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.
X-linked gene controls two common male reproductive birth defects
Baylor College of Medicine scientists defined a previously unrecognized genetic cause for two types of birth defects found in newborn ...
Blondness carried in a single allele that enhances known hair color genes
Some Europeans have enhancers that make them blond. In this case, the enhancer isn’t a hair dye, but a genetic ...
Bruce Ames, identifier of mutation causing chemicals, lists his greatest discoveries
In an otherwise ordinary day in 1964, Bruce Ames picked up a box of potato chips and read the list ...
Rhode Island bill allows DNA collection from any arrestee
A bill before the Rhode Island General Assembly would give law enforcement sweeping new powers to collect DNA from people ...
Breast cancer gene also raises risk of lung cancer in smokers
After comparing the DNA of 11,348 Europeans with lung cancer and 15,861 cancer-free patients, researchers found a particularly strong contention ...
Mosquito-borne dengue fever threatens Brazil World Cup but GM solution blocked by biotech fears
Construction woes aside, visitors to the World Cup in Brazil face a serious threat of mosquito-borned dengue fever. Over 2.5 ...
Metabolic changes in human evolution: Hungry brains and frugal muscles
For decades, scientists have wondered how our metabolism compares to that of other species. It’s been a hard question to ...
Wade responds to racial controversy over his book ‘A Troublesome Inheritance’
hree attacks on my book A Troublesome Inheritance have appeared on The Huffington Post's blog this month. For readers puzzled ...
Beliefs about creationism not good test of public’s science literacy
When asked if they believe in evolution, half of Americans say no. Experts largely regard this as a test of ...
Justice requires that forensic sciences be standardized to protect the innocent
Santae Tribble is one of more than 350 people who have been exonerated by DNA testing after going to prison ...
First avian pollinator discovered: 47 million years old
The discovery, uncovered in Germany's fossil-rich Messel Pit, reveals a three-inch-long (eight-centimeter) bird—about the size of a hummingbird you see ...
Peruvian village where many men go blind by 50 leads to stigmitization
Parán is a small dusty village in the foothills of the Andes in Peru, and for a long time, everyone ...
Humans speed natural species extinction by 1,000 years
First the bad news. Humans are driving species to extinction at around 1000 times the natural rate, at the top ...
Predicting behavior based on our genes just got more complicated
How can we predict organisms behavior and physiology from their genomes? The language of DNA was always thought to be ...
Mexican surrogacy hospital accused of defrauding dozens of couples
Since 2006, the California-based medical tourism company had helped Americans with surrogacy and other medical practices in India. But when ...
Marmosets offer clue to human stillbirths, programmed while mom is in grandma’s womb
One way to learn about reproductive health is to observe how our primate cousins have babies. And a new study ...
RIKEN stem cell scientist Obokata may retract stem cell paper
Reports in Japan suggest Haruko Obokata, of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, has agreed to retract one ...
Bum knees? Sports stars like CC Sabathia find success in experimental stem cell treatments
CC Sabathia, a starting pitcher for the New York Yankees, is making $23 million this year, and the same or ...
Hawaiian crickets escape parasite through gene mutations that keep them quiet
The crickets hadn’t disappeared. Marlene Zuk would go for nighttime walks and see multitudes of the insects in the light ...
Wisconsin allows police to track rape suspects through relatives’ DNA
Wisconsin has joined a handful of states in allowing familial DNA testing — a powerful but debatable procedure — to ...
“Outbreak” redux: Is lab research on influenza worth the risk of a pandemic?
What happens when you mix human error, deadly disease and lab animals? Hollywood would have us believe imminent disaster. Fear ...
After mapping human genome, scientists release catalog of proteins that help make them work
Two teams of scientists are publishing first drafts of the human proteome. The proteome is a catalog of all of ...
Personalized precision cancer treatments tailored to your genes improving but hurdles high
Elaine Mardis and her colleagues first encountered 39-year-old Lucy in 2010 at the Genome Institute at Washington University in St ...
Gene therapy hot again as success stories roll in
In the early 2000s, gene therapy seemed to be on life support. The once-promising technique, which uses engineered viruses and ...
European Comission rejects citizen group’s plea to ban all human embryo research
The European Commission has today replied to the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) 'One of Us'. After having met with the ...
DNA of colorblindness: One woman’s take on how the genetic lottery shaped her family
My 7-year-old son has fallen in love with Rainbow Loom, the wildly popular sets of pegs and rubber bands kids ...
Father’s age may be overblown as risk factor for autism
It’s difficult to pick up a newspaper these days and not see a reference to the apparent increase in the ...
