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.
Mammoth DNA successfully resurrected, but cloning won’t happen anytime soon
A group of researchers are getting closer to bringing the extinct woolly mammoth back to life. Geneticist George Church’s lab ...
How to weigh enormous promise, potential danger of CRISPR/Cas9 technology
A technique for editing genes while they reside in intact chromosomes has been a real breakthrough. Literally. In 2013, Science ...
Angelina Jolie: ‘Why I’m getting my ovaries and fallopian tubes removed’
Two years ago I wrote about my choice to have a preventive double mastectomy. A simple blood test had revealed that I carried ...
Buy your telomere testing kit here! Evidence based or psuedo-science?
Companies are soon to release at-home telomere testing for consumers who want to track their cellular age. But the science ...
Multidisciplinary approach to biological research most valuable to health
Mitochondria are, basically, kind of weird, and that is because they contain puzzles and inconsistencies left over after billions of ...
Overhyping research on ‘cures’ harms patients and medical community
In 2003, researchers writing in the American Journal of Medicine discovered something that should change how you think about medical ...
DNA reveals history of European languages, farming, migration
Europe is famously tesselated, with different cultural and language groups clustering in different regions. But how did they all get ...
Life on Mars? Will we find it? Will we colonize the Red Planet?
Discovery of Martian life could provide us unprecedented insight into life's origins, and maybe help us understand how we can ...
Human complexity lies at intersection of genetics and brain
A wealth of empirical evidence is accumulating on the genetic mediation of brain structure phenotypes. This comes from twin studies ...
Doomed mammoth-cloning attempt foiled by cosmic rays
Hwang Woo-Suk is the bad boy of genetics. He’s most famous for falsely claiming to have cloned human stem cells ...
23andMe on The Dress: Genes don’t settle debate, but age might
In the latest twist in #TheDress, a survey by DNA-testing company 23andMe suggests that genes don’t play an obvious role ...
Great Britain’s gene pool reflects migrants, rather than tribes
Some years ago I went to see a medieval farmhouse in north Devon. The owner was a hostile character with ...
Egg-freezing rhetoric poses major ideological struggle for American women
Facebook and Apple’s offer to cover the costs of egg freezing for their employees has made a large range of headlines. “Not ...
Can human germline genetic modification research proceed with ethics in mind?
I have been following the reports about genetic editing technology with concern. The fact that some scientists are calling for ...
Alzheimer’s drug slows cognitive decline, set for further trials
The search for an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease has been riddled with failures, but a promising new drug could ...
We need to rethink how we think about death
There’s an ugliness to death that Paul Bennett - chief creative officer at Ideo, the global design firm that’s renowned for its ...
Why do we need sleep?
If you’re lucky, you’ll spend a third of your life asleep. “That’s pretty incredible if you think about it, because when we’re ...
Scientist’s quest to prove genes ‘jump’ forever shook up genetics
For much of the 20th century, genes were considered to be stable entities arranged in an orderly linear pattern on ...
Autism: No, it’s not caused by glyphosate or circumcision, but is likely in our genes
Vaccines, glyphosate herbicide, chemtrails and even circumcision have been blamed for the increase in autism cases over the years. But ...
‘Great Indoors’: Your home is a jungle of tiny animal lodgers
When humans began building shelters about 20,000 years ago, we unrolled a welcome mat for other species. Over the past ...
Are human beings GMOs?
Opponents of genetically modified crops often complain that moving genes between species is unnatural. Leaving aside the fact that the ...
Have a rare disease? Fund your own clinical trial
With research funding cuts on the rise and clinical trial spots running short, people are finding new ways to support ...
Why do so many Americans fear Ebola, but reject vaccines?
Sitting and talking about the 10,000 people so-far killed by Ebola hemorrhagic fever in West Africa, it's easy to feel ...
Genghis Khan’s Legacy: Male Y chromosome tells tale of genetic and cultural evolution
I do like to suggest that the genetic and archaeological record support the conjecture of Conan the Barbarian in terms ...
Should biologists keep invasive CRISPR mutations in check?
On 28 December 2014, Valentino Gantz and Ethan Bier checked on the fruit flies that had just hatched in their ...
US ‘Wild West’ of fertility industry
The Utah Legislature has taken a step into territory where state lawmakers rarely tread. It passed a law giving children conceived ...
Egg donation companies commodify women through ad campaigns
This ad appeared as a “suggested post” on a law student’s Facebook News Feed page. Sponsored by A Perfect Match, ...
