Jaap de Roode
@Jaap_de_Roode
Professor at Emory University, studying parasites, monarch butterflies, honey bees. Writing popular-science book on animal self-medication.
Thousands of workers were fired from CDC, NIH, & other agencies, even if they had excellent performance reviews. These are people with critical jobs like monitoring disease outbreaks or developing cancer drugs. Their salaries are a miniscule % of the budget. This makes no sense.
Anyone supporting mass layoffs should read this thread from fired federal workers. These are real people. "I make $50k a year & work to keep drinking water safe. The richest man in the world decided that was an expense too great for the American taxpayer." reddit.com/r/fednews/comm…
Thanks so much for the great conversation @CaraSantaMaria!
This week, I #TalkNerdy with Emory University professor of biology -- Dr. Jaap De Roode. We discuss his work with monarch butterflies and his new book, "Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves.” 👇🏼 @TalkNerdy_Pod 👇🏼 carasantamaria.com/podcast/jaap-d…
My lab has done studies showing that sex biased host responses determine disease outcome during Ebola virus, MERS-CoV, & SARS-CoV-2 infection across species. Sex is a biological variable. Failure to account for that in viral pathogenesis studies is just bad science.
Exclusive: NIH appears to archive policy requiring female animals in studies thetransmitter.org/policy/exclusi…
This is horrible & exactly what we are afraid of - measles kills ppl In ~100 infections in TX, someone has already died For those w/out vacc- it is not the benign virus you’ve been told 1:5 hospitalized 1:100-1000 die This will spread further. 1/ apnews.com/article/measle…
In case anyone needs a reminder… In 2023 #measles killed over 100,000 people **Mostly children under 5** Measles infected ~10 million people 1% mortality in kids And these are just the direct links when measles is recorded as cause of death who.int/news/item/14-1…
Mark your calendars! A second drop of tickets for select @ATLSciFest events happens THIS WEDNESDAY at 8pm. Check out the full lineup of events and don’t wait—these will go fast! 👉 atlantasciencefestival.org/events-2025
About a month after Donald Trump took office, almost all grant-review meetings remain suspended at the US National Institutes of Health, preventing the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research from spending much of its US$47 billion annual budget.…
NIH funding creates medicines, jobs, and economic growth
You can’t script this… Me: Who is the biggest disinformation spreader on X? Grok: Elon Musk x.com/i/grok/share/1…
Cutting NIH to save budget is like cutting the front lobe of brain to lose weight. It’s <1% of body weight yet it governs reasoning and problem solving functions of the brain, basically determining how smart you are. Dumb move to send IT kids to do your brain surgery, America.
Without NIH funds to run research labs at academic institutions, as a country we cannot train PhD students. No physician scientists. No undergraduates get experience in labs. Nothing. Industry does none of these things. Other countries will have to take the lead.
We’re so stoked to get Day 1 of ComSciCon Atlanta 2025 rolling!! #comsciconatl2025
Pitt to pause PhD admissions, following Vanderbilt and USC, because of uncertainty of NIH funding to academic universities. Who will teach and train US scientists for pharma and biotech? Should we import them from countries that do? wesa.fm/health-science…
Hey Pharma, Biotech, are you aware of the massive labor shortage that’s coming your way?
PhD programs are pausing admissions to graduate school due to NIH indirect cost cuts. See the growing number of programs here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d… How is science supposed to advance with fewer trainees, less $ for research? This is devastating.
The last couple of weeks I’ve been hearing stories like this. This is more than NIH being unable to make grants. It’s people having to sit by helplessly while their important scientific work is treated as worthless and casually discarded. It’s devastating. It is not reform.
Just found out the study section scheduled to review my grant today was canceled. I spent three months writing it, representing five years of work from my lab. Gutted. @NIH
Thanks so much to @bonesandbugs for the advance praise of my book! Happy to share all the amazing stories of how animals use medicine and what we can learn from them!
As we speak, scientisists across the country (including myself) are trying to to take care of simple administrative tasks related to the grants that we have recieved from the National Institutes of Health... 1/n
Such a nice new paper by Maria Müller-Theissen, @gottdenk, @altizer_sonia and others: neogregarine parasites are widespread across the genus Danaus, but not across other milkweed butterflies. Museum collections are important! resjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ee…
Impact of NIH funding in Georgia: NIH AWARDS FUNDING: $780 M JOBS SUPPORTED: 11,816 ECONOMIC ACTIVITY SUPPORTED: $2.18 B Bio Industry Impact in the State: Jobs: 37,031 Businesses: 3,284 Cutting NIH indirects will kill jobs and cause a recession. unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-st…
Here's my thread on it if you aren't down to read the whole thing: x.com/angie_rasmusse…
Out today in @ForeignPolicy: I wrote about what will happen if there is an H5N1 pandemic with Robert F Kennedy, Jr. in charge of safeguarding the health of Americans. If RFK Jr is leading HHS & H5N1 begins spreading human to human, the deaths will be counted in millions.🧵👇