Jason Locasale
@LocasaleLab
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Scientist (metabolism, cancer, AI, health/longevity). Academic & scientific reform. Former: Duke, Cornell, Harvard, MIT. DMs open • dr.jason.locasale@gmail
Raleigh, NC
Joined March 2015
I left a successful academic career in STEM after publishing 200+ papers. I believed in science and truth but learned the system valued optics over integrity, conformity over courage. In academia, bureaucracy replaced discovery, egos replaced expertise, and silence replaced
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This is an exciting the direction for federal science funding to move. Universities had a 75-year monopoly on the model, and we now see the consequences. Team-based, mission-driven science is not just desirable is necessary. Modern discovery requires ifreedom from the
NSF is launching one of the most ambitious experiments in federal science funding in 75 years. The program is called Tech Labs, and the goal is to invest ~$1 billion to seed new institutions of science and technology for the 21st century. Instead of funding projects, the NSF
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One of the shocking open secrets in American science is how NIH overhead actually works. A single lab bench in a university medical center can carry ten or more overlapping streams of indirect costs. One professor or "PI" in grant speak can have four R-level grants, each
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"Momentum of discovery" = a research metric measured in chandeliers per square foot. Cancer never stood a chance against Harvard's interior design team.
Just us, redefining the momentum of discovery & the future of cancer care 👀
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From the PhD side, I’ve found something similar: some of my best ideas came from conversations with people in the community who had no formal scientific background. When you listen to what patients, families, and ordinary citizens are curious about or frustrated by, you see
Same for cardiology, especially heart failure 👇🏻
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Put a calendar hold for a meeting** on Friday. (**Playing pickleball)
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Brownstone has been a place that welcomed me and gave me a platform to share my ideas. I’m grateful for that. In a landscape where so many institutions shut down dissent and filter out inconvenient perspectives, Brownstone has created space for new inquiry - not just in
@Grokipedia new article request: Brownstone Institute # Brownstone Institute **Brownstone Institute** is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit think tank founded in May 2021 by Jeffrey A. Tucker and Lucio Saverio Eastman, headquartered in Austin, Texas. It grew out of efforts at
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Academic medical centers have built layers upon layers of mechanisms to extract money from the public. Dutch is showing how they exploit the healthcare system to expand their empires and fuel administrative growth. The same thing is happening in the research they conduct.
𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐚𝐭𝐬, 𝐃𝐚𝐫𝐤 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐲 They train our doctors. They conduct our research. They treat some of the sickest patients. And they collect the highest prices in American healthcare. Academic Medical Centers are the prestige factories of the medical world.
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Universities belong in this reckoning too. The institutions that lecture the country about truth and integrity have refused to admit their own failures: - that they abandoned the spirit of academic freedom and replaced merit with bureaucratic incentives, - allowed
In the last five days, the media has admitted: • Children "may have died" from COVID shots. • Biden knew his policies would cause an immigration crisis, and did it anyways. • Billions of U.S. tax dollars went to corruption in Ukraine.
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Only a bureaucrat could look at the state of American science and decide the real threat is someone asking questions. People see the collapsing trust, failed oversight, censorship, and corporate rot - not a bureaucrat scrambling to defend failed institutions.
🚨 Today, I formally introduced articles of impeachment against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. RFK Jr. has turned his back on science and the safety of the American people. Michiganders cannot take another day of his chaos.
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The plan was clean. The escape? Not so much. Midway City doesn’t play fair. Wishlist this 4-player coop heist FPS on Steam today.
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University free speech and academic freedom policies today are deliberately vague. They’re drafted by lawyers who lace them with enough qualifiers and escape clauses that virtually any unilateral administrative action can be justified after the fact. The language is written to
"The purpose of institutional neutrality is to curtail the unnecessary speech of leadership that might otherwise disenfranchise dissenting students and faculty and thereby stifle their speech... we must, and will, provide protections for free expression, but we cannot provide
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As I began publishing in high-profile journals, I found myself getting to know the editors behind them. We’d meet for meals or drinks, talk casually about my work, our lives, their ambitions. Most were genuinely interested in promoting good science. But it was also clear that
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We don’t need journals - just like we don’t need Harvard diplomas, luxury handbags, Michelin-guided restaurants, country-club memberships, airport-lounge tiers, or board certifications. But societies still create and require systems to signal merit and qualifications. In a
@LocasaleLab Sure. People do good science. But we don’t need journals to tell us that.
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The scientists prioritized institutional preservation and their own advancement within it over the truth. Once truth became secondary to protecting the system, public trust was guaranteed to fall.
Responsibility for the collapse of trust in science belongs those who participated in its corruption, especially those “scientists” who decided to pursue higher priorities than the truth. They have plunged us into a dark age, whether we understand that or not.
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I don’t disagree that Nature publishes plenty of junk - everyone can name examples. That’s not the point. The point is that alongside the junk, there is really good work in CNS journals. There are great labs like Ebright’s or Sabatini’s that spend years purifying and
@LocasaleLab I once read a paper in Nature. It was written up in the New York Times. Every single claim it made was wrong and trivially shown to be so. Nature refused to publish a correction and the authors refused to issue one. But what’s your point?
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Dark Hours, the co-op horror heist where you break into haunted places, score big and try to survive the horrors inside. Available on Steam!
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I once reviewed a paper from SpaceX for Nature on astronaut metabolism. I thought it was genuinely one of the most original and creative papers in the field. Nature eventually published it. The authors sent it there, I endorsed its publication, and the editor published it
I wouldn’t waste even a penny of @elonmusk’e money on a scientific publisher - it’s like saying he should have promoted electric cars by buying Chrysler - if you want to fix science publishing start from scratch
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♥️♥️♥️ Got a message today from a retired mentor who knew me 25 years ago in college. She read my writing, told me she’s proud of me, and encouraged me to keep speaking up. It hit me deeply. Sometimes the support that matters most comes from people who knew you long before
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I’d love to see the DoJ take additional looks at Universities - on civil-rights grounds, antitrust grounds, tax evasion grounds, all of it. But there are a lot of entrenched interests protecting the current system. Universities have taken billions or trillions in tax benefits
@LocasaleLab Given the activity of the Civil Rights Division of the DoJ, there's a chance they might actually do it. Wouldn't that be a welcome development?
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The University of Utah literally created an LLC called "Utah Brands and Entertainment" and sold it to private equity. At this rate I’m expecting season tickets for Chemistry 101 and a university-run streaming service to watch the lectures.
@LocasaleLab Bingo!
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Private equity taking over a part of a public university in Utah isn’t the aberration. It’s the business model finally admitting what it is.
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When I started speaking publicly about the problems scientists face in academic biomedical research, I was struck by how closely they mirror what physicians are describing here. In my later years at Duke, I was routinely spending 20 hours a week on administrative paperwork
As a practicing physician, I can attest that these numbers seem correct. Think of how inefficient our system has become where the highly paid, highly specialized front line workers are spending nearly an entire work week on unnecessary administrative tasks. Wonder why
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