Every summer the same warning makes the rounds: "don't get sick in July." That's when the newly minted doctors arrive, interns six weeks out of med school, senior residents in roles they've never held, entire teams reshuffled overnight. In the US we call it the "July Effect." In Britain, more luridly, the "killing season." New people make more errors, and more errors must mean more dead patients. Right? The "July Effect" feels true, but like many intuitive facts in medicine, it's a myth. 🧵 1/

How to design a cancer vaccine (and vastly improve them): Alex Rubinsteyn & Ben Vincent this is an interview with @iskander and @BenjaminGVincen, two UNC professors. it is three hours of incredibly detailed takes on cancer vaccines, personalized immunotherapy, and how both may be improved in the fullness of time. Alex and Ben are both wellsprings of knowledge and this was a very, very fun episode to film; i expect it could've gone on for an hour longer. enjoy! (other links in reply)

✨ Announcing fast grants for British progress ✨ Have an idea for how to drive growth and progress in Britain? We’re making small grants for research, policy and other projects, with funding decisions in just two weeks. No academic affiliation required. Need some prompting to start cooking? We’ve got a list of questions we’d love people to tackle - on topics like devolution, AI diffusion, financial regulation and more… Apply here: More on why we’re doing this:

IS THE ECONOMIST ALWAYS WRONG? Scandalously, in some circles @TheEconomist has a reputation as a contrarian indicator. This week we fessed up to getting a big call on oil prices from April wrong. Obviously our goal is not perfectly-hedged (and perfectly boring) predictive accuracy: often it is to stimulate, provoke, and challenge. But I did want to test that wider allegation, so I ran a series of LLM scorers across our full leader database since 2000 (7,000 leaders in all.) You can see the results in the chart below: each dot is one of the 1,400 leaders where we identified concrete and falsifiable predictions that were central to the argument. Higher = more accurate, further to the right = more contrarian. We do well, unsurprisingly, when aligned with conventional wisdom. We often do worse when truly out on a limb. But actually, on average, we are a bit likelier to be right than wrong on our somewhat-out-of-consensus calls. All round, a respectable performance. And as @ecurrnomics points out an accompanying leader, there is no shame at all in being beaten by the market: as good free-marketers we believe deeply in the aggregated wisdom of prices. Take a look at my piece here, which includes a canter through our best and worst calls of the last quarter-century:

The manufacturing process for producing >200 million sterile screwworm flies a week can be summarized as creating a “76,000-square-foot artificial wound.” This is grotesquely fascinating:

One of the biggest challenges I see for Claude and AI in biotech drug development is that LLMs are based on published data, patents, etc. But when industry (and my company) try to replicate published work, the failure rate is at least 50-65%. How does the AI know what to trust?

NEW from me: Americans are set to lose nearly $250B gambling this year—a record high, up more than 60% since 2019—and that's before counting unofficial betting via prediction markets or crypto Can anything stop America's gambling boom? 🧵

When you think about it, isn’t it sort of crazy that the continents drift over time, and used to be joined together as a single landmass around 200 million years ago? What’s even crazier is that this only became consensus in the late 1960s. For the decades leading up to then, it was dismissed by most geologists, and called “Germanic pseudo-science”. It “takes considerable liberties with our globe” wrote one leading geologist. It ignores “awkward, ugly facts” and “plays a game in which there are few restrictive rules.” A brilliant new Works in Progress article by Elizabeth Van Nostrand (@acesounderglass) explains how the theory all came together and what convinced the skeptics. Continental drift was proposed multiple times over history, most famously by Alfred Wegener, who first laid out the theory in 1912 and compiled several lines of evidence: • the coastlines of South America and Africa fitting together • matching geological formations on either side of the Atlantic • glaciers on continents now too warm or too far from the poles to have had ice • fossils of the same species lining up across separate continents but not within them Wegener’s research was dismissed by many experts in part because Wegener did not have a background in geology, though it carried more traction in Europe than America. It gained steam again during the Cold War, from work funded by the US Navy to improve submarine navigation, which led to its rediscovery and rapid acceptance. Now, it is geology’s ‘theory of everything’, explaining volcanoes, earthquakes, mountains, and even geological records of the Earth’s magnetic field. This is On the origin of continents. Read it here!

When you think about it, isn’t it sort of crazy that the continents drift over time, and used to be joined together as a single landmass around 200 million years ago? What’s even crazier is that this only became consensus in the late 1960s. For the decades leading up to then, it was dismissed by most geologists, and called “Germanic pseudo-science”. It “takes considerable liberties with our globe” wrote one leading geologist. It ignores “awkward, ugly facts” and “plays a game in which there are few restrictive rules.” A brilliant new Works in Progress article by Elizabeth Van Nostrand (@acesounderglass) explains how the theory all came together and what convinced the skeptics. Continental drift was proposed multiple times over history, most famously by Alfred Wegener, who first laid out the theory in 1912 and compiled several lines of evidence: • the coastlines of South America and Africa fitting together • matching geological formations on either side of the Atlantic • glaciers on continents now too warm or too far from the poles to have had ice • fossils of the same species lining up across separate continents but not within them Wegener’s research was dismissed by many experts in part because Wegener did not have a background in geology, though it carried more traction in Europe than America. It gained steam again during the Cold War, from work funded by the US Navy to improve submarine navigation, which led to its rediscovery and rapid acceptance. Now, it is geology’s ‘theory of everything’, explaining volcanoes, earthquakes, mountains, and even geological records of the Earth’s magnetic field. This is On the origin of continents. Read it here!

Excited that this important piece is finally out. Serious long-running problems w/ UMich consumer sentiment survey has HUGE impact on topline econ satisfaction levels. Overrepresenting partisans (particularly Dems today) & going from phone to online broke the trends big-time

Would you rather drink one beer every evening for a year, or drink 365 beers in one evening? All of nuclear power 'safety' regulation is built on the idea that, when the same question comes to radiation, there's no difference. But the empirical evidence is overwhelming that the body repairs small amounts of damage caused by ionising radiation in the same way it repairs damage from other small harms. If this is correct it would mean that the "unsafe at any dose" philosophy that has underpinned the regulation of nuclear energy since the 1970s is wrong. It is premature to conclude that yet: we need more evidence. But if that further research does confirm what the existing evidence suggests, then nuclear power is much, much more expensive than it needs to be, even in places like South Korea that build cheaply, and nuclear power could be cheaper than any other form of electricity. We could go much further than, say, the Fingleton Review or the mainstream proposals for reform that are on the table in the United States. We could have a new atomic age in which the "too cheap to meter" dream was realised.

All of these were reported over the past month: • A new pancreatic cancer drug, daraxonrasib, that roughly doubles survival in late-stage disease • A precision lung cancer drug, lorlatinib, that kept 55 percent of patients progression-free after 7 years, versus 3 percent on the old drug • A prostate cancer drug, talazoparib, that halves the risk of progression • An endometrial cancer drug, dostarlimab, where 58 percent of patients hadn't progressed after 4 years, versus 16 percent on chemo alone • An early-detection blood test, the NHS Galleri test, that quadrupled cancer detection but missed its main goal • An mRNA cancer vaccine that halved the risk of melanoma recurrence when added to Keytruda • The most effective weight loss drug so far, retatrutide, which cut body weight by about 28 percent • The first in vivo gene editing therapy, which cut hereditary angioedema attacks by 87 percent from a single injection • A one-time gene edit, VERVE-102, that lowered LDL cholesterol by 62 percent • A feat of pharmaceutical synthesis that raised enlicitide's manufacturing yield 14-fold using engineered enzymes • A functional cure for hepatitis B, bepirovirsen, that cleared the virus in about 20 percent of patients • The discovery that human cells can swap chromosome-sized DNA through nanotubes • An ancestor of CRISPR, VIPR, found in bacteriophages, that silences genes without cutting DNA • A preventive Covid-19 pill, ensitrelvir, that cut symptom risk by 67 percent after exposure • The first PROTAC drug, vepdegestrant, which destroys a disease-causing protein rather than blocking it Every month, Niko and I write a round up digging into the latest news in biotech and medicine, and this month's was astonishing. We share some thoughts on what's responsible for this progress and what it means for science in the future.

NEW BLOG! @RuxandraTeslo, @kroetscha, @vientsek, @NeuroStats, and I have started a joint blog on Clinical Trials Abundance! We'll aim to publish weekly thoughts, commentary and ideas on how to make clinical trials more efficient & abundant. Subscribe: