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.
Florida Surgeon General Ladapo calls vaccine mandates “slavery,” as Florida poised to become first state to end childhood vaccine mandates
Florida’s surgeon general ... announced plans to end all state vaccine mandates, including for children to attend schools, which would ...
Algorithms and addiction, teens sue Instagram over mental health harm
After they took too many pills, after their mother found them unconscious on their bedroom floor, after paramedics couldn't get ...
‘Go wild’: Don’t expect a disengaged and science-ignorant president to contain RFK’ Jr.’s assault on science
Trump pledged that he’d empower Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “go wild" on health care. The president has kept his ...
Historians view Trump’s assault on science as page pulled from the autocrats’ playbook to secure more power
The war on science began four centuries ago when the Roman Catholic Church outlawed books that reimagined the heavens. Subsequent ...
Mining nuclear waste may power the future of nuclear power
Today’s nuclear power plants generate energy through a process called nuclear fission. ... This fission chain reaction provides a steady ...
‘Ruining the magic of breeding’? Cloning’s okay but gene-edited horses threaten to upend the pedigreed world of Polo
While Argentina, regarded as the global capital of polo, has long welcomed reproductive technologies – including cloning – to breed ...
Common wisdom: Westerners are overweight because they are not active enough. Study finds that’s not true
For decades, common wisdom and public health messaging have assumed that people in highly developed nations, like the United States, ...
Trump shutdown of LGBTQ+ suicide hotline sparks panic in many states
On July 17, the option shut down for LGBTQ+ youth to access specialized mental health support from the national 988 ...
‘A historic failure’: MIT management professor who falsely claimed Covid shots were ineffective and deadly appointed head of CDC vaccine oversight
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory group has long had a work group in place to ...
Is sunscreen bad for your health? MAHA and social media disinformation threatens a resurgence in skin cancer
Sunscreen protects the skin by either absorbing or reflecting ultraviolet rays that can cause sunburn, premature aging and skin cancer ...
Viewpoint: Profiling Dr. David Geier, the anti-vax quack who is guiding RFK, Jr.’s vaccine policy
By Jessica SteierGraphics by Sara Chodosh and Taylor Maggiacomo Dr. Steier is a public health scientist who specializes in science ...
RFK, Jr. says ‘let measles run its course’. That’s what some said in 1990, and we had an urban health crisis
Few expected a major return of measles to the United States this year, a quarter-century after it was declared eliminated here. But return ...
Viewpoint: Thirst for revenge—What Jay Bhattacharya has in common with Stalin’s crackpot science seer Trofim Denisovich Lysenko
An insecure and inept but ambitious scientist climbs out of obscurity up a ladder of political favor in a burgeoning ...
‘He’s weaponizing public health’: RFK, Jr.’s hand picked CDC in disarray as three members resign and Trump fires the director
The White House on Wednesday fired Susan Monarez as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after she ...
Bill Ackman’s Alpha School: No to DEI, yes to AI
Billionaire Bill Ackman has a new fascination: a fast-growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity and inclusion and ...
Mixed results: Lung from a genetically modified pig transplanted into a human
[I]n the first procedure of its kind, Chinese scientists on Monday reported transplanting a lung from a pig into a brain-dead ...
New moms suffering from postpartum depression turn to psychedelics for relief
84 women across the country [participated] in a clinical trial that hopes to produce the first federally approved psychedelic treatment ...
Viewpoint: Appeal to Nature Fallacy: How MAHA is stoking chemophobia
Chemophobia was born from the “appeal to nature fallacy,” said [Andrea] Love, which is “the false belief that natural substances ...
Unlike GMO food, insulin developed with the identical transgenic process is universally embraced. Here’s a primer on the drug
Most of the insulin used by people today is made by bacteria that have been genetically modified to produce insulin ...
Mazzenga’s 20-year old muscles: How a still-going-strong 92-year old sprinter wins every race she enters
By some measures, [Emma Maria Mazzenga] appears to have the cardiorespiratory fitness of someone in their 50s and her muscle’s ...
Viewpoint: Make America Great Again — For lethal pathogens
The year is 2035 and the world is dealing with another pandemic, only this time it’s even worse. A bird ...
Some judges are adapting AI for use in court cases though hallucination problems have not been solved
The propensity for AI systems to make mistakes and for humans to miss those mistakes has been on full display ...
Can AI speed up the grindingly slow process of drug development?
Sooner or later, in some form, AI tools will be standard in drug discovery, suspects Derek Lowe, the medicinal chemist and ...
Viewpoint: At Marty Makary’s FDA, therapy approvals for rare diseases are hitting a wall
The FDA’s approval of new drugs has notably slowed this year. Annual novel drug approvals averaged 52 in the first ...
Viewpoint: Science is now hopelessly tribal, and the Trump administration is making it worse
Public health in America has always been divisive because it sits at the intersection of science, government authority, personal freedom ...
Bottling stress does long term damage to memory
Keeping quiet about nagging worries often feels like the polite thing to do. However, new evidence shows that this habit ...
Vindication for He Jiankui? Seven years after the Chinese scientist’s pioneering work landed him in jail, scientists and ethicists are exploring the inevitably of gene edited babies
A Chinese scientist horrified the world in 2018 when he revealed he had secretly engineered the birth of the world's ...
