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.
Next phase in the weight loss revolution
For all the societal changes ushered in by GLP-1 drugs, their lofty price tags limit who can afford them. Many patients stop ...
Citing no evidence, RFK, Jr.’s newly-appointed FDA vaccine advisor spreads false information about risks of immunizations, setting the stage for lax policies and a surge in preventable diseases
The Food and Drug Administration will upend its approach to immunizations for respiratory illnesses, including flu vaccines, according to an ...
Rod Kissmee claims ‘‘I have very strong sperm!’: Welcome to the wild west world of social media sperm selling
A man going by the name “Rod Kissme” claims to have “very strong sperm”. It may seem like an eccentric ...
How the pro-life movement undermined Trump’s free IVF campaign promise
Social and religious conservatives spent more than a year lobbying first the Trump campaign and then the administration against mandating ...
Is the mind distinct from the brain, or are we nothing more than chemicals and firing neurons?
COSM 2025 included a debate between neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and well-known skeptic Michael Shermer on the question of “Are Human ...
Viewpoint: ‘Organoid intelligence’?—Ethical questions arise in using organoid human brain nuggets to study disease
As months turned to years, Dr. Arlotta’s team set a record for the oldest documented brain organoids. “We never thought ...
Surprising scientists five years after the pandemic, coronavirus has not disappeared but continues to mutate and spread
"We thought SARS-CoV-2 would follow the same pattern as influenza, with a clear winter peak. But the virus has been ...
CRISPR opens the door toward treating common health threats like rising cholesterol
A CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing therapy has halved people’s cholesterol levels in a small clinical trial — raising hopes that, with further study, gene editing could ...
The fear that AI machines will soon be smarter than humans is just another conspiracy theory
Every age has its believers, people with an unshakeable faith that something huge is about to happen—a before and an ...
Is animal testing still necessary? Will it be phased out?
[The] UK’s science minister announced an ambitious plan: to phase out animal testing. ... The news follows similar moves by ...
Viewpoint: Sobering and scary—An inside report on the growing size and influence of the anti-vaccine movement
From wellness influencers worried about Wi-Fi to crypto enthusiasts trading peer-to-peer coins, the CHD [Children's Health Defense] conference offered something ...
Kiss and tell: The 21 million-year-old history of smooching
Humans do it, monkeys do it, even polar bears do it. And now researchers have reconstructed the evolutionary origins of ...
Rewriting the human code of life: Will we be able to afford the medical advances that gene editing and AI are fast making possible?
We are now in the second great wave of the genetic revolution, not defined by reading the human code of ...
Can culture evolve through natural selection?
For well over a century, Darwin’s theory of natural selection has served as biology’s grand unifying framework, explaining how species ...
A third start-up joins the race to create ethically-acceptable CRISPR babies
A West Coast biotech entrepreneur says he’s secured $30 million to form a public-benefit company to study how to safely ...
AI-designed viruses raise fears over creating life
A group of Stanford University scientists posted a paper online in mid-September, describing a feat that could have been plucked from the ...
Are chatbots sophisticated enough to debunk conspiracy theories?
Many people believe that you can’t talk conspiracists out of their beliefs. But that’s not necessarily true. It turns out ...
As the U.S. reverses its support for climate change solutions, China’s dominance as the renewable energy superpower spreads to the developing world
As the United States torpedoes climate action and Europe struggles to realize its green ambitions, a surprising shift is taking ...
Viewpoint: Science is a corporate conspiracy: The consequences of the alliance between RFK, Jr., his MAHA acolytes, and science-distorting enviro activists
A National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences paper is sounding the alarm about detectable per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in ...
Hitler’s DNA: Peaking into the Fuhrer’s brain—and pants
[A] Hitler male-line relative’s swab collected ... yielded a perfect Y-chromosome match. Whether they got the relative’s permission to use his ...
Will we ever have a sex robot?
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, is trying to walk a fine line. On the one hand, he thinks that ...
Viewpoint: Wall Street Journal calls out Trump’s FDA for foot-dragging on approvals for breakthrough drugs
Our editorials criticizing the Food and Drug Administration for torpedoing promising treatments must be hitting an intracranial nerve. Proof of ...
Conspiracy peddlers have been around for centuries. What’s behind their recent surge in popularity?
QAnon’s mutation from a conspiracy theory on an internet message board into a movement with the characteristics of a cult ...
Rightfully concerned your dog could die of rabies? Many vaccine-suspicious pet owners follow RFK, Jr.’s guidance, increasingly reject life-protecting jabs
For most of her career, vaccination was a routine, unremarkable part of Dr. McGuire’s work as a small animal veterinarian ...
Viewpoint: The ‘massive anti-vax, anti-public health propaganda machine’ promoting RFK. Jr. and his band of HHS grifters
It’s a great time to be a MAHA-pilled anti-vaxxer, because there are so many fun conferences to attend. ... The ...
A journey for one Muslim creationist to embrace evidence-based science and evolution
Ella al-Shamahi is a palaeoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist who grew up as a creationist. ... [She] thought she'd be able to ...
Here is the origin of the term AGI—Artificial General Intelligence
[Artificial] general intelligence, or AGI, [is] the stage at which computers can match or surpass human intelligence. ... Prognosticators say ...
