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.
Growing concern over athletes receiving unproven stem cell therapies
Elite athletes do whatever it takes to win. Lately, that’s meant getting an injection of their own stem cells. The ...
Why evaluating risk factors might not always lead to the best medical advice
Most health-conscious people are familiar with the concept of risk factors for disease. We’re too familiar, in fact. A risk ...
Does reporting on behavioral genetics misinform the public?
A study of 1,500 Americans found that media reports about behavioral genetics create unfounded beliefs about what genes can and ...
Too much and too little: Delicate balance of knowing risk and treating disease
One woman seeks out her genetic risk for familial breast cancer and finds she has a potentially lethal mutation for ...
Women’s colleges considering policy changes that redefine ‘gender’
At an elite college for women, the question arises: What does it mean to be a woman? The president of ...
Are more men idiots? ‘Darwin Awards’ study examines gender differences in idiocy
Sex differences in mortality and admissions to hospital emergency departments have been well documented, and hypotheses put forward to account for ...
Human evolution isn’t all competition: it’s cooperation, too
People often have a grim view of what it means to be human. There’s this conception that inside each of ...
In India, a form of eugenics that people might embrace
The term “eugenics” has very negative connotations today. Nevertheless, in some ways society is moving in a direction which results ...
Drug-resistant malaria strains pose challenge to disease prevention
The region around the Mekong River delta is infamous for its malaria parasites. Twice already—in the 1950s and the 1960s—they ...
Organization misconstrues genetics to spread homophobic message
A controversial billboard proclaiming that “nobody is born gay” has sparked a great deal of controversy in Richmond, Virginia, where ...
Tracking disease outbreaks through city’s sewer system
Disease prevention and mapmaking have been inextricably intertwined since 1854, when an English physician named John Snow plotted a cholera ...
Immune system hoards iron supply to fight microbes
Disease is an act of piracy. When microbes infect us, they steal our resources so they can thrive at our ...
How do stem cells work? Scientists aren’t sure
Eggs and sperm do it when they combine to make an embryo. John Gurdon did it in the 1960s, when ...
New type of stem cell challenges understanding of pluripotency
Researchers from Canada’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and their international colleagues have uncovered a new type of pluripotent mouse stem cell—the ...
When is selecting baby traits the right thing to do?
Although the word was not actually used (or at least I did not hear it), this was a polemic making ...
Proving Native American ancestry is more complicated than a DNA test
Many people have family lore that suggests they have Native American ancestry. The first step to confirming or denying these ...
Google’s Cloud searching for genetic causes of autism
Google has spent the past decade-and-a-half perfecting the science of recognizing patterns in the chaos of information on the web ...
Forced sterilization in Peru: Did modern eugenic practices slow population growth?
The Peruvian government is alleged to have used coercive methods to sterilize thousands of indigenous women and men to control ...
Genetic information: How much to share, how much to keep private in age of Big Data
Genetics and computational biology are evolving so quickly that it’s impossible to predict the medical answers that they’ll reveal in ...
Did the Khoisans’ ancestors once rule the earth?
It is common for strong results from population genetics to be confused when it is translated for public consumption. The ...
How culture shaped human evolution
Culture is not a luxury; it is life or death. Culture has likely been the most important part of the ...
Autism genetics research advancing faster than scientsists can comprehend
Last month, my colleagues and I published two large studies that sequenced the genes or exomes of thousands of families ...
Dangers of exaggerating premature scientific findings
In 2011, Petroc Sumner of Cardiff University and his colleagues published a brain imaging study with a provocative result: Healthy men ...
Does FDA underregulate stem cell treatments?
NBC News did a big on-line story followed by a NBC Nightly News Segment on dubious stem cell therapies on Friday. Normally a ...
Robot working hard to recreate origin of life
A cheap 3D-printed robot and a PlayStation camera are hard at work trying to find the origins of life. But ...
New app will let doctors review patients’ genome for cancer treatment
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the richest doctor in the world, and Blackberry Chief Executive John Chen made some news at Thursday’s Forbes ...
Seeing dragons? Woman’s strange condition that baffled neurologists
Here’s the medical case report in The Lancet: Prosopometamorphopsia and facial hallucinations from a team of researchers including the famous Oliver Sacks ...
