How I grew @prov_pizza 3650% over the last month.

This is me trying to build in public like @thisiskp_ and being transparent like @jackbutcher.

A visual thread. 👇🍕

Incoming rant.

I'm pressing the "tweet" button as I type, and I'm typing as I think, so there's every possibility that this will drift into tangents and/or nowhere. Of course, that's true pretty much every time I start threading.

I know diddly-squat about physiology.

Friends and family who *do* know anything about physiology regularly mock my (apparently bizarre) theories of how bodies work.

I am not a trustworthy narrator when it comes to things like How Vaccines Work.

I know diddly-squat about epidemiology.

Unlike physiology, where I am firmly in the domain of Messrs. Dunning and Kruger, I've read enough about the subject to understand how little I know.

This is a complicated subject, where obvious truths are seldom either obvious or true.

I also know diddly-squat about public health policy.

Public *transportation* policy is way more in my wheelhouse. But this at least lets me make some useful analogies.

…I mentioned digressions? Yeah, I just started to write a very long digression about public transportation paradoxes, and it was taking away from the point I wanted to make.

Thread on censorship

1) Twitter told us last night that the reason hundreds of thousands of people was removed

from the platform is because they have to confirm their phone number or email

Then those numbers would be represented in our follower count

THREAT THREAD: Today @United Airlines shared the travel itinerary of Senator @tedcruz with members of the media and as a result, the public at large. His flight information is being included in tweets to/from mainstream media including @CNN and @Acosta.

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.

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).

I wrote a lot of pieces in 2020! As we close out the year, I want to share a short list of my favorites. (thread)

In March, while we all watched in horror as the Trump administration botched the initial response to the pandemic, I wrote for @Independent about the bizarre and unjust access many healthy celebrities gained to COVID tests, which were quite scarce.

In April, when it was apparent Joe Biden was on his way to winning the nomination, I wrote for @washingtonpost on why progressives should have optimism about a Biden White House.

In June, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling affirming employment protections for LGBTQ people. It's cause for celebration, but as I wrote for @Cosmopolitan: this is a mere fraction of LGBTQ equality. We *must* pass the Equality Act.

That same month brought controversy as J.K. Rowling seemed to be completely unaware of the violence and discrimination faced by trans and non-binary people. So, I wrote about my own experiences in that vein for @USAToday in the hopes of educating folks: