John P. Moore is one of the coauthors of the article in the @Nation claiming that the publication in the @nytimes of @Ayjchan's well-documented brief for the lab leak origin of #Covid_19 was "shoddy" and "an example of science opinion run amok." He took the letter to 1/5 The Nation's editor by me and @fcabello1 mentioning that both targets of his and Gregg Gonsalves's piece were women scholars as an accusation of sexism. He wrote to me in response, claiming that "several female academics who support the natural origins hypothesis have been 2/5

1/2 For decades biologists have accepted the idea that cell differentiation is due to the multistable dynamical attractors of gene regulatory networks, representable by ordinary differential equations or Boolean networks. It was even in my 2005 textbook: amazon.com/gp/product/052… 2/2 But this model is incorrect. We now know switching between discrete functionally specialized cell states is due to phase-transition-like reorganization of liquid-like chromatin hubs, in which thousands of enhancers are recruited from linearly distant sites across the nucleus.

1/N I've never used Twitter to present a new scientific view. But these ideas span evolutionary & developmental biology and philosophy, so it won't be published in any widely read journal, and even if it is, it will take several years to happen, and few will see it. So here goes. 2/N 1. Cells are autonomous agents. They strive to maintain their lives and have dynamical and conditional interactions with their environments, from which they draw nutrition and energy. They reproduce and flourish in niches that are constructed in part by their own activities.

1/N After looking at the demographics, virology, public health dimensions, and earlier parallels (e.g., the 1918 flu epidemic), it seems to me that this whole episode is being handled incorrectly. This is partly due to @realDonaldTrump's self-serving blunders, but not entirely. 2/N This will be a longish thread, which few will see initially. If anyone, particularly with a large following, finds it persuasive, please retweet

The Mueller investigation was totally worth it, despite its conclusions. In early 2017, with a clearly corrupt president in place, but both houses of Congress dominated by Republicans, there would have been no way to launch a legislative branch investigation of his misdeeds. 1/N Even though it was implausible from the start that collusion with Russia by Trump and his team swung the election, there were enough signs of deals with Russian eleites and operatives to justify a probe. the appointment of a DOJ Special Prosecutor was a gift to the Dems. 2/N