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.
Companies may soon use employees’ genetics data in wellness programs
Your employer may one day help determine if your genes are why your jeans have become too snug. Big companies ...
Microbe ‘atlas’ shows what’s in the air you’re breathing
Advertisement. Every time you inhale, you suck in thousands of microbes. (Yes, even right then. And just then, too.) Butwhich microbes? ...
Is the difference between ‘human variation’ and ‘illness’ shrinking in the modern age?
How do we know what is pathological, versus what is normal? It seems obvious until you start thinking philosophically, which ...
DNA testing machine calls UK genetic database into question
Police forces across the UK are testing technology that allows officers to analyse DNA samples in custody suites, amid fears ...
Sofia Vergara’s ex fighting custody battle for frozen embryos
In August 2014, I filed a complaint in Santa Monica, Calif., using pseudonyms, to protect two frozen embryos I created ...
Doctors save children’s lives with 3-D printed ‘airway splint’
Doctors at the University of Michigan have created the first 3-D printed device that can grow with an infant and disintegrate ...
False criminal convictions all too common due to failings of forensic science
The Washington Post revealed that in 268 trials dating back to 1972, 26 out of 28 examiners within the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison ...
Is it time to retire ‘book’ metaphor when talking about DNA?
Since its discovery, biologists have compared DNA to a book that contains the instructions for making a cell's proteins. But if ...
Rise of autism due to increase in diagnoses, not higher prevalence of disorder
Despite the increase in reported prevalence of autism spectrum disorder, there is no direct evidence that this corresponds to an ...
Stem cell therapy might help prevent brain tumors in breast cancer patients
Researchers have developed a mouse model of brain-metastatic breast cancer and found the potential of stem-cell-based therapy to eliminate metastatic ...
How modern health care stems from basic human evolutionary needs
It is now accepted that the expression of certain genes can have a significant impact on both normal and abnormal ...
Why we should stop talking about gene editing in terms of dystopian sci fi
Recently, I went on the NPR show “On Point” to talk about using CRISPR to edit embryos. Towards the end of ...
Setting a framework to evaluate dangers of antibiotic resistance
We have read with interest the Correspondence on our Opinion article (What is a resistance gene? Ranking risks in resistomes) by ...
How DNA testing transformed matchmaking in Orthodox Jewish community
In 1983, the wife of ultra-orthodox Brooklyn rabbi Yosef Eckstein, gave birth to their fifth child. But the couple’s happiness ...
Evolving big heads made childbirth hard on humans
In hominids, upright walking evolved 4-5 million years ago. The human pelvis was affected by these changes and evolved accordingly ...
Could drinking alcohol have prevented cholera epidemic?
When microbiologist Janet Guthrie of Inverness, Scotland found a poster from the time of the city's early-1800s cholera outbreak, urging ...
What do ants and your brain have in common?
Each of the brain’s 86 billion neurons can be connected to many thousands of others. When a neuron fires, it ...
Is it possible to bring the extinct woolly mammoth back to life?
Extinction, it seems, may no longer be for ever. Recently, scientists in George Church’s lab at Harvard University announced that ...
Egg donor industry advertises altruism, but does it exploit women’s bodies for profit?
Back when the only egg donation ads I saw were in the hallways of the Ivy League medical school in ...
Why the Human Brain Project was doomed to fail
In 2005 neuroscientist Henry Markram embarked on a mission to create a supercomputer simulation of the human brain, known as ...
Viruses point forensic scientists to bodies’ location of origin
Certain events can pose enormous challenges in identifying the deceased. The huge scope of mass casualty events such as wars, ...
Can deeply religious Muslim students be taught the theory of evolution?
Certain problematic attitudes towards science have been imported into Muslim societies as a part of rapid globalization and modernization — ...
Enigmatic earliest life-form on Earth eaten to extinction by its successors
Strange and largely immobile organisms made of tubes were the first complex life on Earth. Appearing 579 million years ago, ...
Is it dehumanizing to call children born with disabilities ‘divine’?
My brother was born with Down’s syndrome and for most of his life, people have been making it a point ...
Could mitochondria DNA editing be a more sound alternative to three-person IVF?
Salk Institute scientists used specifically engineered molecular scissors to snip out mutations in embryos, leaving healthy DNA intact. They hope ...
So-called endogenous retroviruses could guide embryonic development, defend young cells from virus infections
Our genomes are riddled with the detritus of ancient viruses. They infected our hominid ancestors tens of millions of years ...
Embyro editing experiment continues to roil scientists
In the wake of the first ever report that scientists have edited the genomes of human embryos, experts cannot agree ...
