My inaugural lecture at
@KU_Leuven
from ~2 weeks ago. Presented the lab's plans, as well as my experiences with racism in science, and how this relates to reforming science publishing (this part starts at 16:35).
I have been informed that I am being replaced as the Editor in Chief of
@eLife
for retweeting a
@TheOnion
piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians.
Since this is going beyond BioSci twitter, here's a 🧵 about who Mike Eisen is and why I care so much that he isn't fired from
@eLife
:
First: Mike, as EiC of eLife, is trying to overturn the idea of prestige publishing
This man is "investigated", ppl tag his employers to fire him, tag funders to pull $$, call on him to resign as EIC, & he deleted his Twitter account. All because he showed support for Palestinians while noting that he is Jewish with family in Israel & condemning Hamas's attacks.
🧵I'm beyond excited to share that I've accepted a tenure-track research professorship at
@KU_Leuven
in
@biosystkuleuven
& the
@LeuvenPlantInst
!
@MehtaLab_KUL
will study & engineer latitudinal adaptation in plants w/ an experimental systems biology lens:
PLEASE RT: We're looking for FIVE new members of
@eLife
's Early Career Advisory Group! The ECAG is an international group of early career researchers (PhD students, postdocs, PIs <5 years) that directly advises eLife's leadership & shapes policy.
Brief thread about the position:
Feel profoundly betrayed by an org. which so many Early Career Advisors (ECAG) spent so many hours help build. And grieving for its excellent staff coz there is no coming back from this for
@eLife
. Here's a 🧵of the amazing things we did that the Board has damaged so grievously.
I have been informed that I am being replaced as the Editor in Chief of
@eLife
for retweeting a
@TheOnion
piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians.
scientists from the first world really have no conception of the gap between their experience of science and that of all other scientists on the planet.
New Article out with
@CellAtlas
colleagues:
“We believe that it is finally time for the plant biology community to retire the western blot as a means to ‘validate’ quantitative proteomics data…”
In this week’s
@nature
WorldView column, I write:
“The EU can and should play a greater part in ensuring global food security. I urge both ministers and legislators to…resist calls to further limit this technology.”
#NGT
#CRISPR
You know what's hypocritical? Trashing the
@NatureComms
paper authored by people in Abu Dhabi but giving this equally bad
@NatureComms
paper a pass just coz the authors are based in the West and are friends with influential scientists and journos.
how do other
#newPIs
respond to reviews that say “the grant requests a postdoc but the applicant is a new PI and has never supervised a postdoc.”?
Like, how are we supposed to start supervising people if we don’t get the chance to hire them first anyways?
Last chance to join nearly 600 scientists in supporting this nomination of
@MicrobiomDigest
for the 2021 John Maddox Prize to give recognition to her tireless efforts to champion scientific integrity.
Sign here:
(form will close this weekend)
A massive thank you to the over 800 of you who supported the nomination of
@MicrobiomDigest
for the John Maddox Prize by
@senseaboutsci
!
Just submitted our nomination and I really hope Dr Bik gets the recognition she so richly deserves for her work.
I write in
@NatureNews
: "If the reluctance of junior researchers like me to talk about racism is regrettable, the silence, and hence complicity, of senior faculty members is unconscionable."
Please share! I'm recruiting a fully-funded PhD student for an exciting project on plant circadian biology and genetic engineering at KU Leuven in Belgium!
#PlantSciJobs
A one-sided article about the changes at
@eLife
.
@alison_c_abbott
makes much of critical letters from a few editors, but we submitted a support letter to the Board with 153 signatories incl. >70 editors from 30+ countries that doesn’t get even a mention😐
People harp on about the "professionalism" a scientist must have, they don't realise that often "professionalism" is just code for maintaining an inequitable status quo. Great leaders speak their mind honestly, we should respond with honesty too.
Nothing in the last decade has revolutionized the culture of life science research as much as
@biorxivpreprint
!
I've posted all my first author research papers here, and will continue preprinting for my entire career.
Happy Birthday /congratulations to
@cshperspectives
& co
The constant RT'ing of
@edyong209
's terrible piece on the new
@elife
virology paper by respected scientists prompted me to vent in a blog post about overselling results in science and its role in selective publishing.
@PlantEvolution
@mbeisen
Don't understand how institutes that don't have a single lab studying plants can claim they study "all areas of biology". I mean "all areas of biology except 80% of the biomass of the planet" is more accurate, no?
Today in
@NatureNews
I describe the story behind my last paper and how it taught me that "Scientists have become so accustomed to celebrating only success that we’ve forgotten that most technological advances stem from failure."
Kathryn Paige Harden would like a future where for $75 we identify kids that are "genetically less-likely in 30 years to have graduated from college or gotten a PhD". It should shock and anger all biologists that this is now considered respectable science.
Please Share: I'm recruiting a fully-funded PhD candidate in bioscience engineering at
@KU_Leuven
. The candidate will work on an exciting project to engineer latitudinal adaptation for climate change in plants.
(A Master's degree is required)
Apply here:
the glyphosate verdicts have to be just incredibly depressing for anyone who works in plant science or agriculture. it's so difficult to make people understand just how hard it is to find as safe and effective a weedkiller, and what losing it will do to farms around the world.
A paper in
@nature
this week that starts, “In evolutionary theory, natural selection describes why some things exist and others do not…Neither (sic Darwin & Modern Synthesis) addresses the space in which new phenotypic variants are generated.” 🤦♂️
Our ECAG Correspondence in
@Nature
is out, setting the record straight about the very high level of support
@eLife
's new peer review model enjoys among its community. We also highlight why journalists should always interact with early career stakeholders.
Latest piece out!
"Why I'm quitting GMO research", where I take out my frustrations with anti-GMO activists and fellow scientists in equal measure and explain why I'm somewhat glad to be moving towards new horizons in science.
via
@massivesci
He's been at this for a while. He co-founded
@PLOS
, kickstarting the Open Access movement in biology, allowing students in the Global South (like I was at the time) access to cutting edge research.
He's also a vocal advocate for greater EDI in science.
His style is brash, radical, speaks truth to power. Many colleagues wish he would "tone down" his tweets. Not me. I found Mike's Twitter in grad school. Every action I've taken to promote EDI since has been a direct consequence of reading Mike's critiques of the status quo here.
Finally out and under review! We found that (unlike previous reports and editorials in
@NaturePlants
) it's a bad idea to use Cas9 to engineer DNA virus immunity in plants. It's not efficient *and* it leads to the creation of a relatively abundant new virus!
From critiquing the Nobel Prizes, to calling out the racism I witnessed in grad school, to working for diversity at every institution I've joined since, all of it is because of Mike's "harsh" tweets and those of people like him. And I'm sure there are others he inspired like me.
Honestly didn’t expect so many people to so openly admit that they just publish and pay to publish just to have specific journal titles in their publication lists rather than for peer review. Shows how completely warped our value systems in science have become.
📢 I am recruiting a fully-funded 4 year PhD student to work on an exciting project to engineer the plant circadian clock, at KU Leuven in Belgium!
Review of applications begins July 22nd.
#plantscijobs
#PlantBio2022
Apply now!
This makes me so mad. We acknowledged a NCI Moonshot grant in one of our publications. This funding mechanism requires immediate open access publishing. The cost of open access for this
@CellCellPress
paper: $9,900.
one of the weirdest parts of modern biology is that if you discover a single regulatory interaction it's considered a great feat of understanding but if you discover thousands you're just producing more data.
Today, for the first time ever, eLife's Early Career Advisory Group (ECAG) is making public recommendations to
@eLife
for radical changes the journal should take in order to make publishing fairer and more inclusive. (thread)
Some have told me he's not a team player, or his style can't bring people along. Nothing could be further from the truth. His cheerful radicalism gives others around him the courage to push boundaries, and work to see their values realised, instead of just overlooking inequities.
I've had heated arguments with him (sadly/ironically on freedom of speech too). He's always been generous in listening and gentle in disagreement, even when I wasn't. When I needed a ref. letter coz one fell through (authorship dispute), he wrote one enthusiastically, no Qs asked
Feel like there's a generation of scientists that's far too much in awe of Crick, Brenner-type of wild hypothesizing and not enough in awe of the insights that actually having a ton of data allows.
Francophone scientists across the Atlantic take a public stance on media misreporting the facts on vaccines, homeopathy, glyphosate, GMOs, climate change and nuclear energy!
Today many French speaking scientists and journalists have published an op-ed in journals of Canada, France, Belgium and Switzerland, calling for better respect of science in the media. This follows on years of increasingly poor treatment of science esp. by French TV & newspapers
I'm going to fill this out to nominate
@MicrobiomDigest
this weekend. The form has doesn't make it easy so I will be making a sign-up sheet for anyone who wants to support the nomination. (you absolutely should do the full nomination if you have the time and a referee)
Nominations are now open for the 2021 John Maddox Prize for Standing up for Science. The award recognises the work of any individual who promotes science and evidence on a matter of public interest in the face of hostility. Find out more:
Hiring committees, please don't ask for reference letters up front. Its just a pain for everyone involved? No committee is going read 200*3 letters+the average postdoc applies to several tens of positions and its inconsiderate to have to ask v. busy profs to write so many letters
A massive thank you to the over 800 of you who signed my nomination of
@MicrobiomDigest
for the John Maddox Prize. And thanks to
@hv_lab
for serving as referee. A very well-deserved honour!
Here's what
@eLife
's new process means for you as an author:
➡️You decide whether to respond to reviewers
➡️You decide whether to revise your paper
➡️You decide when to publish a final version of record
➡️You have less reason to moan about reviewers at lab meetings 🙃
At
@NCBS_Bangalore
now, looking forward to giving my first scientific presentation in India :)
Many thanks to P V Shivakumar and
@RedkarAmey
for hosting!
As promised, here's the recording of
@mbeisen
's fantastic talk at
@MolCellSys
last week.
But here's the deal: you have to promise to watch this the next time you're deciding where to submit your paper, and whether you'll
@biorxivpreprint
it, okay?
Really excited to share something we've been working on for a long time at
@eLife
: our first Open Call for new editors. Read on to find out why this is such an important step for community publishing🧵(1/4):
An invasive insect is forcing smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa to turn to pesticides. But improper use of the pesticides -- as well as some unscrupulous agrochemical dealers -- is putting those farmers at additional risk by
@LauraJoanKraft
People got what they wanted, Mike has been fired. Young scientists are now more afraid than ever to share their opinions.
And yet folk still continue to misrepresent his past tweets without context. Incredibly bad faith behaviour. (Yes, I know it’s Twitter but still).
I wish I could share with all of you jaded PIs the 300+ applications we received from junior scientists all over the world for the ECAG at
@eLife
. They are filled with so much frustration with the current system but also so much optimism and hope for change!!
We recieved an incredible 366 applications for 5 spots on
@elife
's Early Career Advisory Group! That's 361 ECRs around the globe who want to shape research culture but won't have an avenue to do so.
I beg you, make one for them in your societies, journals and institutions, folks!
I've seen this first-hand at eLife, having joined the org. as an advisor before him. He transformed the organisation in just a few years, giving people new energy and always listening to us early career scientists, instead of seating us at the kids table like other senior folk.
"Organic farming doesn’t even feature once in the chapters of the
#IPCC
report dedicated to food security. This is because it is one of the very worst ways of farming if your objective is to conserve land."
💯 this may sound uncharitable but honestly, I too look at papers that never appeared on bioRxiv with greater scrutiny, wondering what the authors were trying to hide…
“Scientists, have we lost the plot?” by KamounLab
🧵Why publishing in selective journals costs so much:
Journals pay staff to handle papers (& pissed-off authors). If a journal gets 200 papers a month, pays 2 staff to handle them, but only publishes 20 papers, those 20 authors must pay the full cost of the staff salaries. (1/8)
When a Masters student nervously asks if a negative result will result in lower grades (before even starting a project),you know that positivity bias in science has gone wayyy too far.
Here's to ending the
#plantsci
tradition of coming in to water your plants on long weekends and holidays!
Instructions to setup a simple timed irrigation (and fertilization) system online on our lab website:
Tested w/ Arabidopsis, Benthamiana and Petunia
Just installed a simple timed watering system and now I don't know why more plant labs don't do this, not all
#plantsci
students have green thumbs y'know.
Plus, we collected 153 signatures in less than a week at that. eLife new model and
@mbeisen
’s leadership has strong support from scientists at all career stages (unlike the opposition) and this article misrepresents the reception to the model.
Nothing gives me more hope for a kinder scientific community than meeting
@elife
’s incredible Early Career Advisors. If eLife’s vision for a journal-free future succeeds it’ll be because of the positivity they bring to the adversarial system of research communication we inherited
MIT study: Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and other vaccines may not do as well covering people of Black or Asian genetic ancestry as they do for white people
"Dr Coates’ analysis found that 82.8% of coronavirus-related preprints and 92.8% of non-coronavirus-related preprints saw no material change to their conclusions upon journal publication."
So much for the "peer review adds value to the paper" argument.
It is a shame that 20 years since Golden Rice was first announced, scientists still have to write editorials like this. Anti-GMO activists have blood on their hands.
If you've had a conference talk cancelled due to
#COVID19
#ShutItDown
,
@eLife
is making it possible for ECRs to present their research virtually!
Sign up here:
Amid all the chaos, happy to present our latest work on CIDER-Seq, expanding the method's utility to sequence viruses AND eccDNA, and a step by step protocol for new users. (1/6)
I'm so glad to see this, for
@MicrobiomDigest
of course, but also because it means that even if scientific leaders and their institutions don't recognise the work people put in to make science better, others do.
Over the past six and a half years,
@MicrobiomDigest
has identified more than 4,900 scientific articles containing potentially doctored images, using her eyes and memory alone.
So if you're someone who's dissatisfied with the status quo in science, and has the time and will to catalyse reform, join us!
Apply here by March 22nd & feel free to reach out if you have Qs:
🧵With the exception of perhaps my first 1-2 papers (incl. as co-author), I’ve tried my very best to ensure code and data is reproducible and provided in great detail in all my papers. Unfortunately, this transparency is more often punished rather than rewarded in peer review.
Btw, here's the preprint that divided reviewers so much that one called it "excellent (and to my knowledge unique)", another said it was "rampant and unsupported speculation", and a third called it "excellent, in design and execution". Decision: Rejected.
It's great that universities are stepping up to support Ukrainian students, but it's at least a little racist(?) that they are fine not giving those supports to students from all the other major warzones (dark red) on the planet right now.
Well they finally did it: they’ve chased one of the most progressive voices in science, someone who gave many young scientists incl. myself hope that change is possible, off this site.
Dunno about you but imo writing a long article to rant about young scientists wasting time by being “too online” seems to be the greater waste of time…
Science in the age of selfies | PNAS
Referees (esp. senior PIs), if you have a student you who you think deserves success, please be enthusiastic about them, because I promise other PIs *are* boosting their students, and science *is* a competitive world.
Optimism turns out to be a huge predictor of extraordinary longevity. Two studies, one 30 years long and the other 10 years, found that high optimism was linked to 11%-15% greater lifespans, even taking into account socioeconomic factors, health & more.
In another world where the culture of science wasn't all about hierarchies, credentialism, and arrogance, this whole zoonosis v. lab leak thing could've been avoided...
Alina Chan, a young scientist who raised early questions about Covid's origins, has faced scathing criticism. A new report from the Biden administration, due shortly, may help shed light on the pandemic's beginnings.