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.
Misinformed parents overdosing children with Vitamin A to fight measles
A recent study in JAMA Network Open has found that between January and March 2025, America's Poison Centers reported a ...
Why weight-loss drugs might be reducing cancer rates and making treatment more effective
At this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago, more than 40 studies, abstracts, oral presentations and ...
The ‘low-quality’, retracted studies RFK, Jr. and MAHA rely on for anti-vaccine claims
Three scientific papers that raised questions about vaccine safety and were used by the Trump administration to justify controversial changes to ...
50% of AI advice on health and medical issues return inaccurate or fabricated advice
An audit of chatbot responses in health and medical fields prone to misinformation found that 49.6% of responses were problematic ...
Viewpoint: How Dr.TikTok (falsely) convinced me that cortisol was running my health
Cortisol is the internet's favorite wellness boogeyman. Per social media, too much of it is why you're experiencing 3 a.m. wake-ups, have ...
‘Natural’ wellness supplements linked to liver injury
Supplement-induced liver injury is emerging as a growing global health concern as the wellness industry expands and regulation struggles to keep up, ...
Can vaping lead to cancer? New ‘association study’ raises questions of “links”
Nicotine-based vapes, or e-cigarettes, are likely to cause cancers of the lung and oral cavity, according to a new study ...
GLP-1 weight-loss drugs may reshape our desires and emotions
Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs were initially understood as a metabolism breakthrough: medicines that act like hormones to control hunger, ...
‘Nicotine-free generation’: Should the U.S. emulate Britain and ban all nicotine products, from cigarettes to vapes?
The United Kingdom just adopted a tobacco-free generation law. Retailers can still sell tobacco to existing customers, but they will never ...
‘Protecting religious liberty and parental authority’: Challenging expert guidance, Trump signs off on Kennedy’s gutting of childhood vaccine schedule
President Trump is signing off on a decision from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) earlier this year ...
Cases of brain inflammation surge as U.S. measles pandemic approaches 2000
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today confirmed 31 new measles cases in a nationwide outbreak that has ...
‘You don’t understand Tolkien’: Skeptic Pope trolls tech giants about the exaggerated, risk-less benefits of AI
[T]he Tolkien nod is particularly salient given some backward interpretations of Middle-earth mythology by right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel and ...
Viewpoint: Doctors who are battling Ebola are incredulous that U.S. government is not utilizing specially designed emergency health units meant to fight virulent disease
Doctors around the country are baffled, disturbed, and in some cases aghast at the Trump administration’s plan for Americans who ...
Viewpoint—N.A.D.+: Why Gwenyth Paltrow’s heralded anti-aging supplement doesn’t work
Gwyneth Paltrow has tried it. So have Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber. ... Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or N.A.D.+, has been ...
Viewpoint: Why the hyper-promoted doping ‘enhanced games’ pseudo Olympics flopped
Testosterone, anabolic steroids, stimulants, metabolic modulators and a grabbag of peptides were just some elements of the “stacks” that these ...
Viewpoint—The end of ‘ivory tower science’: What does that even mean, and what comes next
We built American science like a skyscraper — centralized, concentrated, dependent on a single foundation. More than half of university research budgets ...
In first of more than 1300 cases, Google, Meta, and TikTok to pay $27 million to settle school district lawsuit claiming their products are dangerously addictive
A Kentucky school district reached a $27 million settlement with the owners of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube. Breathitt ...
Viewpoint: Who is RFK, Jr.’s newly-appointed CDC senior counselor, Sara Brenner — Vaccine skeptic and self-proclaimed “MAHA mom”
When President Trump named a new leadership team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention two weeks ago, public ...
How Trump gutted Ebola research
As the world struggles to contain the rapidly growing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ituri province, a ...
Magnifica Humanitas: Pope’s encyclical broadside against AI naivete and overreach
In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV put forth a defense of human dignity in the era of AI, delivering ...
Viewpoint: Many vaccine-suspicious conservatives and MAHA reject shots for their children by invoking ‘patient autonomy’. That’s ridiculous.
In January, Department of Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Trump’s slashed the number of routinely recommended ...
Would you go to a holistic dentist? It’s either a scam or a dentist trying to sell you unnecessary supplements.
In the controversial 2019 documentary Root Cause, the filmmaker claimed certain chronic illnesses are due to root canal treatment. Although these ...
RFK, Jr.’s delusion: Anti-depressants are not harder to quit than heroin—but that does not mean tapering off is easy
There is a legitimate clinical problem at the center of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s initiative to help Americans ...
Viewpoint: Is Trump ‘vice-signaling’ to gain the support of vape users?
In December of 2019, Mitch Zeller, who at the time ran the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, got an urgent phone call from ...
Viewpoint: Scientists recently revised downward the likelihood of catastrophic global warming. Reassured? You shouldn’t be.
Even if global warming does not exceed two degrees, it could lead to more serious consequences than expected. This is ...
Psychological inoculation: With a vaccine to prevent HIV on the horizon, misinformation is soaring. What can be done.
In a paper we published in BMJ Global Health earlier this year, we mapped the landscape of emerging concerns and ...
Viewpoint: RFK, Jr.’s FDA is on a screaming downward path—and why it may never recover
Whether you liked [Marty] Makary or not ..., the purge or whatever this was is not somehow going to miraculously ...
