Liana Lareau
Associate Professor of Bioengineering, Berkeley. Living in an RNA world. lareaulab.org
- Reposted by Liana LareauJudge Biery signed the order with a photo of Liam and two bible verses: The first is "But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven." The second is simply "Jesus wept." Astonishing thing for a judge to do.
- NEWS: Judge Biery has ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Ramos. A thunderous rebuke against ICE’s violent campaign in Minnesota. Read the order below. Link: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
- Reposted by Liana LareauA Minnesota woman observing ICE agents in her car was cornered on one-way streets. An agent approached, called her by name—citing facial recognition. Days later, her Global Entry and TSA privileges were revoked, with no explanation.
- Reposted by Liana LareauWe could have 4 JWST’s or a science mission at every planet. The NIH could be funded for two years. Or 1.5 years or so of USAID funding, if it still existed. This is how they’re spending our tax dollars. This is our money.
- Reposted by Liana Lareau"I didn’t realize, in the hours before his name was released to the public, that the man millions of people had seen lying facedown on the pavement from multiple angles of eyewitness video was my childhood best friend." Read more from @kristenradtke.bsky.social: www.theverge.com/policy/86856...
- Thank you Minnesota
- Last week in Minnesota, I watched ordinary people risk their lives to protect their neighbors. In the process, they not only won a significant—though not final—victory against authoritarianism, they proved virtually every MAGA social theory wrong. (gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
- Reposted by Liana LareauAs a someone with a 33 year NIH-funded lab whose grant is supposed to be reviewed this week, shut NIH down if that is what's needed to end ICE terrorism. Innocent lives are more important 🧪
- Reposted by Liana Lareauin case you're curious about how angry Minnesota is about ICE, it was -20 today
- Reposted by Liana LareauThis is the first example I’ve seen of an American government using AI to meaningfully misrepresent actual events with the intent to deceive the public. We are at Stalinesque levels of propaganda. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/past-the-b...
- Reposted by Liana LareauHe goes on to describe one of his officers being stopped when she was off-duty solely because she's non-white, harassed by ICE goons who slapped her phone out of her hand as she tried to record, only to be let go when she finally revealed she was a cop.
- Reposted by Liana LareauThe conference (agreement between House and Senate) appropriations bill that includes HHS and NIH was released this morning. www.appropriations.senate.gov/news/majorit... 1/5
- Reposted by Liana LareauThese are concentration camps. And these are the numbers they're comfortable sharing.
- Reposted by Liana LareauThe Murphy Lab did our annual retreat this week. This year's theme was using AI (what it's good and bad for). I wanted to be open-minded to make sure we are not missing something we should be using it for, so we did a few exercises to test, and had presentations.
- Reposted by Liana Lareausomeone's gotta go in and tighten the gyre. we can't be having all this widening, it's not sustainable
- Like the best satire, this takes a turn from the ridiculous to the sublime.
- if you want a long read that involves udders, a hot air balloon, and some extremely dubious data on egg prices, the story I’ve been working on for the last few months where I tried to single-handedly take on every government function myself is now online! www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
- Super proud of Joe - he's done fantastic work in the Ingolia lab. His paper last summer was a tour de force dissecting real functional constraints on disordered protein regions. A yeast paper, with just two authors, in Nature!
- Congratulations to MCB postdoc Joseph Lobel (Ingolia Lab) on receiving the 2026 RNA Society Scaringe Young Scientist Award! 👏🎉 @rnasociety.bsky.social @nickingolia.bsky.social mcb.berkeley.edu/news-and-eve...
- Reposted by Liana LareauI don't think you non-science people realize what it takes to get a grant funded by NIH. Started experiments in Sept 2021 to generate 3 new mouse mutants to model human disease. Prelim dara shows they have relevant disease phenotypes worthy of study. Need a small grant first to characterize /1
- Reposted by Liana LareauBreaking some news for @coyotemedia.org here. Incredibly sad about this — some of the best nights of my life have involved this club — but I’m also so honored and grateful to Ramona, Kathleen and Lynn for trusting me with this story. www.coyotemedia.org/san-francisc...
- Reposted by Liana LareauUp until this year, the US invested $10bn in mRNA technology. HHS canceled $500m (22 projects) on mRNA research. The advent of the Covid vaccine was just the beginning of next gen vaccines. It will be expanded to HIV & cancer. Life goes on while leaving us behind. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
- Reposted by Liana Lareau"the researchers found that withdrawing support for rapidly advancing mRNA vaccine technology could result in over 49,000 preventable deaths annually among patients diagnosed with four major cancers"
- 2025 was a banner year for the lab: much science was done. And for me: I got tenure! But it was a hard year for science, for being a scientist, for a future that depends on science. In 2026, I want to share a clearer picture of the enterprise of science and the amazing things it is accomplishing.
- Reposted by Liana LareauThe devastation I feel about this attack on science in particular is hard to cope with. It’s like watching my dad die all over again. I would do anything to spare someone a death via pancreatic cancer.
- A tiny trial in New York has shown that personalized mRNA vaccines can provoke massive, lasting immune responses against pancreatic cancer, even as sweeping federal cuts now threaten the fragile labs required to produce them. theintellectualistofficial.substack.com/p/a-breakthr...
- Reposted by Liana LareauFDA intends to put its most serious warning on Covid vaccines. The agency's “black box” warning is the latest move by RFK & the Trump regime to undermine a vaccine that saved millions of lives. The plan shocked outside experts, who say there's no basis for the warning www.cnn.com/2025/12/12/h...
- Reposted by Liana Lareau
- The past is so recent www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/u...
- Reposted by Liana LareauIn a special edition of her “How to teach this paper” column, Ashley Juavinett @analog-ashley.bsky.social explains how to best educate students about how the business of scientific research actually works. www.thetransmitter.org/how-to-teach... #neuroskyence
- Reposted by Liana LareauJust an absolutely gutting essay by Tatiana Schlossberg, a writer, mother of two young children, and cousin of RFK Jr who is dying of leukemia. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
- Reposted by Liana LareauIn the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes. The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last. The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes. Why? It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.
- Reposted by Liana LareauGiant copy of the Constitution being carried down Pennsylvania Avenue.
- Reposted by Liana Lareauafter millions of views and shares of my Portland Frog art. (thank you all🙏🏾) I got requests to highlight priests, and chickens, and Chicagoans, and T-Rexes, and more… all of us who refuse to bend the knee. so this is for US. 𝚂𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚕. 𝚆𝚎 𝚆𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚆𝚒𝚗.
- Reposted by Liana LareauSome problems have simple solutions. This new “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is one. The answer is simply saying no. Simple does not mean easy. But Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, Vanderbilt, Univ of AZ, UPenn, USC, UT Austin & UVA must understand what they’ll lose if they sign on.
- Reposted by Liana LareauAAUP v. Rubio is out, and look at how it starts. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
- Reposted by Liana Lareau9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nation’s public health system "should alarm every American." It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
- Reposted by Liana LareaumRNA vaccines are safe, have been in development for decades, & have far broader applications than older vaccine technologies. New vaccine technologies evolve when scientists have tools & knowledge to make something more elegant or complex that wasn’t possible before. 5/
- Reposted by Liana LareauOn the new acting CDC director. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
- Reposted by Liana LareauSpread the word - we at @stanford-chemh.bsky.social are searching to fill a new junior faculty at the interface of molecular and computational science. See link below!
- Open faculty position! We're seeking applicants for a tenure-track faculty position at the junior level (Assistant or untenured Associate Professor) with research programs that exist at the interface between molecular science and computation. Apply here: stanford.io/45MF3Qa
- Reposted by Liana LareauWe're Hiring! Assistant Professor of Immunology and Molecular Medicine in MCB. Learn more and apply online: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05096
- Reposted by Liana LareauWe're Hiring! Assistant Professor of Molecular Therapeutics in MCB. Learn more and apply online: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05098
- Reposted by Liana LareauCome join our new Department of Neuroscience @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social as an Assistant Professor! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05041
- Reposted by Liana LareauWould you want to invest in a country where the regime expropriates assets from its opponents? In related news, "personalist regimes are characterized by lower total factor productivity and ... low private investment, poor public-goods provision, and conflict" www.nber.org/system/files...
- Reposted by Liana LareauScience is effectively dead in the US for at least the next 3½ years, and will then take another several years to even get started again. Canceled research doesn’t just uncancel itself, and scientists who find opportunity elsewhere won’t just come flocking back. The damage is generational.
- All scientific grant funding must now be approved by a political appointee and "demonstrably advance the President's policy priorities." I wonder where innovation will happen in the future? It won't be in the US arstechnica.com/science/2025...
- Reposted by Liana Lareau
- Reposted by Liana LareauWe are on a bullet train to the end of US science, and possibly the country as a whole, when political appointees are reviewing every scientific grant submitted to NIH to determine if The Regime finds the science acceptable.
- In all, how much constraint on synonymous positions? From our model, the equivalent of 9% are predictable (sum of smaller effects on more positions) but that excludes strong overall preferences for fast codons. And 3% is just what we can see in a short competition. So: more than zero, less than all!
- This preprint from Helen Sakharova is one of the coolest things to come out of my lab: “Protein language models reveal evolutionary constraints on synonymous codon choice.” Codon choice is a big puzzle in how information is encoded in genomes, and we have a new angle. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
- Synonyms are not identical, in language or in biology. Some synonymous codons are preferred over others, and the preferred ones are decoded more quickly, but they all work, more or less. Where does codon choice really matter?
- Like, it might be important to slow down the ribosome so the protein folds properly and doesn’t tangle up. We were looking for signals like that, directly related to translation. (There are also many other ways that sequence matters: mRNA structure, binding sites, etc.)
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View full threadThe experiment and our model aligned to highlight localization, especially to the mitochondria. There is interesting biology to pursue there. More broadly, our model works -- and that means that evolutionary forces on proteins shape codon choice in nuanced but real ways.
- Reposted by Liana Lareaui think it is hard for some people to really their heads around the reality that kennedy is staunchly anti-vaccine and thinks that people should suffer through disease and that those who die deserved it and that those who survive are a better order of human being
- Reposted by Liana LareauEvery reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.
- Reposted by Liana LareauMaurene Comey's goodbye note to SDNY colleagues:
- Reposted by Liana LareauRümeysa Öztürk describes the library in the prison where she was held for 45 days for co-authoring an op-ed
- Reposted by Liana LareauElon Musk casually, and illegally, dismantled USAID. According to a new study in the Lancet, that action will lead to *14 million* premature deaths between 2025 and 2030. Again: Elon Musk is directly responsible for 14 million coming deaths. 4.5 million will be children.
- Reposted by Liana LareauEmail from Brown admin: government stopped payment on existing NIH grants as of April 3; in three months since, the gov't has cumulatively withheld $45 million in NIH grant reimbursements. Whatever injunctions, court orders, etc. may exist, no resumption of payments... and no explanation either.
- Reposted by Liana LareauNazi Germany did literally ban Nature: "Articles are often published in the London weekly scientific journal Nature containing outrageous and vile attacks on German science and the national socialist state. The journal must therefore be excluded from general use in the scientific libraries."
- Reposted by Liana Lareau“ICE gets a bigger budget than the Marine Corps” is a simple fact that should be communicated very widely because it clearly expresses how crazy and radical this is
- Reposted by Liana Lareau“Rescission by inertia.” Rescission by any name carries the stench of Russell Vought, who seems determined to leave no corner of public service intact.
- Reposted by Liana LareauElites aren't even using their existing mechanisms set up to allow deniable messaging. Go look at PhRMA, the big bad lobbying group; they've got nothing to say about their NIH R&D pipeline being destroyed, nor about the worst regression in public health and vaccine acceptance in U.S. history.
- Reposted by Liana LareauJust learned that Frank Stahl (of the Meselson and Stahl DNA replication experiment ("the most beautiful experiment in biology") died at the beginning of April, to no fanfare. Here's a lovely video of them reminiscing: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-tn...
- Reposted by Liana LareauWar on universities, war on science, war on knowledge
- Reposted by Liana LareauThe White House's proposed FY26 budget would cut NIH funding by >40%. Our new #SCIMaP report projects the budget would lead to economic losses throughout the US with $10M+ lost in almost every House district. scienceimpacts.org/fy26 @joshuasweitz.bsky.social @asinclair.bsky.social @cl10.bsky.social
