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.
Trump’s Ideological corruption of science: Political appointees censor formerly independent CDC report documenting soaring bird flu cases
Trump administration political appointees have taken steps in recent weeks to exert unprecedented influence over the Centers for Disease Control ...
Anti-vaccination hysteria impact: Hospital flu-related visits surge to highest level in 15 years
Levels of influenza nationwide are now at the highest they have been since the peak of the 2009 swine flu ...
Offspring from two males? CRISPR experiment works in mice opening controversial frontier
The concept of biological reproduction between same-sex individuals in mammals has always been deemed impossible. However, scientists have now successfully ...
How much did the Neanderthals penchant for cannibalism lead to their extinction?
Neanderthals went extinct about 30,000 years ago. They lived successfully in Europe, Asia, and Africa for hundreds of thousands of ...
Is the Alzheimer’s research community rife with fraud?
Over the past 25 years, Alzheimer’s research has suffered a litany of ostensible fraud and other misconduct by world-famous researchers ...
Viewpoint: Trump has sided with the cigarette industry in blocking a proposed FDA ban of menthol cigarettes. Why that will kill black people?
Today, January 24, 2025, the Trump administration extinguished a long-awaited ban on menthol cigarettes, derailing decades of public health efforts ...
Microplastics are bad for your brain
Tiny plastic particles pervade nearly every corner of our planet, from remote ocean trenches to pristine polar ice fields. These ...
Viewpoint: Hostile takeover—Here’s the damage we can expect to America’s health if Dr. Oz is confirmed as the next head of the $1.5 trillion medicare and medicaid agency
[Dr. Mehmet] Oz garnered a number of critics over the years for his statements on [his] show. Most notably, 10 ...
Viewpoint: New York Times cancels unorthodox columnist Pamela Paul known for challenging ideological orthodoxy
I am pretty sure I predicted this, though I’m not going to trawl back through my posts to see for ...
Breakthrough technologies: Global poll highlights embrace of AI in health care, gene editing and cell based meat, although optimism of U.S. respondents lags
Scientific advances will only succeed if people are willing to embrace them. Leaps by Bayer (the company’s impact investment arm) ...
A guide for pediatricians talking to skeptical parents about vaccines
The New York Times spoke to pediatricians across the country who said they were looking for better ways to address ...
Will Trump be successful in killing USAID? Civil war erupts in Congress over the future of America’s global humanitarian agency
In a letter to Congress, obtained by the Associated Press, [Marco] Rubio said he had designated Trump ally Peter Marocco ...
Controversial first post Roe vs. Wade prosecution: Louisiana court indicts New York physician for mailing abortion pills into its state
The cross-border abortion wars escalated Friday, when a Louisiana grand jury indicted Margaret Carpenter, a physician from New York, for ...
‘Women are biologically female’: Trump’s executive order will not be so easy to implement, and here’s why
One of President Trump’s first-day executive orders proclaimed that “women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.” It sounds ...
Bird flu outbreak edging towards becoming a full-fledged pandemic
When bird flu [H5N1] first struck dairy cattle a year ago, it seemed possible that it might affect a few ...
Aluminum microtrace hysteria: RFK. Jr. and his followers demonize vaccines … but one slice of American cheese contains 10x more than 6 months of childhood shots
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has often trained his criticisms of vaccines on a common ingredient: aluminum, which he has suggested is ...
The fake call for ‘choice’ in medicine: RFK, Jr. is normalizing science-rejecting vaccine opponents
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t want to talk about his past as a leader of the anti-vaccine movement. But as ...
MAGA and MAHA: Republicans find common ground with former leftist alt-med, holistic-medicine embracing moms
There has been a cultural sea change over the last year when it comes to health in America. It is ...
User beware: China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot is a hotbed of Chinese, Russian and Iranian disinformation
Chinese company DeepSeek’s new AI chatbot advanced the positions of the Beijing government 60 percent of the time in response to prompts ...
Viewpoint: Wall Street Journal opposes RFK, Jr.’s HHS nomination—Risk is high he will enrich his trial-lawyer friends at the expense of public health and medical innovation
President Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary in return for his presidential endorsement. But Senate Republicans ...
Viewpoint: Here’s what far left ideologues are writing in support of RFK Jr.’s wacky views on health, chemicals, food and agriculture
Advocates for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda were gathered in Washington this week ahead ...
Viewpoint: ‘Alt-right’ piles into the RFK. Jr. science-distorting chemophobia-promoting clown car
[Robert Francis Kennedy Jr.] has spread misinformation multiple times over the past three years claiming that herbicides and other chemicals ...
Political opportunism and campaign donations: Trump pardons Silk Road drug kingpin convicted of selling heroin and meth on the Dark Web
Libertarian and crypto allies of Ross Ulbricht, who was serving a life sentence for distributing drugs on his Silk Road ...
Quirky DeepSeek: A look under the hood of China’s clever new open-source search engine
DeepSeek’s success and a technical paper it published last week suggest that Chinese AI developers can match their U.S. counterparts ...
How AI is trying to figure out the cause of the LA fires
What’s shaping up to be one of the worst wildfire disasters in US history had many causes. Before the blazes raged ...
Here are all the health benefits of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs
With the use of [drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, or glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists] spiking in recent years, a ...
‘Devastation’ and ‘panic’: Trump guts key government support for National Institute of Health programs
Confusion and anxiety is rippling through the US health-research community ... following Donald Trump taking office as the 47th US ...
