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.
‘Stateless babies’: Mexico’s unregulated surrogacy industry fuels a global ethical debate
Mexico has become the go-to destination for intended parents shut out by surrogacy bans elsewhere, but a patchwork of state ...
Do-it-yourself, anti-aging wonder drug deception: No evidence yet metformin works
Biohackers have long touted metformin, a cheap diabetes drug, as a secret weapon against aging. But a new review finds ...
Viewpoint: If Trump has his way, nitrogen oxide-polluting AI data centers will be exempt from air pollution rules
The Trump administration is moving to end public notification of air pollution from AI data centers, as Guardian reporter Tom ...
Death of a Chinese girl in a gene-editing trial raises concerns about China’s rush to become a biomedical superpower
Six-year-old "Mei" had Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome, a disorder diagnosed in just 237 people worldwide, marked by developmental delays and simple ...
Deadly ‘faith healing’ exemption: Idaho remains the only state shielding parents from prosecution for replacing medical care with prayer or spirits—even if their child dies
This story was originally published by ProPublica. In Idaho, parents who say their faith prohibits lifesaving medical care for their children ...
Viewpoint: With Trump’s declining mental health and an incapacitated Mitch McConnell unlikely to return to the Senate, America’s gerontocracy needs a Public Physician
Senator Mitch McConnell, 84, hasn't spoken publicly since an ambulance took him from his Washington home on June 14th, 2026 ...
Viewpoint: RFK Jr. and other vaccine denialists blame vaccines for a surge in severe autism. The surge is a myth—and here’s why
Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. keep pointing to what they call an explosion of severe autism cases as ...
Can cloud seeding ease the deepening drought across the American West?
A 26-foot tower resembling a football goalpost in Moab, Utah, pulses electrical charges into clouds — and its maker says ...
Politicizing science: Trump’s pick to head the FDA—Heidi Overton— promotes an ‘alternative system’ of ‘conservative-based science’
President Trump's nominee to run the Food and Drug Administration once called for conservatives to build their own scientific journals ...
Five alarming ways ‘autonomous AI’ can go rogue
In July 2026, Hugging Face discovered a cyberattack unlike any it had seen before — only to learn the culprit ...
African science innovation is growing exponentially, but it’s almost entirely absent from Wikipedia. Why that’s a problem.
Africa's scientific output is surging, but you'd barely know it from Wikipedia: the continent accounts for roughly 10 percent of ...
‘Right-to-try’: Montana’s new law allows licensed center for therapies not yet approved by FDA
Montana has become the first state to license clinics that can sell access to experimental treatments still working through the ...
It’s not child’s play: Teaching a computer to use language requires an inhuman amount of data—and it still learns much more slowly than kids
Chatting naturally with a computer now feels routine, but as MIT Technology Review's Elise Cutts reports, the large language models ...
Who’s getting vaccinated? Scientific American ranks states by kindergarten vaccination rates
America's kindergartners are heading back to school less vaccinated than ever. New CDC data analyzed by Scientific American's Jackie Flynn Mogensen and Sanidhya ...
Viewpoint: Rebranding questionable ‘anti-aging’ claims as ‘longevity’ treatments is a fashionable new online wellness con
The global wellness industry has swapped “anti-aging” for “longevity” — same unproven promises, shinier vocabulary — as Cheek Media’s Varsha Yajman ...
RFK Jr. faces Senate fire over lucrative ties to Scientology-linked law firm spearheading Gardasil lawsuits (which he profited from)
Four Senate Democrats are pressing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to explain his financial ties to Wisner Baum, the Scientology-linked law ...
What can we learn from the latest deaths of children whose parents declined to vaccinate them
Pennsylvania officials reported two deaths of unvaccinated individuals from measles Tuesday [August 25, 2026], the first two in the state in over three decades ...
The inside story of how Moderna and Merck teamed to develop the world’s first cancer vaccine
Moderna's experimental cancer vaccine cleared a hurdle no cancer vaccine has cleared before. As STAT's Matthew Herper, Jason Mast, and ...
U.S. badly trails China in lowering barriers to biotech innovation
America's lead in biotechnology is eroding, and one Florida company's three-year wait for a routine government stamp shows why, as ...
Recent birth vitamin K rejectionism soaring in Canada
Canadian doctors are raising alarms over a growing number of parents refusing the routine vitamin K shot for newborns, as ...
Hispanics are more likely than whites to seek out health information from social media, but most remain skeptical
Nearly half of U.S. Latino adults now get health information from social media at least occasionally, according to a 2026 ...
The story behind Moderna’s cancer vaccine miracle
A personalized mRNA shot for melanoma just did something no cancer vaccine has done before. As The Wall Street Journal's Alex Janin ...
‘On the brink’: RFK Jr.’s HHS guts agency built to help fix America’s broken healthcare system
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has quietly gutted the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), ...
FDA drafts roadmap for regulating generative AI medical devices
The FDA is drafting a first-ever policy roadmap for regulating medical devices powered by generative AI, according to STAT News reporter Mario ...
Trump administration has deleted or altered nearly 400 federal datasets on public health, education and safety standards
America's official data trove is quietly shrinking, and nobody in charge is explaining why. A Guardian investigation by reporters Amy Qin and ...
The CDC’s ‘zombie programs’ have funding, but almost no one left to run them
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars earmarked for public health work, but ...
Viewpoint: Social media is fueling reproductive health myths and ‘hormonophobia’
Scroll through TikTok's sexual-health corner long enough, and the birth control pill starts to look like public enemy number one ...
