So - that was quite a twitter/media day for me, and welcome to my new followers; 3 threads coming up - introducing myself, explaining my background and COIs (this one); technical aspects of the new strain from my vantage; commentary on what is means for the future

(for the people who know me, skip the rest of this thread!)
A brief tweet portrait of me; I am deputy director general of @embl and co-direct (with Rolf Apweiler, not on twitter) one it's six sites, @emblebi which is based just south of Cambridge, UK.
@embl is the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, a European treaty organisation that does science, similar to CERN. EMBL does molecular biology from high end atomic structural biology to development - and in the future, bridging to Ecosystems.
EMBL is Headquartered in beautiful Heidelberg, Germany and has 5 other sites; Hamburg (Germany also), Grenoble (France), EMBL-EBI at Hinxton (UK), Rome (Italy) and Barcelona (Spain).
Like CERN, the EMBL treaty is separate from EU treaties (though we have a very productive relationship and agreement with the EU); Israel and Switzerland were both founding members of EMBL in 1973. As such Brexit does not legally effect EMBL-EBI in the UK >>
<< though it has many impacts on the operational details and general tenor of the staff at EMBL-EBI, both EU nationals @emblebi, British nationals and non-EU nationals (we are very international in our recruitment)
Overall @embl has 5 missions - Excellent Research, world class scientific services, Training (all career levels), dissemination to industry and European science coordination. @emblebi is focused on bioinformatics - data science in biology - and contributes to all of these
In particular @emblebi provides the world with public molecular biology information; most iconic is the human genome sequence and its associated annotation, but this thread goes far deeper; from the 1970s for protein structures, 1980s for DNA sequence.
In the pandemic @emblebi has provided the technical centre piece to https://t.co/N47Vc4mBnz which enabling worldwide sharing of molecular data on COVID19 - DNA, protein, structures, and impact on the human host (expression changes, human genetics, done in a responsible way)
My own personal expertise is both algorithms around DNA and more recently outbred genetics, in both humans and Japanese Medaka fish.
When life is a little slower I will hopefully regale you all on Medaka fish genetics and phenotypes (its... slow science, and all the better for it) but the main thing about this field is two fold
(a) Data science in biology - aka Bioinformatics - gets hooked into all sorts of parts of biology, and one often reuses a fundamental toolkit (processing, models, statistics) in disparate fields - it really is a wonderful "freedom to roam" and means I collaborate broadly
(b) It is very international, both in data sharing worldwide (such a good thing for humanity I can't tell you - this pandemic being one example!) and also human genetics is very much a global village - we are a small group of upright apes that have exploded quickly worldwide
The final thing to add is that I often work with companies - I have a very porous view of how academia and companies should work in terms of expertise, and then sharp discontinuities about which problems are better solved in the public sphere, and which via private money
(so - I don't find it *at all* a problem that I am for open science and also cheerlead/support companies in general and a specific set of companies; rather it is "for this problem, what is the best structure to solve it")
As such I have a list of companies I have consulted for; am consulting for now; and may well consult for. For the "past" it includes, a long time back, Compugen in Israel, more recent past being GSK (the pharma company)
For the present I am a long standing consultant to @nanopore , which makes a new COVID test (LamPORE); as such I have a clear COI on testing which I try to be squeaky clean about announcing (much to people's amusement).
The other current consultancy of note is @DTGenomics which has a variety of clever library techniques, in particular proximity ligation for assemblies, structural variation and chromatin structure. They don't have a COVID line but they might.
For the future... I can't say (obviously) but what I do aim for is transparency with everyone. As @Spikew3 from nanopore says "Better a conflict of interest than a lack of interest" and being transparent is the start to this.

More from Twitter

The twitter ban on 45 is a victory in some sense for the immediate but a warning in the long term, not on the curtail of free speech but as gesture towards the expansive power commercial tech has on every aspect of our governance and our lives, I don’t quite have the words but-

What I’m trying to get at, is not just that Twitter’s decision allows us to see—in ways that have been obscured—how much control they have over content moderation—

but as @Elinor_Carmi points out “platforms don’t just moderate or filter “content”; they alter what registers to us and our social groups as “social” or as “experience.”
https://t.co/GSByAOoDWg changed

I’m worried that the celebration of Twitter’s intervention on fascist rhetoric-however too little and too late- directs us to desire tech companies enforcement of liberal and democratic procedures rather than towards an investigation of

how they’ve developed computational infrastructures which exceed the power of the nation state, are hollowing out our institutions for frictionless (see removing human contact) optimization and are insufficiently described by neoliberalism
A big part of my tweets are inspired by other people's content.

I bookmark everything that looks interesting and go there when in need of inspiration.

This is a thread-recap of the best-saved tweets from 2020 (for me at least) and what you can steal from each one. 🧵👇


The year chart by @jakobgreenfeld

What to steal: the idea and the design

Create a chart with the key moments of your growth. It's a great reflective exercise for you and it can be a great learning experience for your


Let's collaborate by @aaraalto

What to steal: the idea.

Creating a blank piece of content (could be a sentence, a design, a video...) that your audience can later


Advice to first-time info product creators by @dvassallo

What to steal: the insight

This tweet was one of the sparks for me writing the Twitter Thief ($1,3k revenue says it's good


How to be a better writer by @JamesClear

What to steal: the insight

A world-class writer giving free writing lessons. The tweet is from 2019 but I discovered it this
So regarding to my "bombshell"...it's perhaps a bit less dramatic than many presumed, yet it still troubles me a lot, to the point that I wondered whether I should stop posting on certain things


You see, I realized in the last few months that, by translating information and news related to one of the fastest growing spaceflight powers of the world...I inadvertently became a spreader of PRC propaganda.

And with me exactly 180 degrees away from them, I feel scared.

It actually started a few years ago - it's not hard to meet Chinese Twitter users interested in spaceflight, either those living overseas or find a way to climb over the wall. Not surprisingly, many of these S/F enthusiasts are interested in their own military too.

This steadily grew with my followers' count until the flagship Chinese spaceflight missions of 2020 (Chang'e 5 especially but also many others) brought in dozens of them liking/re-tweeting my info tweets sometimes, and similar no. of such followers every month.

I do casually check these new followers/users sometimes. To my horror, far too many of them routinely insults, attacks, mocks others who they see as "anti-China" or spread potential mis-information, even blatant attacks, that started off w/ their state media/spokesperson.

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I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical.


I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.