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.
Viewpoint: RFK, Jr.’s depressingly misguided (and litigator-funded) crusade against antidepressants
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently announced plans to begin significantly reducing the most-used class of antidepressants in America. Under his ...
Prioritizing AI, robotics, and nuclear energy: Trump administration is guiding research funding away from independent universities to private companies
President Trump’s science adviser told lawmakers on [July 22, 2026] that the Trump administration intended to drastically overhaul the country’s ...
No test, no tennis: Women’s Tennis Association becomes first major female sports league to require genetic sex testing
The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) has taken a step beyond most other women’s sports leagues by requiring genetic sex testing ...
FDA takes up peptide therapies as hype outpaces science
A slate of popular peptide therapies has won the backing of a key advisory panel to the federal government – ...
Viewpoint: ‘Thought police in the UK?’ Conservatives lash out at government report calling anti-LGBQT+ narratives ‘false and misleading’
Anti-transgender views have been classed as “misinformation” in a government-commissioned report. The study urges the Government to use psychology to ...
Poll: Younger people more open to using genetics to increase fertility and reduce chances of inherited diseases
Our report Fertility, Embryo Research and Genome Editing: Public Attitudes in Europe explores public attitudes to fertility treatment, embryo research, genome editing, donor conception, surrogacy and ...
Trump-RFK, Jr. National Science Board firings: Accountability vs. partisan meddling
In late April, President Trump fired the National Science Board (NSB), yanking a federal science institution that had operated largely out of ...
We are entering a new era of personalized medicine—if you’re white
The National Institutes of Health recently announced a remarkable achievement: the world’s largest database of human genomes, a repository of ...
Is the longevity obsession a new form of ageism?
It wasn’t always like this. In the 1600s and 1700s, when people aged 65-plus made up just 2% of the ...
Viewpoint: Kratom ‘supplement’ crisis: DEA sits on its hands while patient addictions to this ineffective drug rise
Earlier this month, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced a plan to ban a class of kratom products known as 7-OH, ...
High cholesterol? FDA approves effective oral medication
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Lipfendra (enlicitide), the first oral inhibitor of proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9), ...
Viewpoint: A practical guide to evaluating social media wellness hype
Evaluating a health claim often comes down to a few questions that most people were never taught to ask. The ...
The Indian physician’s one-woman battle against health disinformation on Wikipedia
For over a decade, Dr. Netha Hussain has been part of the last line of defense against public health disinformation ...
Are we edging closer to precisely, and safely, editing human embryos?
On June 1, an international group of industry and academic collaborators, led by geneticist Dieter Egli at Columbia University, released a preprint ...
Rapamycin: Here’s the skinny on the anti-aging pill that increases the lifespan—of mice by 10%
The PEARL trial — published in full results in 2025 — was the most rigorous human study of low-dose rapamycin ...
More and more babies are developing uncontrollable bleeding—linked directly to vaccine deniers’ rejection of vitamin K shots
Bleeding episodes among infants of 6 months of age or younger in Sweden doubled from 2003 through 2021. This concerning ...
Viewpoint: RFK, Jr. is setting up a panel to compensate people who claim they were injured by a COVID vaccine–no proof needed
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to make it easier for people to get compensated for ...
‘It’s time to have a conversation’: Once adamantly opposed to human gene editing, UK’s The Guardian acknowledges likely benefits
Ever since Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing technology emerged in the early 2010s, ethical questions around genetically altered humans, so-called designer babies, have ...
Viewpoint: Trump appoints climate change hoax promoter to head influential government policy project
The Trump administration has appointed a critic of mainstream climate science to oversee the federal government’s flagship report on how ...
Viewpoint: With trust in doctors and mainstream medicine collapsing, medical professionals need a new communications strategy
Institutional trust has been in decline since the late 1950s, Stephanie Baker, PhD, professor of sociology at City St George’s, ...
Wellness grifters overwhelm information channels in the developing world, and the problem is escalating
A scroll through TikTok, Instagram or Facebook is enough to find supplements claiming to do almost everything. Lose weight. Reverse ...
Pete Hegseth’s bizarre Viagra commercial as Trump administration endorses ‘hormone replacement therapy’
Pete Hegseth announced [on July 15, 2026] that the Department of Defense will offer testosterone deficiency screening for soldiers 30 and ...
US court revives 550 lawsuits claiming Tylenol causes autism and ADHD. What does this ruling mean for science and the law?
A federal appeals court today revived more than 500 lawsuits alleging that Tylenol maker Kenvue failed to warn consumers that ...
Science under siege: As federal funding dries up, top research universities are turning out fewer PhDs
The number of students admitted to Ph.D. programs this fall dropped 15 percent from [2025], according to data from over ...
Across Eastern Europe, science disinformation has spread far beyond COVID and vaccine denialism. Here’s the grim list.
Medical misinformation in Poland has become in 2025 a much larger ecosystem than the old anti-vaccination narratives. A NASK report, ...
Viewpoint: Supplements to clean your liver? Not a good idea.
As cases of liver disease and public awareness of the organ's role in overall health have risen, so have sales ...
Which among war, weather and cyber attacks is the biggest world threat? None of the above. It’s misinformation, and here’s why.
The UN and the World Economic Forum have identified misinformation and disinformation as top global risks—ranking them as higher short-term ...
