Human Features
The GLP tackles innovations in human genetics and biotechnology. We highlight the work of our own writers, as well as that of contributors from around the Web. The GLP does not take a position on genetics-related issues; any opinions expressed belong to the authors.
Categories include:
- CRISPR and gene editing
- Gene therapy
- Stem cell research
- Genetic diseases
- Synthetic biology
- Epigenetics
- Biodrugs (pharmacogenetics)
- Personal genomics
- Ancestry and evolution
- Ethics and regulations
Podcast: Unreliable COVID tests; Amazon’s creepy Halo health band; Celebrate pesticides?
How do COVID-19 tests work, and are their results reliable? Recent media reports have raised some concerning questions. Amazon's Halo ...
Marketers are beginning to use data mined from consumer DNA tests. Should we be worried?
A woman lingers at a display of coffeemakers. Soon after, images of the very same contraptions festoon her Facebook feed, ...
Reflecting on ‘The Queen’s Gambit’: Are women genetically hardwired to underperform men in chess?
Unlike the wildly popular Netflix chess-themed series The Queen’s Gambit, female players have struggled to climb to the top of ...
How COVID deniers are taking pages out of the anti-vaccine movement’s playbook
One of the most notable things about the COVID-19 pandemic has been how fast two science denialist movements made common cause ...
More or less deadly? Which way is SARS-CoV-2 evolving?
No lethal pandemic lasts forever. The 1918 flu, for example, crisscrossed the globe and claimed tens of millions of lives, ...
Your personal genetic makeup can determine whether you respond to a treatment, get worse, or even die
Henk-Jan Guchelaar knows all too well the serious problems that the side-effects of medication can cause. As a professor of clinical pharmacy at the ...
‘Auto-activation deficit’: The curious cases of people hard wired to react but not act
One day, a lively and successful businessman was bitten by a wasp, triggering an unexpected encephalopathy of the brain. Afterwards, he ...
PEW global survey: Caution about research on gene editing, but wide support for treating diseases in human embryos
Global publics take a cautious stance toward scientific research on gene editing, according to an international survey from Pew Research ...
Why humanity will likely be around for a long time
Will our species go extinct? The short answer is yes. The fossil record shows everything goes extinct, eventually. Almost all ...
Podcast: How do COVID vaccines work? CRISPR kills cancer; Danish study debunks mask mandates?
The leading COVID-19 vaccines are RNA-based immunizations and the first of their kind. How do they work, and are they ...
Viewpoint: COVID won’t subside in the US until 70% of us are immune. That means: ‘Get a vaccine’
The United States is one of the most seriously COVID-19-impacted countries, faring the worst among the ten most-affected countries worldwide, as ...
Halal effect: Global Muslim communities face unique COVID challenges, including a religion-grounded hesitation to vaccines
COVID-19 has spared no ethnic, racial or religious group. It treats everyone with equal disdain. But that doesn’t mean that ...
Sordid ledger: Humans’ destructive history of wiping out other species
Sometime in the late 1600s, in the lush forests of Mauritius, the very last dodo took its last breath. After ...
Free will vs genetics: How much do our genes shape our actions?
Many of us believe we are masters of own destiny, but new research is revealing the extent to which our ...
Level the playing field: Genetics makes us not only different but unequal. CRISPR could change that. Should we do it?
Over the past decade, economists, sociologists and psychologists have begun collaborating with geneticists to investigate how genomic differences among human ...
High-tech medical and dental innovation garner the headlines but the most impactful practices are mostly lower tech and prevention-focused
Much of the progress in medicine during the past half-century has involved expensive, high-tech diagnostic tests and therapies. The trend in ...
Are Sudanese Arabs?
Sudan, once the largest and one of the most geographically diverse states in Africa, split into two countries in July ...
When humans evolved selfishness
There has long been a general assumption that human beings are essentially selfish. We’re apparently ruthless, with strong impulses to ...
‘Reverse dieting’ fad reality check: Is it possible to maintain a lower body weight while consuming more calories?
We all know that when it comes to weight loss, dropping the pounds is the easy part. It’s keeping weight ...
To the victor go the spoils: How Homo sapiens prevailed in battles for survival with Neanderthals
Around 600,000 years ago, humanity split in two. One group stayed in Africa, evolving into us. The other struck out ...
Viewpoint: Politics and science in Europe: How the development of COVID-19 vaccines highlights ideological inconsistency and hypocrisy
The announcement that Astra-Zeneca, a British-Swedish biopharmaceutical company, had developed the third coronavirus vaccine to show promise in Phase III ...
How evolution could thwart the new COVID vaccines and what we can do to prevent that
The first drug against HIV brought dying patients back from the brink. But as excited doctors raced to get the ...
How to assess the real safety risks of getting a COVID vaccine shot
It seems like we might have a vaccine on the way and some of this madness will stop. But, like everything ...
When it comes to COVID, nurture trumps nature – so far
In the early weeks of the pandemic, as patients overwhelmed New York City hospitals, the clinical characteristics of the most ...
Podcast: Beyond CRISPR and gene therapy—How ‘gene writing’ is poised to transform the treatment of even the rarest diseases
In just a few short years, gene editing has launched a biomedical revolution, yielding previously unimaginable treatments for conditions ranging ...
Debating the prickly notion of identity: It’s different depending on your ideology
In 2020, much of the public discussion of social issues revolves around notions of identity. Ideas about race, reformulations of ...
What did a teenage girl look like 9,000 years ago? Here is her face, reconstructed from bone fragments found in a cave in Greece
Swedish sculptor Oscar Nilsson reconstructed the face of an 18-year-old young woman, dubbed Avgi, whose 9,000-year-old bones were found in ...
