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.
Genetic arms race: The next war frontier is the capacity to dominate the human genome
Rapidly accelerating breakthroughs in our ability to change the genes of organisms are generating medically thrilling possibilities. They are also ...
Bionic eyes? Congenital blindness affects more than 2 million people. Possible gene editing solutions are within reach
As a child, Max Hodak learned to develop film in a darkroom with his late grandfather who was almost blind ...
Can a healthy lifestyle counterbalance genetic predisposition to a shorter lifespan?
A healthy lifestyle may offset the impact of genetics by more than 60% and add another five years to your ...
Fertility conundrum: UK IVF clinics have genetic health information about egg and sperm donors. Are they obliged to share this with patients?
ECS is a reproductive genomic test, used prior to conception, that can identify whether a potential parent or donor carries any ...
Viewpoint: Designing the future — ChatGPT-directed biotech breakthroughs will help us fight disease, feed the planet, generate energy, and capture carbon
Imagine a world where everything from plastics to concrete is produced from biomass. Personalized cell and gene therapies prevent pandemics ...
Our brains are getting bigger. Could this protect us from dementia?
Human brains have been steadily growing through the decades, and that may be lowering the risk of dementia. ...
This ‘superstar’ genetic analyst cracked criminal cases and locked people up for three decades. New findings reveal she may have fudged the data
For nearly three decades, Yvonne “Missy” Woods was Colorado’s star forensic scientist, relied on by police and prosecutors to test ...
Viewpoint: ‘The average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five. Longevity evangelists argue that it doesn’t have to be this way’
Many of us have come to expect that our bodies and minds will deteriorate in our final years—that we may ...
‘Competition between species has shaped our own evolutionary tree’: Human evolution works the ‘complete opposite’ way than most other animals
Interspecies competition in ancient humans saw an evolutionary trend that is the complete opposite of almost all other vertebrates, according to a ...
Orchid babies: Is this embryo scanning fertility startup furthering eugenics or ‘protecting future people from future suffering?’
God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have ...
Viewpoint: With weight loss drug prices plummeting, ‘it’s possible to imagine a future in which almost everyone is taking some variety of GLP-1 drug’
Last year was called the year of Ozempic, though it was also a year of Ozempic backlash and Ozempic shortages, which could persist for years ...
Is aging a ‘treatable disease’? Harvard geneticist faces accusations of ‘snake oil salesman’ as expert scientists refute claims
Harvard geneticist David Sinclair, who has said his “biological age” is roughly a decade younger than his actual one, has ...
AI and CRISPR converge: Artificial intelligence generates gene editing blueprints to solve host of previously untreatable diseases
Generative A.I. technologies can write poetry and computer programs or create images of teddy bears and videos of cartoon characters that look like something from a ...
Deep water living: Top-secret story of how British researchers experimented on themselves and found the key to surviving underwater — helping make D-Day a success
Geneticists John Burdon Sanderson Haldane and Helen Spurway’s goal was to see how long she could breathe the oxygen before ...
Companies race to achieve pig kidney transplants. Who will be first to convince the world their technologies are safest?
Xenotransplantation, the futuristic sounding field of animal-to-human organ transplants, is suddenly a lot closer to reality. The first two gene-edited ...
Were Neanderthals cannibals?
At this point, there’s little doubt Neanderthals ate each other, even if the practice doesn't appear to have been widespread ...
History of brainwashing: How the race for mind control changed America forever
A war correspondent who had spent considerable time in Asia, Edward Hunter had achieved brief media stardom in 1951 after ...
North Korea and bioweapons: US believes Communist dictatorship has engineered CRISPR biological weapons
North Korea has the capability to genetically engineer biological weapons, according to a U.S. government report. ... The report said ...
Podcast: Is ‘runner’s high’ real? Here’s the science
You’ve probably heard people talking about “runner’s high”: a sense of euphoria and relaxation runners feel when they’ve been running ...
DNA and politics: Is there a genetic basis for right-wing authoritarianism?
New research provides evidence that political leanings are more deeply intertwined with our genetic makeup than previously thought, specifically linked ...
‘We need to take more risks’: Global biodiversity crisis prompts researchers to explore editing species to save them from from climate change-induced extinction
Habitat degradation, invasive species, infectious diseases and climate change have put many native animals in jeopardy and given Australia one ...
Part 3: Human beings have transformed the Earth unlike any other species
Although human beings arrived on Earth just ~300,000 years ago, we’ve transformed the entire planet completely ...
China and social media disinformation: State-affiliated accounts leverage artificial intelligence to exploit racial tensions in the US, Taiwan and elsewhere
Online actors linked to the Chinese government are increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence to target voters in the U.S ...
Vaccine package warnings cover every side effect imaginable, no matter how rare — giving anti-vaxxers a tool to exploit
One of the cherished strategies of anti-vaxxers is to quote vaccine package inserts to “prove” that vaccines are dangerous ...
Part 2: Modern humans evolved just 300,000 years ago, the result of an intricate connection with every species on earth
The earliest primates gave rise to monkeys, great apes, hominids, and eventually, our own species itself: homo sapiens ...
A genetic mutation that prevents Alzheimer’s? Columbian villager who ‘outlived’ early-onset Alzheimer’s may provide insights to disease treatment
Researchers have made significant advances in understanding the genetic form of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease ...
‘Go for it’: Dozens of people on the brink of death put faith in controversial ‘in vivo’ CRISPR gene therapy treatments
Regulators last year approved the world’s first medicine using Crispr, the Nobel Prize-winning tool for modifying genes ...
