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.
“Bubble boy” breakthrough cure shows how some viruses can save lives
Beneath all the bad news about viruses this week lies a good virus: the one that underlies gene therapy for ...
Oldest known cave art holds clues to history of human creativity
Humans are intrinsically artists. Cave paintings and hand-carved figurines found in France, Spain and Italy suggest that Homo sapiens were crafting 35-40 ...
Proposed Ebola vaccine trials will use volunteer health care workers as subjects
When Ripley Ballou came to a Geneva, Switzerland, meeting about Ebola vaccines last week, he had a tough message to ...
Promising new gene therapy for “bubble boy” disease
More than a decade ago, doctors showed dramatic progress in helping infants born with a severe deficiency in their immune ...
Is evolution actually halted in ‘living fossils’?
One late spring weekend a few years back, my wife and I drove out to Delaware to see an amazingly ...
Progenitor cells, not stem cells, responsible for daily blood supply
Currently, text books say the life-long supply of the billions of blood cells in our veins is driven by a ...
Tall Genes: Thousands found responsible for height differences
There are more 600 of spots on the genome responsible for about a fifth of the variation in human height ...
Epigenetic markers may indicate type 2 diabetes risk
By studying identical twins, researchers from Lund University in Sweden have identified mechanisms that could be behind the development of ...
Cost barriers limit promising GM blood cancer treatments
Cancer treatments that genetically modify patients’ blood cells to target the disease have shown amazing results in clinical trials. Now ...
What we know (and don’t) about the causes of autism
What causes autism? As researchers have worked to unravel t[autism's] nature, they've come to grips with some unsatisfying facts. One is ...
Our GPS brain: What is the ‘doorway effect’ and how do we orient ourselves
How does memory and what amounts to a GPS system in our brain root us in the world? That's the ...
Science fiction meets Julia Child: An elegant cookbook for lab-grown meats
Although they've not yet hit the market, a Dutch art collective has created the definitive volume on how to cook ...
Scientists track progression of disease to predict risk
A new study, based on 6.2 million Danish patients, could soon allow scientists to predict what illnesses each individual is ...
Performance in school is heritable, but inequality of education still an issue
The idea that children can inherit the ability to get good results at school can spark heated debate. But, put ...
National Resource Defense Council reverses course, acknowledges ‘factory farms’ do not overuse antibiotics
Advocacy groups often claim antibiotic use on 'factory farms' is soaring, hurting animals and even humans who are developing resistance ...
Should there be greater regulation on using stem cells in cosmetics and sports?
Long ago, in last century’s nuclear age, mythical mutations were created by radiation, in a sinister play on humanity’s newly ...
Neuroscientists awarded Nobel Prize for discovering brain’s internal GPS
The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine has been awarded to three scientists who discovered the brain's "GPS system". UK-based ...
Africans dangerously underrepresented in gene research
Almost a decade after the first human genome was published, famed anti-apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu and three African bushmen became the first sub-saharan ...
Social stigma of anorexia distracts from exploring genetic causes
Social pressure to be as slender as a catwalk model, as sylph-like as a Hollywood star, is said to be ...
Uses of CRISPR/Cas9 genome engineering expand to editing RNA
The CRISPR/Cas9 system, a powerful tool for genome engineering and gene regulation, has been thought to be incapable of targeting RNA ...
Promising new findings on BRCA2 gene give hope for improving breast cancer treatment
For the first time, researchers from the UK have created pictures of the BRCA2 protein. Mutations in the gene that ...
Controversial fetal cell transplants revived for Parkinson’s trials
Fetal brain cell transplants fell out of favor as a potential therapy for Parkinson’s disease after mixed reviews from trials ...
Big Data revolutionizing how we research science and medicine
"The scientific method itself is growing obsolete,” says Atul Butte, an entrepreneur and associate professor of pediatrics at the Stanford School of ...
Thousands of genes contribute to height
It's no secret that if your dad is tall and your mother is tall, you are probably going to be ...
How Vietnam War vets aid in brain research
In 1967, William F. Caveness, a neurologist and veteran of the Korean War, began building a registry of living soldiers ...
Beware of the biomedical industrial complex
Dr. Steve McKnight, President of the American Society For Biochemistry And Molecular Biology, has written an article that must be as ...
Why there probably is no ‘perfect’ human gut microbiome
Jeff Leach, at the "Human Food Project", has written pungently about a bout of microbiome self-experimentation: "(Re)Becoming Human: what happened the ...
