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.
How accurate are non-invasive prenatal screening procedures?
In the past few years, "non-invasive" prenatal screening tests have flooded the market, which claim to be able to predict ...
DNA is tough enough to survive space travel
Could the blueprint for life have come from space? Yes, according to an experiment carried out by molecular biologist Cora ...
Gene Therapy 3.0: Rise and fall and rise again of gene therapy–For real this time?
Gene therapy is seeing a renaissance after a long period of skepticism about its failed potential. What are the new ...
Antibiotic resistance may be bigger problem than previously thought
A project commissioned by the British government has released estimates of the near-future global toll of antibiotic resistance that are ...
Who controls your actions: you or your brain?
Imagine that Brian promises to drive you to the airport but never shows up, and you miss your flight. When ...
Why don’t indigenous Americans look like their pioneer ancestors?
The first face of the first Americans belongs to an unlucky teenage girl who fell to her death in a ...
Women’s colleges considering policy changes that redefine ‘gender’
At an elite college for women, the question arises: What does it mean to be a woman? The president of ...
Are more men idiots? ‘Darwin Awards’ study examines gender differences in idiocy
Sex differences in mortality and admissions to hospital emergency departments have been well documented, and hypotheses put forward to account for ...
Human evolution isn’t all competition: it’s cooperation, too
People often have a grim view of what it means to be human. There’s this conception that inside each of ...
Growing concern over athletes receiving unproven stem cell therapies
Elite athletes do whatever it takes to win. Lately, that’s meant getting an injection of their own stem cells. The ...
Why evaluating risk factors might not always lead to the best medical advice
Most health-conscious people are familiar with the concept of risk factors for disease. We’re too familiar, in fact. A risk ...
Does reporting on behavioral genetics misinform the public?
A study of 1,500 Americans found that media reports about behavioral genetics create unfounded beliefs about what genes can and ...
Too much and too little: Delicate balance of knowing risk and treating disease
One woman seeks out her genetic risk for familial breast cancer and finds she has a potentially lethal mutation for ...
Drug-resistant malaria strains pose challenge to disease prevention
The region around the Mekong River delta is infamous for its malaria parasites. Twice already—in the 1950s and the 1960s—they ...
Organization misconstrues genetics to spread homophobic message
A controversial billboard proclaiming that “nobody is born gay” has sparked a great deal of controversy in Richmond, Virginia, where ...
Tracking disease outbreaks through city’s sewer system
Disease prevention and mapmaking have been inextricably intertwined since 1854, when an English physician named John Snow plotted a cholera ...
Immune system hoards iron supply to fight microbes
Disease is an act of piracy. When microbes infect us, they steal our resources so they can thrive at our ...
How do stem cells work? Scientists aren’t sure
Eggs and sperm do it when they combine to make an embryo. John Gurdon did it in the 1960s, when ...
In India, a form of eugenics that people might embrace
The term “eugenics” has very negative connotations today. Nevertheless, in some ways society is moving in a direction which results ...
Did the Khoisans’ ancestors once rule the earth?
It is common for strong results from population genetics to be confused when it is translated for public consumption. The ...
How culture shaped human evolution
Culture is not a luxury; it is life or death. Culture has likely been the most important part of the ...
New type of stem cell challenges understanding of pluripotency
Researchers from Canada’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and their international colleagues have uncovered a new type of pluripotent mouse stem cell—the ...
When is selecting baby traits the right thing to do?
Although the word was not actually used (or at least I did not hear it), this was a polemic making ...
Proving Native American ancestry is more complicated than a DNA test
Many people have family lore that suggests they have Native American ancestry. The first step to confirming or denying these ...
Google’s Cloud searching for genetic causes of autism
Google has spent the past decade-and-a-half perfecting the science of recognizing patterns in the chaos of information on the web ...
Forced sterilization in Peru: Did modern eugenic practices slow population growth?
The Peruvian government is alleged to have used coercive methods to sterilize thousands of indigenous women and men to control ...
Genetic information: How much to share, how much to keep private in age of Big Data
Genetics and computational biology are evolving so quickly that it’s impossible to predict the medical answers that they’ll reveal in ...
