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.
Anti-seed-oil to anti-vax pipeline: MAHA movement spreads to teen influencers
For years, the “Make America Healthy Again” movement was driven by moms. Concerned about the safety of childhood vaccines and ...
The tech billionaires behind the immortality movement
Among the most potent archetypes of our time is the elite who seeks eternal youth, whose power is drawn from ...
Anti-vaccine activists are now the majority in RFK, Jr.’s CDC Vaccine Panel
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is giving several prominent right-wing and anti-vaccine medical groups a formal ...
Dad brains: Only women undergo bodily changes during and after childbirth? Think again.
... By the time [anthropologist Lee] Gettler looked into this field, it was already an established fact that fathers had ...
How America’s medical system encourages psychiatric overdiagnosis
Psychiatric diagnoses in the United States are rising across virtually every category, in every age group. According to the National ...
IV vitamin therapy could change your life — by killing you
An IV therapy clinic offers a vitamin cocktail administered via injection, promising hydration, energy, a strengthened immune system, and a ...
Word games: How Moderna is selling its newest vaccine without using the “v” word
... Last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services, zeroed in on mRNA, ...
Viewpoint: Health experts engage MAHA: Shared concerns, differing views on what constitutes evidence
At a national public health meeting in March, I attended a session that brought together public health professionals, physicians, and ...
Viewpoint — ‘We want to put them in trauma’: The inside story of the crusade targeting public health
In a video obtained by ProPublica in fall 2024, Russell Vought—the architect of Project 2025, and later the director of ...
Blocked arteries, kidney stones, nausea, constipation, fatigue: Long list of health problems caused by too much vitamin D
The "sunshine vitamin" may come with a dark side. Just as a lack of vitamin D can lead to health ...
With federal funding for scientific research already reeling, Trump fires the entire apolitical National Science Board
Multiple sources are reporting that the Trump administration has dismissed the entire National Science Board (NSB). The NSB advises the ...
How pediatricians are navigating America’s surge of health misinformation
Across the country, clinicians ... are contending with a sharp rise in vaccine hesitancy. They are trying to do what ...
Back to the vax — Is the measles surge testing MAHA’s vaccine rejectionism?
Measles has been spreading in the US, reaching infection levels not seen in decades .... This year, the Centers for ...
Digital junk food: Social media algorithms designed to highlight controversy not science
Imagine that you have a very social friend — Rickie — who throws a potluck dinner every year. He asks ...
Kennedy’s CDC blocks publication of study that shows vaccines reduce hospitalizations by 50%, then misrepresents why
A report showing the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine that was previously delayed by the head of the Centers for ...
Viewpoint: ‘Make America Pregnant Again’ — Trump guts support for birth control to placate the right’s birth obsession
Decreasing the unintended pregnancy rate was a bipartisan wish. In 1969, President Richard Nixon recognized that “unwanted or untimely childbearing ...
In Zimbabwe, an almost-deadly collision between fake news and a real virus
Misinformation can affect and even derail polio vaccination campaigns, threatening the lives of children in underprotected communities. 23 March 2026 ...
Viewpoint — ‘Completely unethical’: RFK, Jr.’s medical ignorance deprives melanoma cancer-sufferers of a life-saving therapy
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t like our criticism of the Food and Drug Administration’s rejection of Replimune’s life-saving drug for metastatic melanoma ...
Latest fevered, right-wing conspiracy: Fox, New York Post, and kooky GOP legislators push ‘Dead Scientists’ scare
Are America’s top scientists being kidnapped or disappeared by a foreign adversary? Right-wing media are abuzz with speculation that 11 ...
Viewpoint: Truce between MAHA and mainstream science? Its embrace of ‘quackery’ and pseudoscience makes that impossible
One of the truly remarkable—and depressing—things that I’ve observed since the longtime antivax activist who is now our Secretary of ...
‘Irresponsible decision’? On mandatory military flu shots, Hegseth chooses ‘freedom’ over health
Health experts are hoping the effects of new Pentagon policy are minimal following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s directive to make ...
Viewpoint — Politicization of public health: What’s the impact of the White House strategy on children
Vaccine mandates are being lifted across the United States and American children are suffering the consequences. In , U.S. healthcare ...
Vaccine skepticism is a growing global problem
Vaccination is one of the most successful global health interventions in history, eradicating or eliminating some of the deadliest diseases ...
Viewpoint — Digital freedom: How AI could undermine Chinese communism
... Even China’s heavily censored chatbots have proved difficult to contain within the party’s ideological boundaries. American frontier models, running ...
10,000 scientists gone: Trump’s cuts create an unprecedented brain drain
Some 10,109 doctoral-trained experts in science and related fields left their jobs last year as President Donald Trump dramatically shrank ...
Fish oil supplements for brain injuries probably don’t work
A first-of-its-kind study led by the Medical University of South Carolina raises questions about the value of fish oil supplements ...
Congressional Republicans pushing false claims that over-the-counter birth control pills are unsafe
Imagine that you're pregnant, a few weeks in, and you decide you want an abortion. You walk into a retail ...
