Daily Human Digest
Every day, the staff of the Genetic Literacy Project scours the Web for stories on a range of human genetics issues, including gene editing, regulations and bioethics, gene therapy, epigenetics, personal genomics, evolution, ancestry and artificial intelligence. We publish excerpts of those stories and encourage our readers to visit the original publications for the complete stories.
Viewpoint: ‘Science is always evolving’ is a dangerous excuse to reject it
As popular mistrust of expert opinion grows, we increasingly encounter the following skeptical argument about science: Historically, even well-established theories ...
Viewpoint: Wrecking havoc on American health—RFK, Jr.’s grim first year legacy
In the 11 months since he was confirmed as health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has wreaked steady havoc on ...
Who’s my daddy? Chinese billionaire has hundreds of U.S.-born babies. Who has custody?
Chinese gaming tycoon Xu Bo's company [December 16, 2025] pushed back against claims he had fathered more than 100 children ...
AI doomerism is so passé. Or is it?
It’s a weird time to be an AI doomer. This small but influential community of researchers, scientists, and policy experts ...
Viewpoint: ‘Increasingly futile’—Why debating MAHA influencers with science and reason doesn’t work
... Dr. Mikhail Varshavski, the New Jersey-based family medicine physician and medical social media influencer better known as Dr. Mike, appeared ...
AI hype takes a hit—For most businesses, the revolutionary tool falls short
Some disillusionment was inevitable. When OpenAI released a free web app called ChatGPT in late 2022, it changed the course of an ...
Viewpoint: Crazy left meets crazy right—The tort machine created by activist environmentalists to target aspartame, Gardasil, and glyphosate is now turning its sights on vaccines and other MAHA pet grieves
Anti-vaxxers have found a powerful new weapon: the plaintiffs’ bar. Armed with repurposed federal claims and fueled by political momentum, ...
New U.S. cancer policy head falsely believes COVID vaccines ‘turbocharge’ cancer and horse dewormer ivermectin is a miracle drug
An epidemiologist who has speculated about whether there is a connection between Covid-19 vaccines and “turbo cancer” in young people, ...
AI morality? Don’t hold your breath
It’s not the AI overlords destroying humanity that we need to worry about so much as a hyperpolarized, hyperweaponized humanity destroying ...
Hype adjustment: Probiotic supplements don’t help much to improve your gut function and overall health, and are a waste of money
There are microbes living in medicine cabinets across the U.S., next to the aspirin and the Band-Aids. And people want ...
‘Like an atom bomb’: Under RFK Jr.’s broken leadership, handpicked vaccine skeptic tapped to oversee the FDA’s drug office
On [December 3, 2005], Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg was tapped as acting director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation ...
What diseases lurk in your DNA? AI has many new answers
Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have developed a novel artificial intelligence tool that not only ...
Alert to Donald Trump: Tanning bed users at higher risk for skin cancer
Hop onto TikTok and you'll find lots of videos of young people — mostly women — fake baking under the ...
Viewpoint: The U.S. has entered a dark period in public health, thank you Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
We expect [medical] breakthroughs to occur on a regular basis, and 2025 delivered; successful trials of gene therapies for diseases ...
Trouble getting pregnant: AI is the energizer bunny way to supercharge sperm
Doctors at Columbia University's fertility centre ... have developed an imaging technology, Sperm Tracking and Recovery (STAR), which they believe ...
Outside the boundaries of modern science? Gene editing opens the door to treat rare diseases
Fyodor Urnov, the scientific director of UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), showed me a list of rare diseases and ...
Evolutionary quirk or survival instict? Why are we ticklish?
Only humans and our close relatives are known to engage in tickling behaviour, suggesting that it may have evolved in ...
Viewpoint: RFK, Jr. and the vaccine denial movement is undermining trust between doctors and patients
Over the past few years, the rise of anti-science and anti-vaccine rhetoric has fundamentally changed the relationship between clinicians and ...
‘Terrible distortion of facts’: Anti-vax lawyer’s heb B testimony perfectly illustrates playbook to subvert science and litigate fear
Attorney Aaron Siri, JD, who has worked as legal counsel for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ...
New York Times says it will not be intimidated into reporting about Trump’s faltering health
The New York Times, attacked by President Donald Trump for reporting about his physical condition, said on [December 9, 2025] that ...
RFK, Jr. poised to marginalize effective RSV therapies after vaccine opponents question efficacy of safety data based on no new data
U.S. health regulators informed senior executives at Merck, Sanofi and AstraZeneca ... that their approved protective RSV treatments for infants ...
Viewpoint: Once the global center of science-based medicine, the CDC now regularly lies and peddles junk science
... On November 19, 2025, the CDC updated its webpage about one of the central antivax claims dating back to ...
Speculation on how our brains may have evolved to invent the idea of gods
Recent archaeological and neurobiological evidence suggests that as the human brain evolved, specific cognitive abilities appeared that paralleled the invention ...
‘We must absolutely ignore them’: Medical experts rebuke Kennedy’s CDC after ‘hand-picked’ panel upends hepatitis B vaccine guidance
A CDC vaccine advisory panel's decision to stop recommending universal hepatitis B vaccination for newborns has sparked a split between federal advisors ...
Mismatch of bodies and brains: Humans were not built for our industrialized present; our evolutionary future looks grim
In a recent research paper co-authored with Daniel Longman, ... [evolutionary anthropologist Colin Shaw] argues that the extensive environmental shifts of the Anthropocene ...
Can we ‘recharge’ our cells to rewind the aging clock? Scientists think so
Think of cells as the biological answer to battery-powered electronics. Mitochondria are the batteries that supply them with enough energy to keep going. ...
Volcanic eruptions brought the Black Death plague to Europe
Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in ...
