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.
A promising annual shot might provide long term protection against HIV
Every year, my colleagues and I put together a list of what we think are the top 10 breakthrough technologies ...
What is ‘therapy speak’ and why is its proliferation so dangerous?
Psychiatric diagnosis has taken on a new role in public life. Turbocharged by social media, “therapy speak” has permeated every ...
What causes ‘mind blanking’?
Researchers think that our minds are blank somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of the time ... Athena Demertzi, a cognitive neuroscientist ...
‘Mutational discrimination’: Gene editing medical innovations are leaving out people with rare diseases
Stunning advances in genetic science have revealed the subtle, insidious culprits behind these brutal [rare genetic] diseases and have started ...
Viewpoint: With science and medicine under assault, more people turn to search and social media for guidance. That’s scary
[T]he authority of medical experts has crumbled under the combined weight of disillusionment and the flood of information now available ...
Viewpoint: What impact will Trump’s budget cuts have on U.S. ability to track and adapt to climate change
Over the last few months, … there’s been an explosion of news about proposed budget cuts to science in the ...
Viewpoint: High IQ vs. Low IQ—America’s legacy of eugenics
[T]he morning after a tragic midair collision in Washington, DC, between a military helicopter and an American Airlines plane, President ...
Profiling the people now guiding America’s health policy
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became health secretary, he didn’t just bring with him an unconventional and controversial approach to ...
AI activists rethink their strategy, focusing on the future of work
[Recently] the AI Now Institute, a think tank that studies the social implications of artificial intelligence, published a sweeping report ...
The disabled, the elderly and the poor: Trump administration flirts with eugenics
Trump has deployed in his administration and in his relationships with billionaires a group of the old and new eugenicists ...
Viewpoint: Time to put limits on lawyers targeting corporations for huge legal payouts
In response to several bills introduced in both the US House and Senate seeking to put limits and disclosures on ...
Biotech companies are pioneering research to use electricity to cure diseases. Here’s how
Electricity is gaining newfound traction as a potential treatment for diseases, from rheumatoid arthritis to hard-to-treat cancers including glioblastoma and ...
AI hallucinations: They’re getting worse
More than two years after the arrival of ChatGPT, tech companies, office workers and everyday consumers are using A.I. bots ...
RFK Jr. stacks purged vaccine committee with ‘covid contrarians’
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named eight people to the influential federal panel that recommends vaccines ...
Sperm donor with cancer-prone mutation conceived at least 67 children across Europe
The sperm of a man carrying a rare cancer-causing mutation was used to conceive at least 67 children, 10 of ...
Biology junkie? Here are some great summer reads
One of my favorite summer chores is finding a new book to take from the beach to the pool. ...
Electric respiration: Bacteria that ‘breathe’ electricity could revolutionize wastewater treatment and biomanufacturing
A team led by Rice University bioscientist Caroline Ajo-Franklin has discovered how certain bacteria breathe by generating electricity, using a natural ...
Risk averse, precautionary Europe is missing out on the technology revolution
The world’s technology revolution is leaving Europe behind. Europe lacks any homegrown alternatives to the likes of Google, Amazon or Meta. Apple’s market value is ...
Gene editing embryos: Crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong funding ethically controversial project
Brian Armstrong, the billionaire CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, says he’s ready to fund a US startup focused on ...
FaceAge AI uses snapshots to predict biological age and help oncologists tailor treatments
A new artificial intelligence tool developed by researchers at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School uses a snapshot of a patient’s face to ...
RFK, Jr. guts Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine panel, plays sleight-of-hand with promise to Senate
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on [June 9] removed all 17 members of the expert panel that makes vaccine ...
Learning about the brain: It’s less like a machine than a swarm of starlings
When we consider the highways traversing the brain and how signals establish behaviourally relevant relationships across the central nervous system, ...
Viewpoint and book review: Egg donation is not only commodified — it is also racialized
A recent journalistic investigation of the global [human] egg trade at Bloomberg put the industry’s unregulated practices and their exploitative implications ...
With the Trump administration’s dismantling of the NIH, the Human Genome Project records are poised to be inaccessible
The archival records [at the National Human Genome Research Institute, which is one of the 27 agencies comprising the NIH] … are ...
Viewpoint: The Trump administration’s conspiratorial view of COVID endangers U.S. disease research
Disease cure research in the United States—for cancer, for Alzheimer's disease, even for pediatric heart defects—has been stopped. Graduate school ...
Gene editing holds the potential of suppressing mosquito species that carry deadly diseases — and raises ethical concerns
[S]ome doctors and scientists say it is time to take the extraordinary step of unleashing gene editing to suppress mosquitoes ...
Investigation: TikTok is awash with misleading and potentially dangerous health information
More than half of all the top trending videos offering mental health advice on TikTok contain misinformation, a Guardian investigation ...
