Michael Baym @baym Twitter profile

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Michael Baym

@baym

5 years

@nquinoneso and @implosian made a logo for our lab and it's incredible. I can't get over it

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Last Seen Profiles

@BayernMako

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@ktdwyer24

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

Can we just take a second to appreciate how bonkers it is that you can inject mRNA into someone and the body is like “ok cool I’ll translate that, recognize it as exogenous, and develop lasting immunity to what it codes for”

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

Three infected travelers at a scientific conference have now infected at least SEVENTY others. If you're organizing a conference in next several months, please ask yourself whether you want the same to happen there. Because it will. The conference can wait.

Liam Martin

@LiamFromBoston

4 years

BREAKING: Massachusetts has just announced 51 *new* cases of coronavirus, bringing the total number of presumptive cases to 92 -- a 124 percent increase from yesterday. Seventy of the cases are related to the Biogen conference in Boston. Six people are hospitalized. #WBZ

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

Delta calling it “the B.1.617.2 variant” makes my morning

Sam Sweeney

@SweeneyABC

3 years

BREAKING: Delta Air Lines says unvaccinated employees must pay $200 per month surcharge for health insurance.

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

Twenty years of being a mathematician and only yesterday I learned omicron and omega were “little o” (o-micron) and “big o” (o-mega)

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Michael Baym

@baym

1 month

Some personal news

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

There’s no doubt N95/KN95/KF94/FFP2 is better than surgical is better than cloth but the numbers in this graphic are classic data bullshit

Seung Min Kim

@seungminkim

2 years

This graphic from the @WSJ is incredibly helpful

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

Is there a word for the mix of burnout with the sense that you haven’t done enough to warrant it?

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

Nothing in biology makes sense even in the light of evolution

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

I appreciate journals making Covid19 work open access, and I hope when this is over we don’t forget that their logic in doing so tacitly admits that their traditional model slows down the advancement of science

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Michael Baym

@baym

5 years

If journal styles don’t allow Oxford commas, I’m sending my next three papers to Nature, a predatory journal and a scam publisher

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

The most toxic, destructive people I’ve known in academia knew exactly what to say publicly to look good and kind. Before deciding to work with someone, don’t just read what they put out publicly. Talk to them and people who have worked with them, and trust your instincts

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

It looks like they just took the CDC fifteen minute contact definition and multiplied it by the filtration percentages and called it a day. This is not something responsible journalists or scientists should be repeating credulously

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

Worried I've hit this stage of being a PI

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

I've told my lab that they are welcome to volunteer for any efforts to fight Covid19, whether it uses their scientific skills (like testing) or not (like community support). They will be fully paid (and receive benefits) for the duration. I encourage other PIs to do the same. 1/2

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

It may look on paper like I was productive in 2020. I wasn't. All the systems I've carefully built to work around ADHD got blown up. I wrote little, I did almost no good thinking. But I survived, and I kept my family, my lab, and my community as safe as I could. And that matters

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Michael Baym

@baym

9 months

Tell me you’ve never seen academics talk to each other without telling me

Nate Silver

@NateSilver538

9 months

Part of the issue is that academics are too slow to explicitly call out one another's bullshit. There's a bit of a bystander effect, and when that happens, people who do call it out are more likely to be targeted through peer pressure or sometimes even lawsuits.

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Michael Baym

@baym

6 years

Siri, I’d like to misunderstand genetics, machine learning, culture, and art in just one tweet

Complex

@Complex

6 years

Ancestry is teaming up with Spotify to create playlists based on their user's DNA

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

Important update: when you start a zoom meeting, by default it uses the most recent background. I found this out at lab meeting today.

Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

Me: I'm a serious scientist, working hard on molecular diagnostics and advocating social distancing to counter coronavirus. Also me, in Zoom meetings:

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

If only there were some cheap, safe, and extraordinarily effective way to teach people’s immune systems how to make antibodies when they need it instead of injecting super expensive ones that don’t work as well when they’re already sick and likely damaged🤔

Ron DeSantis

@GovRonDeSantis

3 years

Monoclonal antibody treatments such as Regeneron have had a major impact in preventing hospitalizations & saved lives. We are utilizing monoclonal antibody strike teams to bring treatment directly to our vulnerable populations in long-term care facilities.

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

When you see things like this, ask yourself: Do we know what an infectious dose is? (not really) Does it make sense the numbers are symmetric? (No) Does 15 minutes for unmasked/unmasked make any sense? (Definitely not) Is there a dependence on distance? Ventilation? Why not?

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Michael Baym

@baym

1 year

I love that you can see which phages have injected their DNA and which have yet to

Sebastian M. Markert

@sci_bastian

1 year

That's the reason I love #electronmicroscopy You can see cool stuff like this :D Any ideas what's going on here?

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

You say: They must have had a preexisting condition, right? You mean: I desperately want to justify why I’m still safe You sound like: The lives of people with disabilities or health issues are less valuable

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

My lab is three years old today, so here’s a short thread of things I’ve learned about being a PI that I couldn’t have known as a postdoc... 1/87

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Michael Baym

@baym

6 years

Lets flip that meme around: what’s something that should be obvious, but your profession seems to misunderstand?

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

It’s the season for grad school interviews. I’ve been doing these a couple years now (for a few different programs), and in the interest of dismantling the hidden curriculum, here’s how I’d interview you and what I’d look for: 1/

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 months

Help why does my UMAP look so strange

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 months

If there was only one scientific practice I could teach to every scientist regardless of stage or field I think it would be: look at the data. Spot check it. Find a few data points and trace them through to see if they make sense. Look at the raw data. Don't just do analyses.

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

Every few seconds I have another realization of how important this is. Right now it's knowing that my incredible students and postdocs now won't get their visas denied or arbitrarily deported in a cynical play to appeal to xenophobes.

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

This mismatched shadow is probably the most subtle yet amazing rolling-shutter artifact I’ve ever seen

Damaris Brisco 🦉

@Fungal_Love

4 years

*bounce*

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Michael Baym

@baym

1 year

Maybe it’s time for us as scientists with acronyms to stop and think whether we should

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

Just remembering today how in a mandatory faculty training, Harvard's Title IX office boasted that most of the victims who contact them don't contact them a second time and that that was evidence that they were doing their job well

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Michael Baym

@baym

1 year

Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism coming in strong with cover art (h/t @implosian )

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

Twitter remains undefeated

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 months

You call it the systems biology department, but to me it’ll always be

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

One thing about PI life that I don't think any postdoc training can prepare you for is how much of a rollercoaster it can be, how you can go from "things are going really well" to "my current situation is untenable" even in a matter of minutes

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

NIAID, the primary funder of infectious disease research (including virology) for the entire United States, has a budget of $5.9B/year. The NYPD, police for 2.6% of the US population, has a budget of $6B/year.

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Michael Baym

@baym

5 years

When faculty tell you what they got criticized for on the academic job market

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

If these numbers were measured and not just guessed, you’d expect three things: 1) noise 2) asymmetry (since it’s an asymmetric process) 3) not breaking down into clean ratios It’s none of these things

Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

@jboerckel It’s worse than symmetric, it’s just a vector squared. It’s 15m*[1 1.33 2 10]’*[1 1.33 2 10]

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Michael Baym

@baym

5 years

There was a time when my wife was researching performative environmentalism and I was modeling latent tuberculosis. Yes, we were studying conspicuous nonconsumption and nonconspicuous consumption.

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

I’ve had several PhD students now ask me how to start identifying potential postdoc labs. Here’s my best advice: When you read a paper so good, so elegant, you’re almost a little jealous you didn’t write it, add the senior author (and the first if applicable) to your list. 1/2

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

What something that’s commonly known in your field but would probably make people outside your field uncomfortable to know?

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Michael Baym

@baym

7 months

Perhaps I’m simply an idiot, but this paper is nominally in my field and after multiple reads I still have absolutely no idea what it’s doing

nature

@Nature

7 months

Nature research paper: Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 months

Thrilled to announce an important T->C transition

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

"There is truth, and there are lies" -President Biden I cannot believe how refreshing this is after four years

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

At this point, every PI running a wet lab who isn’t in hard shutdown should start preparing for it immediately. It’s a matter of when not if, eventually university leadership will catch up and realize what’s going on. At that point they may not give you much warning.

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

The reason to cancel meetings and seminar visits is the same reason we have them in the first place: by establishing long-distance connections and high-connectivity nodes, we help ideas spread much faster through our social networks. It's the same for a virus.

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

Me, to bacteria, all the time

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Michael Baym

@baym

6 years

Prof tip: before you apply for a Pew grant make sure they can’t see that your application file is called Pewpewpew.pdf

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 months

Honestly this is probably the single best advice for making it through grad school or a postdoc as well. Just get stuff done. It may feel smart to critique things well, it may even be useful, but ultimately you are judged on what you've gotten done

Sophia Kianni

@SophiaKianni

10 months

When former President Obama was asked to share his most important career advice for young people, he replied... "Just learn how to get stuff done."

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Michael Baym

@baym

5 months

Here's the thing about AI in biology: it absolutely has revolutionary potential, but any model is only as good as the data it's trained on. And there's a lot we don't know or are simply wrong about in bio. Want to truly build AI for bio? Invest in basic discovery science.

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

There's a cognitive bias I've seen again and again this pandemic: that the same behavior is equally risky at different times. Seeing co-workers this week is materially riskier than a week and a half ago. Don't think what you did in October won't result in getting infected today

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

When the PI wants to "help with someone's experiment"

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

There’s a useful point in this dumpster fire of a tweet: It’s a common misconception that evolution optimizes fitness. It doesn’t. As long as organisms are just barely able to produce more kids than there are of them, they’ll persist. It’s survival of the “eh, good enough”

Neil Clark

@NeilClark66

4 years

If masks were necessary for our survival as a species we would have evolved one by now. We haven’t. We have noses and mouths. We have airways. It is not natural for people to go around with face masks on in their general life. And no amount of govt propaganda can change that.

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

Merry Christmas to everyone who will mistake reduced testing the next few days for a decrease in omicron cases

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

Is it bad that as a microbiologist I really couldn't care less whether viruses are considered alive? It yields no testable predictions, and so is unfalsifiable. It's a distinction without a difference, and it really isn't science. It's like arguing whether Pluto is a planet

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

Some of the most insidious scientific bullshit is when the qualitative message is basically right but the methods aren’t actually able to conclude it

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

People often talk about having "good hands" in the lab like it's some kind of magical gift certain people have. Yet every person I've met with good hands approaches lab work like a physical discipline with repetitive, focused practice. Good hands are a skill you learn.

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

I don't know who needs to hear this, but a Zoom call is not a "retreat"

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

Vaccines don't need to prevent infection entirely to stop transmission! For a super-infectious pathogen where each person infected infects an average of four others (Re=4), even just reducing transmission by 76% will take that number below 1 and end transmission chains

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

Happy Large Boulder the Size of a Small Boulder Day!

San Miguel Sheriff

@SheriffAlert

4 years

Large boulder the size of a small boulder is completely blocking east-bound lane Highway 145 mm78 at Silverpick Rd. Please use caution and watch for emergency vehicles in the area.

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

That feeling you’re feeling, like “why did we shut down just to have Covid come roaring back?” It’s betrayal. You sacrificed, maybe a lot, and the government just gave up because they thought it might make them look bad to fight. November is a while off, but don’t ever forget.

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

Fellow biomedical scientists: if you have Viral RNA isolation kits in your lab, due to shortages local or regional hospitals may soon be in dire need for diagnostics. Consider reaching out to their micro labs and letting them know you have them and are willing to donate/lend.

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Michael Baym

@baym

1 year

Every Author as First Author

We propose a new standard for writing author names on papers and in bibliographies, which places every author as a first author -- superimposed. This approach enables authors to write papers as...

arxiv.org

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

Me: I'm a serious scientist, working hard on molecular diagnostics and advocating social distancing to counter coronavirus. Also me, in Zoom meetings:

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

I’ll start: it’s really easy, almost comically easy, to evolve antibiotic resistant bacteria

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Michael Baym

@baym

6 years

Lesson from my first year as a PI: You’ll spend most of your time putting out fires. If you want to get something done, light it on fire.

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

I just did an updated calculation of what happens to America if we do nothing. And it is nothing short of terrifying. The current rate of spread is a near-perfect exponential. If we do not change our behavior dramatically and fast, here is what the math says: 1/n

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

I dreamt last night there was an extremely round bacterium called Vibrio chonkera

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

When you bleach a 100ml culture of E coli (at saturation in LB) you're killing roughly the same number as humans who have ever lived

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

This is bigger news than 95 vs 90% efficacy

Nsikan Akpan, PhD

@MoNscience

3 years

In a separate release, Moderna claims that its mRNA vaccine is now stable for 30 days at temps of 36° to 46°F. Translation: You can store it in a regular refrigerator i.e. they're tossing shade at Pfizer's candidate, which requires ultra-cold freezers.

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Michael Baym

@baym

1 year

Checkmate, biologists

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

I don’t know if any of the students and postdocs who follow me need to hear this, but it’s ok not to be ok right now. Your anger, your fear, your sadness make you human, and no less of a scientist, even if you have more important things than science going on today.

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

This is so amazing I briefly considered switching to R

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 months

If only there was some way to ask a couple experts in advance of publication to take a look

Frontiers

@FrontiersIn

3 months

@DrCJ_Houldcroft @aero_anna We thank the readers for their scrutiny of our articles: when we get it wrong, the crowdsourcing dynamic of open science means that community feedback helps us to quickly correct the record.

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

And people say molecular biology is nothing like witchcraft

PacBio

@PacBio

3 years

DNA Extraction Tip 3: When sequencing plants, it is recommended to obtain the youngest leaf/shoot tissue from an individual plant that has been dark treated (kept out of light) for 24-72 hours. #Sequencing101 More at:

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

Twitter academics, there are just over two days left in 2019. Let's spend it doing what we do best: broadly telling each other how to do our jobs

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 months

How stable are bacterial genomes as they adapt to an environment? My collaboration with @anuraglimdi , @EvolSys , @RELenski , and @ten_olivier exploring this over 50,000 generations of evolution is out today! 1/

Changing fitness effects of mutations through long-term bacterial evolution

Predictable and parallel changes occur in the fitness effects of mutations in Escherichia coli over 50,000 generations.

www.science.org

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Michael Baym

@baym

5 years

My lab's MIRA got funded!! We get to spend the next five years studying why antibiotic resistance isn't worse!

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

I know a few science writers follow me, and today I'm asking you to please, please learn about Poisson Noise (or Standard Error). It's an estimate that basically means if you see N events, you really can only trust that to within +- sqrt(N)

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

When I was studying undergrad genetics I thought the term “linkage disequilibrium” was a ridiculously overcomplicated way of saying covariance between alleles. With the benefit of twenty years more experience, I stand by that

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Michael Baym

@baym

5 years

At a conference like #ASMicrobe many of you are going to be meeting a lot of new people. Networking (😱). I don't recall where I got this, but for a template, just remember Inigo Montoya: 1) Greeting 2) Name 3) Relevant professional connection 4) What to expect from the encounter

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

Let me put this politely: fuck this xenophobic bullshit, every single person involved in it, and the horses they rode in on

NPR Politics

@nprpolitics

4 years

JUST IN: President Trump plans to sign an executive order extending to January a pause on issuing “green cards” to new immigrants -- and will also halt temporary work visas for skilled workers, managers and au pairs in the H-1B, H-4, H-2B, L-1 and J categories.

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

Remember, he isn't this stupid. He thinks you're this stupid.

Senator John Cornyn

@JohnCornyn

3 years

If every willing person in America is vaccinated for #COVID19 by May, as POTUS has said, why put our lives on hold till July the 4th?

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

It took some light hacking, but I now have one button to end all Zoom calls (with sound effects)

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

What is your favorite example of a unit of measure having unexpected dimensionality? Mine is miles per gallon. Miles are a unit of length, gallons a unit of volume, or length^3. Meaning fuel efficiency is an area. Seems counterintuitive, but there's a simple physical explanation

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

TFW when you have an idea for the perfect experiment. And then a couple days later learn it was done already. By Max Delbrück. In 1945. 🤦‍♂️

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

My issue here isn’t with back-of-the-envelope calculations. With proper caveats and warnings those can be very useful for estimating and reasoning. Reporting it without those caveats and context is as scientific as declaring a five second rule for the coronavirus.

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

I don't think it's widely appreciated how incredible an achievement this is. Biotechnology has advanced unbelievably in the last fifteen years, but even still, going from new virus to completed phase 3 clinical trials in eleven months is like... I can't come up a good metaphor

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Michael Baym

@baym

6 years

Me, as a trainee, before a talk: Am I going to remember my talk? Are they going to criticize my science? Are people going to think I'm smart? Me, as a PI: Are they going to notice I'm wearing the same shirt as my profile photo? Will they think I only own one shirt? Do I?

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

The combination of the difficulty in getting NIH and NSF grants that are shrinking wrt inflation with all this billionaire money tossed around in already-rich areas very much feels like US science is reverting to renaissance patronage and abandoning 20th century democratization

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

I don’t see the big deal with recruiting postdocs, I haven’t had a problem with it. Sure I’m at Harvard, have some famous older work, and am a dude, but I think it’s really because I have a paragraph somewhere on my website about what I think mentoring is

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

What junior faculty actually need is for tenure committees to realize that the point of the evaluation is future-looking and adjust expectations to the reality of a pandemic world, not give us an extra year to hew to artificial standards from a world that no longer exists

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Michael Baym

@baym

2 years

Oh and one more thing! This chart being symmetric implicitly ignores the eyes as a route of infection

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Michael Baym

@baym

1 year

If you can't wake up on Monday, go for a five mile run, meditate, write an entire R01 before 8am when the sponsored research office starts work, and make latte art with hand-ground espresso, are you just too lazy for faculty life?

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

Mentoring junior scientists is the most meaningful and probably most important part of being a professor. I could not be more honored or flattered to be selected for this award

DBMI at Harvard Med

@HarvardDBMI

3 years

Congratulations to @HarvardDBMI 's Michael Baym @baym for being named a 2021 recipient of @harvardmed 's A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award! For background on this award see

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Michael Baym

@baym

1 year

The PCR didn't fail, it just experienced a rapid unscheduled loss of DNA

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Michael Baym

@baym

4 years

The biggest misconception of graduate school I see is that you are going to learn science directly from your professors. Even if you learn more from your PI than from any one other person, you will learn far more in aggregate from other trainees than any one professor.

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

I’ve heard a lot of “but what about the risks of a new vaccine tech” takes from usually reasonable people recently. My math is that over 35000 people have now been given an mRNA vaccine. If there were risks anywhere close to Covid’s we’d have seen it. It’s by far the safer option

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Michael Baym

@baym

3 years

The dangers of EtBr and radioactive reagents are far overstated. The dangers of Bunsen burners and razorblades are underappreciated

Dr. Caroline Bartman

@Caroline_Bartma

3 years

What is your most controversial lab opinion? I think a lot of stuff people keep in a -80 could probably be in a -20 and nothing would happen

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