And a front-of-book editorial by Remnick, saying things you might've thought were obvious but that the rest of the landscape makes look courageous

Or, you can watch the whole conference proceedings here: www.youtube.com/live/aworV8Y...

More detailed analysis here: cen.acs.org/policy/MAHA-...

5. Biotech executives are trying to carve out a space within MAHA under the banner "making American biotech accelerate," or MABA, and speaking in favor of the US translational research environment, but without comment on funding.

4. Administration officials from Vance on down are looking to collaborate with industry via MAHA-oriented public-private partnerships.

(Also, some of them think pharma companies should get into the wellness space.)

3. Marty Makary, FDA commissioner, wants the agency to take a more proactive approach to new drug reviews: go out there and offer priority vouchers based on early evidence, complete the bulk of reviews before clinical trials read out,etc.
(Some priority-voucher recipients also spoke at the summit.)

2. Jay Bhattacharya, NIH director, says that the hardest thing about his job (besides the $ scale - which his bosses want to reduce) is " to convey the message first that science is still worth investing in . . . but at the same time to acknowledge that we have not done a good job in the past.”

1. Who's in MAHA? It's contested. But researchers are definitely out.

However, since nobody has time for 6.5 hours of MAHA content the day before Thanksgiving, I've watched it for you and written up some takeaways.

To me, the issue is the internal editorial structure that keeps the political reporter from walking over to the science desk/slack channel and saying "hey, could you look over my coverage quickly and identify potential problems". So, I'd place this at the feet of the most senior editors.

and amino acid sequences that get degraded fast if they do slip through the ribosome.

Zoya Ignatova, who pioneered this suppressor tRNA approach a few years back, told me, "This is the one place biology works in our favor."

So far, the suppressor tRNA is expressed at very low levels, even after lots of optimization.

But more importantly, actual translation termination almost never depends on just one stop codon. Genuine stop codons have follow-up stop codons in frame, UTRs that attract a ton of termination factors,

You may ask: Why doesn't changing an endogenous tRNA into a suppressor-tRNA cause ribosomes to plow through stop codons all over the genome?

The answer (as so often in biology) is a little bit of stoichiometry, and a little bit of belt-and-suspenders biological redundancy.

It's not ready for prime time (sorry). But suppressor tRNAs are a growing focus of genetic medicine. David Liu's lab is trying to bring them into the genome by editing endogenous tRNAs.

(The chemist declined to share more details, so I couldn't fact check it, and share here with a grain of salt. But I'd like it to be true.)

One chemist that I spoke to told me about complaining about the vague language in the 2018 farm bill to someone they had met at a conference--only to later be informed that that person had drafted the language in question.