Angelika Amon passed away this morning. She was the greatest scientist I’ve ever met. This is a huge loss for her family, her friends, and for every biologist.
As a grad student with Kim Nasmyth and then an independent fellow at the Whitehead, Angelika changed our understanding of the cell cycle.
People thought that cell cycle kinases just got degraded at the end of mitosis, but she showed that regulated phosphatase activity was actually crucial to completing the cell cycle and re-entering G1:
People today are very excited about “phase separation” - she was already studying it 20 years ago. She discovered that the phosphatase CDC14 was sequestered in a phase-separated nuclear compartment - the nucleolus - and it had to be released for cell cycle exit:
As a faculty member at MIT, she established the field of aneuploidy biology, and developed tools to study aneuploidy in yeast and mammalian cells:
I joined Angelika’s lab as a grad student in 2009. It was an incredible environment to do research, and I learned so much from her. Here’s all of us gathered together for her 50th birthday party in 2017.
People who’ve met Angelika knew that she was a big talker. But she could always back it up.
Like, she always talked about how good her hands were in the lab. I was skeptical - all PI’s say they were great in lab! But then one day we played flip cup - her 1st time playing - and she was flawless, beating people who had played for years. Unbelievable dexterity.
Angelika was also the most rigorous scientist I’ve ever met. She grew up in yeast genetics - she believed in knockouts, suppressor screens, and genetic pathways. She was skeptical of microarrays, RNAi, and any experiment where you needed a p-value to prove a point.
Some signs that she kept on her office door:
Angelika was a *huge* supporter of women in science, as you can tell by her scientific progeny - @Marston_lab @kristinknouse @brarkeley Elcin Unal, Rosella Visintin, and many others.
When @joans and I tried to write up our study on gender biases in lab composition, a few members of the faculty were unsupportive. But Angelika let us know that she had our backs and she pushed us to publish our results.
The MIT grad students all loved Angelika, because she was hilarious and outspoken and wouldn’t tolerate any BS. One graduate class edited her wikipedia page to say that she was the best biologist to come from Austria since Gregor Mendel (truth).
She loved Sex and the City, Mick Jagger, and Tom Brady (until someone showed her a picture of a MAGA hat in his locker).
There’s so much more I could say. She was the best advisor I could ask for. Thank you Angelika - the King of Chromosomes

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More from @JSheltzer

23 Sep
In two weeks, the Nobel Committee at the Karolinska Institute will award the 2020 Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology.

Who will win? We don’t know for sure - but I think that we can make some educated guesses.
Science is dominated by a phenomenon called “the Matthew effect”. In short, the rich get richer. Getting one grant makes it more likely you’ll get the next. Winning one prize makes it more likely you’ll win another.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_e…
I looked back at the last 20 years of Nobel Prizes in Med/Phys.

83% of them had won at least one of three prizes before the Nobel: the Lasker, the Gairdner, or the Horwitz Prize.
Read 12 tweets
16 Sep
Here are the award rates for 11 different postdoc fellowships in 2019.

There’s a huge variation in success rates: four different organizations fund fewer than 6% of applications that they receive, while the success rates for the K99 and F32 are >24%. Image
To back up - my appointment at CSHL let me run a lab without doing a postdoc, so I never had the experience of applying for these grants. To help out my current postdocs, I wanted to make up for my lack of experience by doing some research.
I collected the award rates for each of these grants either from the org’s website or by emailing them directly. (I included an asterisk to indicate uncertainty. For instance, Beckman said they received “over” 150 applications, and I used 150 as the denominator).
Read 5 tweets
1 Sep
Question: can anyone name a paper whose findings were challenged by a “matters arising” or “technical comment”-type rebuttal, but subsequent research proved that the original paper was actually correct?
One example: Charles Sawyers published that leukemia patients who relapsed on Gleevec developed ABL-T315I mutations.

Science then published 2 technical comments reporting that other groups didn't find this mutation in independent patient populations:

science.sciencemag.org/content/293/55…
Larger surveys subsequently confirmed that T315I was a common (though not universal) cause of Gleevec resistance, T315I became the paradigmatic example of a “gatekeeper” resistance mutation, and Sawyers won the Lasker prize.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21732333/
Read 4 tweets
26 Aug
What happens to a paper submitted to a top journal?

Among a set of manuscripts sent out for review by Cell in 2018:

-33% were published in Cell
-26% were published in another Cell-family journal
-7% are still under review at Cell
-The median time to publication was 391 days
To back up: in 2018, Cell started the “Sneak Peek” program, in which authors had the option of posting a preprint of their manuscript if it was sent out for review by a Cell-family journal. cell.com/sneakpeek
Using this site, I found 46 papers that were sent out for review at Cell and posted on “Sneak Peek” between June 1st and Dec 31st, 2018. Each paper’s current status was also noted: “Published”, “Under review”, or “Review Complete” (a nice euphemism for “rejected”).
Read 14 tweets
16 Aug
Two whole-genome CRISPR screens for SARS-CoV-2 resistance are on bioRxiv.

**Among the top 100 hits in each screen, 99 are non-overlapping.**

Could cell type-specific differences could explain this discrepancy? And if so, what’s the “right” way to study SARS-CoV-2 in culture? Image
A few thoughts: Wei recovered ACE2 as their #1 hit, which is strong evidence in favor of the biological validity of their screen.

(Heaton didn't recover ACE2, which they suggest is because their cells transgenically express ACE2 cDNA, though I don't get why that should matter.)
Wei also validated a large number of their top hits in individual CRISPR assays.

Heaton validated their top hit, the kinase SRPK1, by treating cells with an "SRPK1 kinase inhibitor", given at 50uM! No way on earth that that's specifically inhibiting a single kinase.
Read 6 tweets
11 Aug
Here are the publication records and research topic areas of 63 faculty candidates in the life sciences who interviewed at R1 institutions in 2019-2020.

70% have a first-author paper in Cell, Nature, or Science, 22% have a K99, and 30% have unpublished work on bioRxiv.
Methods: faculty candidate seminars were found on public departmental websites. Pub records were acquired from Google Scholar or Pubmed, and K99's were found on NIH Reporter. I did my best to summarize research topics by reading the abstracts of a candidate's recent papers.
The candidates were interviewed at a variety of public and private R1 institutions. I focused on departments studying genetics, cell biology, cancer biology, biochemistry, and related fields in the life sciences.
Read 23 tweets

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