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.
Whose stem cells are they anyway?
How should we regulate treatments that use cells taken from a patient's own body? If the cells are grown in ...
Bioengineering modular viruses to fight disease
Imagine fitting viruses together like Lego pieces and using them as a vehicle to deliver gene therapy. Scientists at Rice ...
Gene breakthroughs spark a revolution in cancer treatment
Researchers have identified fifteen lung-cancer variants, most of them in just the past four years, by decoding DNA in tumors—akin ...
Pluripotent cells may help animals jumpstart drastically new lifestyles
Many tissues, such as skin and hair follicles, regenerate constantly throughout an organism’s lifetime, fueled by what are known as ...
The fall and rise of gene therapy
Rarely does a whole life’s work crumble in a single week, but James Wilson’s did. Wilson and his colleagues were ...
Military blood serum bank advances research, raises privacy concerns
The US Department of Defense's huge blood serum bank is great for scientific research, but not all donors know they're ...
Common genetic ground found for depression, schizophrenia, austism
New research bolsters the idea that the risk for psychiatric and developmental disorders isn’t specific to particular conditions— and that ...
Non-Jews hit by ‘Jewish’ diseases fall through the cracks of genetic screening
Today, the vast majority of babies born with Tay-Sachs disease are not Jewish. Why aren't non-jews getting prenatal screening? ...
The next big thing in pregnancy: Sequencing your baby’s genome
Every year roughly 4 million pregnancies go through the same battery of prenatal health checks: analyses of the mother's blood ...
Programming language based on the human brain
IBM has developed a new programming architecture based on the language of the human brain, taking us one step closer ...
Genetic evidence shows how early humans migrated from Africa to Europe
Humans emerged en masse from Africa thousands of years ago, but scientists still aren’t sure about the exact routes they took as ...
For IVF, biopsied and frozen sperm is as effective as fresh
Some men with very severe infertility (with either very little or no sperm in their semen due to testicular failure, ...
The Sports Gene author debunks the ‘10,000-Hour Rule’
Long before he co-authored a damning investigative article on Lance Armstrong or introduced the phrase “deer antler spray” into the lexicon with his feature ...
Why do microbes kill some people but not others?
Why do some horrible infectious diseases kill an unlucky few and ignore millions of others? Perhaps the most infamous example ...
Stem cells: what happened to the radical breakthroughs?
It's 1998 and science is taking big strides. The first cloned mammal,Dolly the Sheep, has just had her first lamb; ...
Scientists reverse engineer a bacterium by sequencing diseased human tissue
Normally, bacteria are identified after investigators obtain a living sample and grow it in laboratory dishes. But in the case ...
NIH’s HeLa agreement embraces an expansive definition of familial genetic consent
The NIH has announced an agreement with Henrietta Lacks’ descendants to obtain their consent for access to and use of the HeLa genome ...
Would you post your DNA on Facebook?
The case of Henrietta Lacks provides a cautionary tale for those who willingly give up their DNA for genealogy tests, lawyers ...
Gene therapy used to improve memory in mice
Researchers for years have been on a tantalizing quest to develop a drug to slow age-related memory loss. In recent research, ...
Scientists bioengineer tumor-killing cells
Scientists have combined the ability to reprogram stem cells into T cells with the ability to genetically modify patients’ own ...
NYTimes’ “Autism’s Unexpected Link to Cancer Gene”: an old story, made murky
It’s not news that disrupting a gene for tumor-suppressing proteins can result in non-cancer effects on many body systems, including ...
Twin studies suggest connection between genetics and spirtuality
I am frequently asked by journalists to recall the most surprising finding of our twin studies. The study of religion ...
Latest ‘junk DNA’ discovery: Operating system for cells
In the August 1 issue of CELL, researchers from the Gene and Stem Cell Therapy Program at Sydney's Centenary Institute revealed ...
DTC genetic test results reveal the surprisng truth about a 1964 kidnapping case
As the FBI dusts off its files on a 1964 kidnapping and reunion mixup, the man at the center of ...
Why is Myriad still filing patent suits for breast-cancer tests after SCOTUS rebuke?
Science is complicated, and the US Supreme Court ruled narrowly on the Myriad case: Now lawsuits are flying ...
DNA strands trying to reconnect, caught on film
Time-lapse microscopy has captured severed DNA strands in the act of pairing up with partners from the wrong chromosomes – ...
Study tells the story of caste segregation and genetic diesase in India
Scientist provide evidence that modern-day India is the result of recent population mixture among divergent demographic groups. The findings describe how India ...
