Newsletter GLP Human
The age of genetically-enhanced children is approaching. Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro imagines a have-and-have not future, and it’s not pleasant
Biotech interventions to help sick children—like gene therapy—are approached with supreme caution. If a treatment has a reasonable chance of ...
‘The One’ on Netflix claims to find your soulmate based on your DNA. What’s the reality?
The Netflix drama The One centres around a geneticist who invents a new matchmaking service. It uses DNA to help people ...
Sharon Peacock: COVID-19 Variant Hunter
The UK is a world leader in sequencing SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Of all the coronavirus genomes that ...
Debating the possible origins of COVID-19: A lab-escaped bioweapon? Animal poop? Random mutations of an existing virus?
“Virus outbreak: research says COVID-19 likely synthetic,” shouted the headline in the Taipei Times on February 23, 2020. The idea ...
Podcast: NatGeo promotes pesticide fears; How weed affects your brain; Real-life Jurassic Park?
Despite its long history as a reputable science magazine, National Geographic has recently embraced simplistic narratives about the environmental impact ...
The evolutionary history of human tolerance
Environmental pressures may have led humans to become more tolerant and friendly towards each other as the need to share ...
Artificial intelligence is teaching robots to evolve autonomously so they can pioneer exploration on distant planets
It’s been suggested that an advance party of robots will be needed if humans are ever to settle on other ...
Rural, Republican America deeply skeptical about the reality of COVID and the importance of vaccines. Here’s why
At 70, Linda Findley has long been active in her small town of Fort Scott, Kansas, which sits more than ...
Would you agree to be infected with COVID for science? Intentional ‘challenge’ studies underway as researchers explore new vaccines and treatments
Lauren Thomas, who just turned 26, is trying to get into a clinical trial at the University of Oxford, where ...
Viewpoint: FDA’s ‘pause’ on distribution of the J&J vaccine was overly risk-averse
Citing “an abundance of caution,” the FDA on [April 13] recommended a “pause” in the administration of Johnson & Johnson’s ...
Battling AIDS has provided valuable lessons for managing the pandemic
World AIDS Day this year finds us still deep amid another pandemic – COVID-19. The highly infectious novel coronavirus has ...
How do you spot a liar? (Hint: Non-verbal cues don’t matter much)
Police thought that 17-year-old Marty Tankleff seemed too calm after finding his mother stabbed to death and his father mortally bludgeoned ...
Viewpoint: ‘War against the West’: Russia powers global vaccine rejectionist movement even as it inoculates its own citizens
Anyone active on social media is aware that there is a great deal of passionate but ill-founded opposition to vaccination, ...
Message to social media ‘prophets of doom’ Drs. Whistle Blower, Anti-Vaxx and Dangerfield: No, COVID vaccines aren’t dangerous and are incredibly effective
It’s hard to ignore the wave of anti-vaccine videos circulating on social media. Curiosity makes us click, and we watch ...
Playing victim: People who claim grievances more likely to lie and cheat, but victim status comes with evolutionary benefits
Victimhood is defined in negative terms: “the condition of having been hurt, damaged, or made to suffer.” Yet humans have ...
Podcast: If you get a COVID vaccine, you’re pro-GMO; 5G conspiracies; Lab-grown humans?
All the approved COVID-19 vaccines were developed with the help of genetic engineering. If we rely this technology to end ...
Should ‘race’ be abandoned as surrogate for population differences in medical research?
Race was originally introduced in US medical curricula in 1790 by Benjamin Rush, who asserted that blackness was a particular ...
Brain fog, fatigue and depression: Solving the mystery of Long Covid and what can be done about it
COVID-19 entered my home a year ago today when my 16-year-old daughter Molly first developed the tell-tale cough. By March ...
The mRNA vaccines battling COVID-19 are revolutionizing virus fighting strategies. Here’s how
British economist Thomas Babington Macaulay challenged a thread of pessimism writing in 1830: “On what principle is it that, when ...
Podcast: Giving nature a helping hand – how humans are shaping species
Dr Kat Arney explores the impact that humans have had on the evolutionary trajectories of the species we share the ...
Which offers more protection: Vaccination or natural immunity?
According to Sen. Rand Paul – an ophthalmologist, not an infectious disease specialist – natural immunity is better. While not ...
Viewpoint: Will 5G harm you? Activist groups succeed in stirring conspiracy health risk phobias, as New York State legislature prepares to debate ‘growing evidence’ of harm
Two bills were recently introduced in the New York State legislature (in the Assembly and in the Senate) to establish ...
Why some diseases confer lifelong immunity and others do not
Some diseases, like the measles, infect us once and usually grant us immunity for life. For others, like the flu, ...
Was the devout evangelical Christian who murdered 8 people in Atlanta suffering from ‘sex addiction’?
A 21-year-old white man is alleged to have entered three different spas in the greater Atlanta area on March 16 ...
About bats and COVID: Why the Wuhan ‘lab leak’ theory shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, and other reflections one year into the crisis
Winston Churchill famously observed that in wartime the truth must be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies. Many of my ...
Viewpoint: Heard reports that dozens of environmental chemicals found in pregnant women pose health dangers? It’s junk science, and here’s why
Tracey Woodruff, PhD, MPH, of the University of California San Francisco, frequent collaborator of anti-vaccine activist and organic industry trade ...
Viewpoint: How a God-like superintelligent AI set free in the world could destroy us
The person in the photo that sits to the left of this paragraph does not exist. It was generated using Artificial ...
