Your gut microbes might encourage criminal behavior

A few years ago, a Belgian man in his 30s drove into a lamppost. Twice. Local authorities found that his blood alcohol level was four times the legal limit. Over the space of a few years, the man was apprehended for drunk driving three times. And on all three occasions, he insisted he hadn’t been drinking.

He was telling the truth. A doctor later diagnosed auto-brewery syndrome—a rare condition in which the body makes its own alcohol. Microbes living inside the man’s body were fermenting the carbohydrates in his diet to create ethanol. Last year, he was acquitted of drunk driving.

His case, along with several other scientific studies, raises a fascinating question for microbiology, neuroscience, and the law: How much of our behavior can we blame on our microbes?

Each of us hosts vast communities of tiny bacteria, archaea (which are a bit like bacteria), fungi, and even viruses all over our bodies. The largest collection resides in our guts, which play home to trillions of them. You have more microbial cells than human cells in your body. In some ways, we’re more microbe than human.

Microbiologists are still getting to grips with what all these microbes do. Some seem to help us break down food. Others produce chemicals that are important for our health in some way. But the picture is extremely complicated, partly because of the myriad ways microbes can interact with each other.

But they also interact with the human nervous system. Microbes can produce compounds that affect the way neurons work. They also influence the functioning of the immune system, which can have knock-on effects on the brain. And they seem to be able to communicate with the brain via the vagus nerve.

If microbes can influence our brains, could they also explain some of our behavior, including the criminal sort? Some microbiologists think so, at least in theory. “Microbes control us more than we think they do,” says Emma Allen-Vercoe, a microbiologist at the University of Guelph in Canada.

Researchers have come up with a name for applications of microbiology to criminal law: the legalome. A better understanding of how microbes influence our behavior could not only affect legal proceedings but also shape crime prevention and rehabilitation efforts, argue Susan Prescott, a pediatrician and immunologist at the University of Western Australia, and her colleagues.

“For the person unaware that they have auto-brewery syndrome, we can argue that microbes are like a marionettist pulling the strings in what would otherwise be labeled as criminal behavior,” says Prescott.

Auto-brewery syndrome is a fairly straightforward example (it has been involved in the acquittal of at least two people so far), but other brain-microbe relationships are likely to be more complicated. We do know a little about one microbe that seems to influence behavior: Toxoplasmosis gondii, a parasite that reproduces in cats and spreads to other animals via cat feces.

The parasite is best known for changing the behavior of rodents in ways that make them easier prey—an infection seems to make mice permanently lose their fear of cats. Research in humans is nowhere near conclusive, but some studies have linked infections with the parasite to personality changes, increased aggression, and impulsivity.

“That’s an example of microbiology that we know affects the brain and could potentially affect the legal standpoint of someone who’s being tried for a crime,” says Allen-Vercoe. “They might say ‘My microbes made me do it,’ and I might believe them.”

There’s more evidence linking gut microbes to behavior in mice, which are some of the most well-studied creatures. One study involved fecal transplants—a procedure that involves inserting fecal matter from one animal into the intestines of another. Because feces contain so much gut bacteria, fecal transplants can go some way to swap out a gut microbiome. (Humans are doing this too—and it seems to be a remarkably effective way to treat persistent C. difficile infections in people.)

Back in 2013, scientists at McMaster University in Canada performed fecal transplants between two strains of mice, one that is known for being timid and another that tends to be rather gregarious. This swapping of gut microbes also seemed to swap their behavior—the timid mice became more gregarious, and vice versa.

Microbiologists have since held up this study as one of the clearest demonstrations of how changing gut microbes can change behavior—at least in mice. “But the question is: How much do they control you, and how much is the human part of you able to overcome that control?” says Allen-Vercoe. “And that’s a really tough question to answer.”

After all, our gut microbiomes, though relatively stable, can change. Your diet, exercise routine, environment, and even the people you live with can shape the communities of microbes that live on and in you. And the ways these communities shift and influence behavior might be slightly different for everyone. Pinning down precise links between certain microbes and criminal behaviors will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. 

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to take someone’s microbiome and say ‘Oh, look—you’ve got bug X, and that means you’re a serial killer,” says Allen-Vercoe.

Either way, Prescott hopes that advances in microbiology and metabolomics might help us better understand the links between microbes, the chemicals they produce, and criminal behaviors—and potentially even treat those behaviors.

“We could get to a place where microbial interventions are a part of therapeutic programming,” she says.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Longevity clinics around the world are selling unproven treatments

The quest for long, healthy life—and even immortality—is probably almost as old as humans are, but it’s never been hotter than it is right now. Today my newsfeed is full of claims about diets, exercise routines, and supplements that will help me live longer.

A lot of it is marketing fluff, of course. It should be fairly obvious that a healthy, plant-rich diet and moderate exercise will help keep you in good shape. And no drugs or supplements have yet been proved to extend human lifespan.

The growing field of longevity medicine is apparently aiming for something in between these two ends of the wellness spectrum. By combining the established tools of clinical medicine (think blood tests and scans) with some more experimental ones (tests that measure your biological age), these clinics promise to help their clients improve their health and longevity.

But a survey of longevity clinics around the world, carried out by an organization that publishes updates and research on the industry, is revealing a messier picture. In reality, these clinics—most of which cater only to the very wealthy—vary wildly in their offerings.

Today, the number of longevity clinics is thought to be somewhere in the hundreds. The proponents of these clinics say they represent the future of medicine. “We can write new rules on how we treat patients,” Eric Verdin, who directs the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, said at a professional meeting last year.

Phil Newman, who runs Longevity.Technology, a company that tracks the longevity industry, says he knows of 320 longevity clinics operating around the world. Some operate multiple centers on an international scale, while others involve a single “practitioner” incorporating some element of “longevity” into the treatments offered, he says. To get a better idea of what these offerings might be, Newman and his colleagues conducted a survey of 82 clinics around the world, including the US, Australia, Brazil, and multiple countries in Europe and Asia.

Some of the results are not all that surprising. Three-quarters of the clinics said that most of their clients were Gen Xers, aged between 44 and 59. This makes sense—anecdotally, it’s around this age that many people start to feel the effects of aging. And research suggests that waves of molecular changes associated with aging hit us in our 40s and again in our 60s. (Longevity influencers Bryan Johnson, Andrew Huberman, and Peter Attia all fall into this age group too.)

And I wasn’t surprised to see that plenty of clinics are offering aesthetic treatments, focusing more on how old their clients look. Of the clinics surveyed, 28% said they offered Botox injections, 35% offered hair loss treatments, and 38% offered “facial rejuvenation procedures.”  “The distinction between longevity medicine and aesthetic medicine remains blurred,” Andrea Maier of the National University of Singapore, and cofounder of a private longevity clinic, wrote in a commentary on the report.

Maier is also former president of the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, an organization that was set up with the aim of establishing clinical standards and credibility for longevity clinics. Other results from the survey underline how much of a challenge this will be; many clinics are still offering unproven treatments. Over a third of the clinics said they offered stem-cell treatments, for example. There is no evidence that those treatments will help people live longer—and they are not without risk, either.

I was a little surprised to see that most of the clinics are also offering prescription medicines off label. In other words, drugs that have been approved for specific medical issues are apparently being prescribed for aging instead. This is also not without risks—all medicines have side effects. And, again, none of them have been proved to slow or reverse human aging.

And these prescriptions are coming from certified medical doctors. More than 80% of clinics reported that their practice was overseen by a medical doctor with more than 10 years of clinical experience.

It was also a little surprising to learn that despite their high fees, most of these clinics are not making a profit. For clients, the annual costs of attending a longevity clinic range between $10,000 and $150,000, according to Fountain Life, a company with clinics in Florida and Prague. But only 39% of the surveyed clinics said they were turning a profit and 30% said they were “approaching breaking even,” while 16% said they were operating at a loss.

Proponents of longevity clinics have high hopes for the field. They see longevity medicine as nothing short of a revolution—a move away from reactive treatments and toward proactive health maintenance. But these survey results show just how far they have to go.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

“Spare” living human bodies might provide us with organs for transplantation

This week, MIT Technology Review published a piece on bodyoids—living bodies that cannot think or feel pain. In the piece, a trio of scientists argue that advances in biotechnology will soon allow us to create “spare” human bodies that could be used for research, or to provide organs for donation.

If you find your skin crawling at this point, you’re not the only one. It’s a creepy idea, straight from the more horrible corners of science fiction. But bodyoids could be used for good. And if they are truly unaware and unable to think, the use of bodyoids wouldn’t cross “most people’s ethical lines,” the authors argue. I’m not so sure.

Either way, there’s no doubt that developments in science and biotechnology are bringing us closer to the potential reality of bodyoids. And the idea is already stirring plenty of ethical debate and controversy.

One of the main arguments made for bodyoids is that they could provide spare human organs. There’s a huge shortage of organs for transplantation. More than 100,000 people in the US are waiting for a transplant, and 17 people on that waiting list die every day. Human bodyoids could serve as a new source.

Scientists are working on other potential solutions to this problem. One approach is the use of gene-edited animal organs. Animal organs don’t typically last inside human bodies—our immune systems will reject them as “foreign.” But a few companies are creating pigs with a series of gene edits that make their organs more acceptable to human bodies.

A handful of living people have received gene-edited pig organs. David Bennett Sr. was the first person to get a gene-edited pig heart, in 2022, and Richard Slayman was the first to get a kidney, in early 2024. Unfortunately, both men died around two months after their surgery.

But Towana Looney, the third living person to receive a gene-edited pig kidney, has been doing well. She had her transplant surgery in late November of last year. “I am full of energy. I got an appetite I’ve never had in eight years,” she said at the time. “I can put my hand on this kidney and feel it buzzing.” She returned home in February.

At least one company is taking more of a bodyoid-like approach. Renewal Bio, a biotech company based in Israel, hopes to grow “embryo-stage versions of people” for replacement organs.

Their approach is based on advances in the development of “synthetic embryos.” (I’m putting that term in quotation marks because, while it’s the simplest descriptor of what they are, a lot of scientists hate the term.)

Embryos start with the union of an egg cell and a sperm cell. But scientists have been working on ways to make embryos using stem cells instead. Under the right conditions, these cells can divide into structures that look a lot like a typical embryo.

Scientists don’t know how far these embryo-like structures will be able to develop. But they’re already using them to try to get cows and monkeys pregnant.

And no one really knows how to think about synthetic human embryos. Scientists don’t even really know what to call them. Rules stipulate that typical human embryos may be grown in the lab for a maximum of 14 days. Should the same rules apply to synthetic ones?

The very existence of synthetic embryos is throwing into question our understanding of what a human embryo even is. “Is it the thing that is only generated from the fusion of a sperm and an egg?” Naomi Moris, a developmental biologist at the Crick Institute in London, said to me a couple of years ago. “Is it something to do with the cell types it possesses, or the [shape] of the structure?”

The authors of the new MIT Technology Review piece also point out that such bodyoids could also help speed scientific and medical research.

At the moment, most drug research must be conducted in lab animals before clinical trials can start. But nonhuman animals may not respond the same way people do, and the vast majority of treatments that look super-promising in mice fail in humans. Such research can feel like a waste of both animal lives and time.

Scientists have been working on solutions to these problems, too. Some are creating “organs on chips”—miniature collections of cells organized on a small piece of polymer that may resemble full-size organs and can be used to test the effects of drugs.

Others are creating digital representations of human organs for the same purpose. Such digital twins can be extensively modeled, and can potentially be used to run clinical trials in silico.

Both of these approaches seem somehow more palatable to me, personally, than running experiments on a human created without the capacity to think or feel pain. The idea reminds me of the recent novel Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, in which humans are bred for consumption. In the book, their vocal cords are removed so that others do not have to hear them scream.

When it comes to real-world biotechnology, though, our feelings about what is “acceptable” tend to shift. In vitro fertilization was demonized when it was first developed, for instance, with opponents arguing that it was “unnatural,” a “perilous insult,” and “the biggest threat since the atom bomb.” It is estimated that more than 12 million people have been born through IVF since Louise Brown became the first “test tube baby” 46 years ago. I wonder how we’ll all feel about bodyoids 46 years from now.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Autopsies can reveal intimate health details. Should they be kept private?

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been following news of the deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa. It was heartbreaking to hear how Arakawa appeared to have died from a rare infection days before her husband, who had advanced Alzheimer’s disease and may have struggled to understand what had happened.

But as I watched the medical examiner reveal details of the couple’s health, I couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable. Media reports claim that the couple liked their privacy and had been out of the spotlight for decades. But here I was, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, being told what pills Arakawa had in her medicine cabinet, and that Hackman had undergone multiple surgeries.

It made me wonder: Should autopsy reports be kept private? A person’s cause of death is public information. But what about other intimate health details that might be revealed in a postmortem examination?

The processes and regulations surrounding autopsies vary by country, so we’ll focus on the US, where Hackman and Arakawa died. Here, a “medico-legal” autopsy may be organized by law enforcement agencies and handled through courts, while a “clinical” autopsy may be carried out at the request of family members.

And there are different levels of autopsy—some might involve examining specific organs or tissues, while more thorough examinations would involve looking at every organ and studying tissues in the lab.

The goal of an autopsy is to discover the cause of a person’s death. Autopsy reports, especially those resulting from detailed investigations, often reveal health conditions—conditions that might have been kept private while the person was alive. There are multiple federal and state laws designed to protect individuals’ health information. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects “individually identifiable health information” up to 50 years after a person’s death. But some things change when a person dies.

For a start, the cause of death will end up on the death certificate. That is public information. The public nature of causes of death is taken for granted these days, says Lauren Solberg, a bioethicist at the University of Florida College of Medicine. It has become a public health statistic. She and her student Brooke Ortiz, who have been researching this topic, are more concerned about other aspects of autopsy results.

The thing is, autopsies can sometimes reveal more than what a person died from. They can also pick up what are known as incidental findings. An examiner might find that a person who died following a covid-19 infection also had another condition. Perhaps that condition was undiagnosed. Maybe it was asymptomatic. That finding wouldn’t appear on a death certificate. So who should have access to it?

The laws over who should have access to a person’s autopsy report vary by state, and even between counties within a state. Clinical autopsy results will always be made available to family members, but local laws dictate which family members have access, says Ortiz.

Genetic testing further complicates things. Sometimes the people performing autopsies will run genetic tests to help confirm the cause of death. These tests might reveal what the person died from. But they might also flag genetic factors unrelated to the cause of death that might increase the risk of other diseases.

In those cases, the person’s family members might stand to benefit from accessing that information. “My health information is my health information—until it comes to my genetic health information,” says Solberg. Genes are shared by relatives. Should they have the opportunity to learn about potential risks to their own health?

This is where things get really complicated. Ethically speaking, we should consider the wishes of the deceased. Would that person have wanted to share this information with relatives?

It’s also worth bearing in mind that a genetic risk factor is often just that; there’s often no way to know whether a person will develop a disease, or how severe the symptoms would be. And if the genetic risk is for a disease that has no treatment or cure, will telling the person’s relatives just cause them a lot of stress?

One 27-year-old experienced this when a 23&Me genetic test told her she had “a 28% chance of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease by age 75 and a 60% chance by age 85.”

“I’m suddenly overwhelmed by this information,” she posted on a dementia forum. “I can’t help feeling this overwhelming sense of dread and sadness that I’ll never be able to un-know this information.”

In their research, Solberg and Ortiz came across cases in which individuals who had died in motor vehicle accidents underwent autopsies that revealed other, asymptomatic conditions. One man in his 40s who died in such an accident was found to have a genetic kidney disease. A 23-year-old was found to have had kidney cancer.

Ideally, both medical teams and family members should know ahead of time what a person would have wanted—whether that’s an autopsy, genetic testing, or health privacy. Advance directives allow people to clarify their wishes for end-of-life care. But only around a third of people in the US have completed one. And they tend to focus on care before death, not after.

Solberg and Ortiz think they should be expanded. An advance directive could specify how people want to share their health information after they’ve died. “Talking about death is difficult,” says Solberg. “For physicians, for patients, for families—it can be uncomfortable.” But it is important.

On March 17, a New Mexico judge granted a request from a representative of Hackman’s estate to seal police photos and bodycam footage as well as the medical records of Hackman and Arakawa. The medical investigator is “temporarily restrained from disclosing … the Autopsy Reports and/or Death Investigation Reports for Mr. and Mrs. Hackman,” according to Deadline.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

This annual shot might protect against HIV infections

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Every year, my colleagues and I put together a list of what we think are the top 10 breakthrough technologies of that year. When it came to innovations in biotech, there was a clear winner: lenacapavir, a drug that was found to prevent HIV infections in 100% of the women and girls who received it in a clinical trial.

You never hear “100%” in medicine. The trial was the most successful we’ve ever seen for HIV prevention. The drug was safe, too (it’s already approved to treat HIV infections). And it only needed to be injected twice a year to offer full protection.

This week, the results of a small phase I trial for once-yearly lenacapavir injections were announced at a conference in San Francisco. These early “first in human” trials are designed to test the safety of a drug in healthy volunteers. Still, the results are incredibly promising: All the volunteers still had the drug in their blood plasma a year after their injections, and at levels that earlier studies suggest will protect them from HIV infections.

I don’t normally get too excited about phase I trials, which usually involve just a handful of volunteers and typically don’t tell us much about whether a drug is likely to work. But this trial seems to be different. Together, the lenacapavir trials could bring us a significant step closer to ending the HIV epidemic.

First, a quick recap. We’ve had effective pre-exposure prophylactic (PrEP) drugs for HIV since 2012, but these must be taken either daily or just before a person is exposed to the virus. In 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first long-acting injectable drug for HIV prevention. That drug, cabotegravir, needs to be injected every two months.

But researchers have been working on drugs that offer even longer-lasting protection. It can be difficult for people to remember to take daily pills when they’re sick, let alone when they’re healthy. And these medicines have a stigma attached to them. “People are concerned about people hearing the pills shake in their purse on the bus … or seeing them on a medicine cabinet or bedside table,” says Moupali Das, vice president of HIV prevention and virology, pediatrics, and HIV clinical development at Gilead Sciences.

Then came the lenacapavir studies. The drug is already approved as a treatment for some cases of HIV infection, but two trials last year tested its effectiveness at prevention. In one, over 5,000 women and adolescent girls in Uganda and South Africa received either twice-yearly injections of lenacapavir or a daily PrEP pill. That trial was a resounding success: There were no cases of HIV among the volunteers who got lenacapavir.

In a second trial, the drug was tested in 3,265 men and gender-diverse individuals, including transgender men, transgender women, and gender nonbinary people. The twice-yearly injections reduced the incidence of HIV in this group by 96%.

In the most recent study, which was also published in The Lancet, Das and her colleagues tested a new formulation of the drug in 40 healthy volunteers in the US. The participants still got lenacapavir, but in a slightly different formulation, and at a higher dose. And whereas the previous trials involved injections under the skin, these participants received injections into their glute muscles. Half the volunteers in this trial received a higher dose than the others.

The drug appeared to be safe. It also appears likely to be effective. These individuals weren’t at risk of HIV. But the levels of the drug in their blood plasma remained high, even in the people who got the lower dose.

A year after their injection, the levels of the drug were still higher than those seen in people who were protected from HIV in last year’s trials. This suggests the new annual shot will be just as protective as the twice-yearly shot, says Renu Singh, a senior director in clinical pharmacology at Gilead Sciences, who presented the findings at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco.

“I was just so excited [to hear the results],” says Carina Marquez, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who both studies infectious disease and treats people with HIV.

Annual shots would make things easier—and potentially cheaper—for both patients and health-care providers, says Marquez. “It will be a game changer if it works, which looks promising from the phase I data,” she says.

The drug works by interfering with the virus’s ability to replicate. But it also seems to have some very unusual properties, says Singh. It can be taken daily or yearly. Small doses can stay in the blood for days rather than hours. And bigger doses form what’s known as a depot, which gradually releases the drug over time.

“I previously worked at the FDA, and looked at many, many different molecules and products, but I’ve never seen [anything] like this,” Singh adds. She and her colleagues have come up with nicknames for the drug, including “magical,” “the unicorn,” and “limitless len.”

Once a phase I trial is successfully completed, researchers will typically move on to a phase II trial, which is designed to test the efficacy of a drug. That’s not necessary for lenacapavir, given the unprecedented success of last year’s trials. The team at Gilead is currently planning a phase III trial, which will involve testing annual shots in large numbers of people at risk of HIV infection.

The drug isn’t approved yet, but the researchers at Gilead have submitted twice-yearly lenacapavir for approval by the FDA and the European Medicines Agency and hope to have it approved by the FDA in June, says Das. The drug is also being assessed under the EU-Medicines for all (EU-M4all) procedure, which is a collaboration between the EMA and the World Health Organizations to fast-track the approval of drugs for countries outside Europe.

With any new medicine for an infection that affects low- and middle-income countries, there are always concerns about cost. The existing formulations of lenacapvir (used for treating HIV infections) can cost around $40,000 for a year’s supply. “There’s no price for the twice-yearly [formulation] yet,” says Das.

Gilead has signed licensing agreements with six generic drug manufacturers that will sell cheaper versions of the drug in 120 low- and middle-income countries. In December, the Global Fund and other organizations announced plans to secure access to twice-yearly lenacapavir for 2 million people in such countries.

But this was an effort coordinated with the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program whose very existence has come under threat following an executive order issued by the Trump administration to pause foreign aid.

“We are looking at the political situation right now and evaluating our possible options,” says Singh. “We are committed to working with the government to see what’s next and what can be done.”

The pause on US foreign aid will have devastating consequences for the health of people around the globe. And the idea that it might interfere with access to a drug that could help bring an end to the HIV epidemic—which has already claimed over 40 million lives—is a heartbreaking prospect. It is estimated that 630,000 people died from HIV-related causes in 2023. That same year, another 1.3 million people acquired HIV.

“We’re in such a good place to end the epidemic,” says Marquez. “We’ve come so far … we’ve got to go the last mile and get the product out there to the people that need it.”

Now read the rest of The Checkup

Read more from MIT Technology Review‘s archive

You can read more about why twice-yearly lenacapavir made our 2025 list of the top 10 breakthrough technologies here. (It’s also worth checking out the full list, here!)

The pharmaceutical company Merck has explored a different approach to delivering PrEP drugs—via a matchstick-size plastic tube implanted in a person’s arm. 

In 2018, Antonio Regalado broke the news that He Jiankui and his colleagues in Shenzen, China, had edited the genes of human embryos to create the first “CRISPR babies.” The team claimed to have done the procedure to ensure that the resulting children were resistant to HIV.

The first approved mRNA vaccines were for covid-19. But Moderna, the pharmaceutical company behind some of those vaccines, is now working on a similar approach for HIV.

AIDS denialism is undergoing a resurgence thanks to conspiracy-theory-promoting podcasts and books, one of which was authored by the newly appointed US secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

From around the web

Last week, I covered the creation of the “woolly mouse,” an animal with woolly-mammoth-like features. Its creators think they’re a step closer to bringing the mammoths back from extinction. But the woolly mammoth is just one of a list of animals scientists have been trying to “de-extinct.” The full list includes dodos, passenger pigeons, and even a frog that “gives birth” by vomiting babies out of its mouth. (Discover Wildlife)

The biotechnology company Beam Therapeutics claims to have corrected a DNA mutation in people with an incurable genetic disease that can affect the liver and lungs. It is the first time a mutated gene has been restored to normal, the team says. (New York Times)

In the peak covid-19 era of 2020, Jay Bhattacharya was considered a “fringe epidemiologist” by Francis Collins, then director of the US National Institutes of Health. Now, Collins is out and Bhattacharya may soon take his place. What happens when the “fringe” is in charge? (The Atlantic)

The Trump administration withdrew the nomination of Dave Weldon to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Weldon has a long track record of criticizing vaccines. (STAT) 

Mississippi became the third US state to ban lab-grown meat. The state’s agriculture commissioner has written that he wants his steak to come from “farm-raised beef, not a petri dish from a lab.” (Wired)

An ancient man’s remains were hacked apart and kept in a garage

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

This week I’ve been working on a story about a brain of glass. About five years ago, archaeologists found shiny black glass fragments inside the skull of a man who died in the Mount Vesuvius eruption of 79 CE. It seems they are pieces of brain, turned to glass.

Scientists have found ancient brains before—some are thought to be at least 10,000 years old. But this is the only time they’ve seen a brain turn to glass. They’ve even been able to spot neurons inside it.

The man’s remains were found at Herculaneum, an ancient city that was buried under meters of volcanic ash following the eruption. We don’t know if there are any other vitrified brains on the site. None have been found so far, but only about a quarter of the city has been excavated.

Some archaeologists want to continue excavating the site. But others argue that we need to protect it. Further digging will expose it to the elements, putting the artifacts and remains at risk of damage. You can only excavate a site once, so perhaps it’s worth waiting until we have the technology to do so in the least destructive way.

After all, there are some pretty recent horror stories of excavations involving angle grinders, and of ancient body parts ending up in garages. Future technologies might eventually make our current approaches look similarly barbaric.

The inescapable fact of fields like archaeology or paleontology is this: When you study ancient remains, you’ll probably end up damaging them in some way. Take, for example, DNA analysis. Scientists have made a huge amount of progress in this field. Today, geneticists can crack the genetic code of extinct animals and analyze DNA in soil samples to piece together the history of an environment.

But this kind of analysis essentially destroys the sample. To perform DNA analysis on human remains, scientists typically cut out a piece of bone and grind it up. They might use a tooth. But once it has been studied, that sample is gone for good.

Archaeological excavations have been performed for hundreds of years, and as recently as the 1950s, it was common for archaeologists to completely excavate a site they discovered. But those digs cause damage too.

Nowadays, when a site is discovered, archaeologists tend to focus on specific research questions they might want to answer, and excavate only enough to answer those questions, says Karl Harrison, a forensic archaeologist at the University of Exeter in the UK. “We will cross our fingers, excavate the minimal amount, and hope that the next generation of archaeologists will have new, better tools and finer abilities to work on stuff like this,” he says.

In general, scientists have also become more careful with human remains. Matteo Borrini, a forensic anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, curates his university’s collection of skeletal remains, which he says includes around 1,000 skeletons of medieval and Victorian Britons. The skeletons are extremely valuable for research, says Borrini, who himself has investigated the remains of one person who died from exposure to phosphorus in a match factory and another who was murdered.

When researchers ask to study the skeletons, Borrini will find out whether the research will somehow alter them. “If there is destructive sampling, we need to guarantee that the destruction will be minimal, and that there will be enough material [left] for further study,” he says. “Otherwise we don’t authorize the study.”

If only previous generations of archaeologists had taken a similar approach. Harrison told me the story of the discovery of “St Bees man,” a medieval man found in a lead coffin in Cumbria, UK, in 1981. The man, thought to have died in the 1300s, was found to be extraordinarily well preserved—his skin was intact, his organs were present, and he even still had his body hair.

Normally, archaeologists would dig up such ancient specimens with care, using tools made of natural substances like stone or brick, says Harrison. Not so for St Bees man. “His coffin was opened with an angle grinder,” says Harrison. The man’s body was removed and “stuck in a truck,” where he underwent a standard modern forensic postmortem, he adds.

“His thorax would have been opened up, his organs [removed and] weighed, [and] the top of his head would have been cut off,” says Harrison. Samples of the man’s organs “were kept in [the pathologist’s] garage for 40 years.”

If St Bees man were discovered today, the story would be completely different. The coffin itself would be recognized as a precious ancient artifact that should be handled with care, and the man’s remains would be scanned and imaged in the least destructive way possible, says Harrison.

Even Lindow man, who was discovered a mere three years later in nearby Manchester, got better treatment. His remains were found in a peat bog, and he is thought to have died over 2,000 years ago. Unlike poor St Bees man, he underwent careful scientific investigation, and his remains took pride of place in the British Museum. Harrison remembers going to see the exhibit when he was 10 years old. 

Harrison says he’s dreaming of minimally destructive DNA technologies—tools that might help us understand the lives of long-dead people without damaging their remains. I’m looking forward to covering those in the future. (In the meantime, I’m personally dreaming of a trip to—respectfully and carefully—visit Herculaneum.)

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Some believe an “ancient-DNA revolution” is underway, as scientists use modern technologies to learn about human, animal, and environmental remains from the past. My colleague Antonio Regalado has the details in his recent feature. The piece was published in the latest edition of our magazine, which focuses on relationships.

Ancient DNA analysis made it to MIT Technology Review’s annual list of top 10 Breakthrough Technologies in 2023. You can read our thoughts on the breakthroughs of 2025 here. 

DNA that was frozen for 2 million years was sequenced in 2022. The ancient DNA fragments, which were recovered from Greenland, may offer insight into the environment of the polar desert at the time.

Environmental DNA, also known as eDNA, can help scientists assemble a snapshot of all the organisms in a given place. Some are studying samples collected from Angkor Wat in Cambodia, which is believed to have been built in the 12th century.

Others are hoping that ancient DNA can be used to “de-extinct” animals that once lived on Earth. Colossal Biosciences is hoping to resurrect the dodo and the woolly mammoth.

From around the web

Next-generation obesity drugs might be too effective. One trial participant lost 22% of her body weight in nine months. Another lost 30% of his weight in just eight months. (STAT)

A US court upheld the conviction of Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the biotechnology company Theranos, who was sentenced to over 11 years for defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Her sentence has since been reduced by two years for good behavior. (The Guardian)

An unvaccinated child died of measles in Texas. The death is the first reported as a result of the outbreak that is spreading in Texas and New Mexico, and the first measles death reported in the US in a decade. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to be downplaying the outbreak. (NBC News)

A mysterious disease with Ebola-like symptoms has emerged in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Hundreds of people have been infected in the last five weeks, and more than 50 people have died. (Wired)

Towana Looney has been discharged from the hospital three months after receiving a gene-edited pig kidney. “I’m so grateful to be alive and thankful to have received this incredible gift,” she said. (NYU Langone)

8,000 pregnant women may die in just 90 days because of US aid cuts

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Yesterday marks a month since the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th US president. And what a month it has been. The Trump administration wasted no time in delivering a slew of executive orders, memos, and work notices to federal employees.

On February 18, Trump signed an executive order that seeks to make IVF more accessible to people in the US. In some ways, the move isn’t surprising—Trump has expressed his support for the technology in the past, and even called himself “the father of IVF” while on the campaign trail last year.

Making IVF more affordable and accessible should give people more options when it comes to family planning and reproductive freedom more generally. But the move comes after a barrage of actions by the new administration that are hitting reproductive care hard for people around the world. On January 20, his first day in office, Trump ordered a “90-day pause in United States foreign development assistance” for such programs to be assessed. By January 24, a “stop work” memo issued by the State Department brought US-funded aid programs around the world to a halt.  

Recent estimates suggest that more than 8,000 women will die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth over the next 90 days if the funding is not reinstated.

On January 24 Trump also reinstated the global gag rule—a policy that requires nongovernmental organizations receiving US health funding to agree that they will not offer abortion counseling and care. This move alone immediately stripped organizations of the funding they need to perform their work. MSI Reproductive Choices, which offers support for reproductive health care in 36 countries, lost $14 million as a result, says Anna Mackay, who manages donor-funded programs at the organization. “Over 2 million women and girls would have received contraceptive services with that money,” she says.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) had a 2025 budget of $42.8 billion to spend on foreign assistance, which covers everything from humanitarian aid and sanitation to programs promoting gender equality and economic growth in countries around the world. But the “stop work” memo froze that funding for 90 days.

The impacts were felt immediately and are still rippling out. Clinical trials were halted. Jobs were lost. Health programs were shut down.

“I think this is going to have a devastating impact on the global health architecture,” says Thoai Ngo at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “USAID is the major foreign funder for global health … I’m afraid that there isn’t [another government] that can fill the gap.”

Reproductive health care is likely to lose out as affected governments and health organizations try to reorganize their resources, says Ngo: “In times of crisis … women and girls tend to be deprioritized in terms of access to health and social services.”

Without information on and access to a range of contraceptive options, unintended pregnancies result. These have the potential to limit the freedoms of people who become pregnant. And they can have far-reaching economic impacts, since access to contraception can improve education rates and career outcomes.

And the health consequences can be devastating. Unintended pregnancies are more likely to be ended with abortions—potentially unsafe ones. Maternal death rates are high in regions that lack adequate resources. A maternal death occurred every two minutes in 2020.

“It’s difficult to overstate how catastrophic this freeze has been over the last several weeks,” says Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on global sexual and reproductive health and rights. “Every single day that the freeze is in place, there are 130,000 women who are being denied contraceptive care,” she says.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that should USAID funding be frozen for the full 90 days, around 11.7 million women and girls would lose access to contraceptive care, and 4.2 million of them would experience unintended pregnancies. Of those, “8,340 will die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth,” says Friedrich-Karnik.

“By denying people access to contraception, not only are you denying them tools for their bodily autonomy—you are really risking their lives,” she says. “Thousands more women will die down the road.”

“USAID plays such a central role in supporting these life-saving programs,” says Ngo. “The picture is bleak.”

Even online sources of information on contraceptives are being affected by the funding freeze. Ben Bellows is a chief business officer at Nivi, a digital health company that develops chatbots to deliver health information to people via WhatsApp. “Two million users have used the bot,” he says.

He and his team have been working on a project to deliver information on contraceptive options and family planning to women in India, and they have been looking to incorporate AI into their bot. The project was funded by a company that, in turn, is funded by USAID. Like the funding, the work is “frozen,” says Bellows.

“We’ve slowed [hiring] and we’ve slowed some of the tech development because of the freeze [on USAID],” he says. “It’s bad [for] the individuals, it’s bad [for] the companies that are trying to operate in these markets, and it’s bad [for] public health outcomes.”

Reproductive health and freedoms are also likely to be affected by the Trump administration’s cuts to federal agencies. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been in the administration’s crosshairs, as has the Food and Drug Administration.

After all, the FDA regulates drugs and medical devices in the US, including contraceptives. The CDC collects and shares important data on sexual and reproductive health. And the NIH supports vital research on reproductive health and contraception.

The CDC also funds health programs in low-income countries like Ethiopia. Following Trump’s executive order, the country’s ministry of health terminated the contracts of more than 5,000 health workers whose salaries were supported by the CDC as well as USAID.

“That’s midwives and nurses working in rural health posts,” says Mackay. “We’re turning up to support these staff and provide them with sexual reproductive health training and make sure they’ve got the contraceptives, and there’s just no one at the facility.”

So, yes, it is great news if the Trump administration can find a way to make IVF more accessible. But, as Mackay points out, “it’s increasing reproductive choice in one direction.”

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Last November, two years after Roe v. Wade was overturned, 10 US states voted on abortion rights. Seven of them voted to extend and protect access.

My colleague Rhiannon Williams reported on the immediate aftermath of the decision that reversed Roe v. Wade.

Fertility rates are falling around the world, in almost every country. IVF is great, but it won’t save us from a looming fertility crisis. Gender equality and family-friendly policies are much more likely to be effective. 

Decades of increasingly successful IVF treatments have caused millions of embryos to be stored in cryopreservation tanks around the world. In some cases, they can’t be donated, used, or destroyed and appear to be stuck in limbo “forever.”

Ever come across the term “women of childbearing age”? The insidious idea that women’s bodies are, above all else, vessels for growing children has plenty of negative consequences for us all. But it has also set back scientific research and health policy. 

There are other WhatsApp-based approaches to improving access to health information in India. Accredited social health activists in the country are using the platform to counter medical misinformation and superstitions around pregnancy.

From around the web

The US Food and Drug Administration assesses the efficacy and toxicity of experimental medicines before they are approved. It should also consider their “financial toxicity,” given that medical bills can fall on the shoulders of patients themselves, argue a group of US doctors. (The New England Journal of Medicine)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new US secretary of health and human services, has vowed to investigate the country’s childhood vaccination schedule. During his confirmation hearing a couple of weeks ago, he promised not to change the schedule. (Associated Press)

Some scientists have been altering their published work without telling anyone. Such “stealth corrections” threaten scientific integrity, say a group of researchers from Europe and the US. (Learned Publishing)

The US Department of Agriculture said it accidentally fired several people who were working on the federal response to the bird flu outbreak. Apparently the agency is now trying to hire them back. (NBC News)

Could your next pet be a glowing rabbit? This startup is using CRISPR to “level up” pets. Their goal is to eventually create a real-life unicorn. (Wired)

A woman made her AI voice clone say “arse.” Then she got banned.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been speaking to people who have lost their voices. Both Joyce Esser, who lives in the UK, and Jules Rodriguez, who lives in Miami, Florida, have forms of motor neuron disease—a class of progressive disorders that result in the gradual loss of the ability to move and control muscles.

It’s a crushing diagnosis for everyone involved. Jules’s wife, Maria, told me that once it was official, she and Jules left the doctor’s office gripping each other in floods of tears. Their lives were turned upside down. Four and a half years later, Jules cannot move his limbs, and a tracheostomy has left him unable to speak.

“To say this diagnosis has been devastating is an understatement,” says Joyce, who has bulbar MND—she can still move her limbs but struggles to speak and swallow. “Losing my voice has been a massive deal for me because it’s such a big part of who I am.”

AI is bringing back those lost voices. Both Jules and Joyce have fed an AI tool built by ElevenLabs recordings of their old voices to re-create them. Today, they can “speak” in their old voices by typing sentences into devices, selecting letters by hand or eye gaze. It’s been a remarkable and extremely emotional experience for them—both thought they’d lost their voices for good.

But speaking through a device has limitations. It’s slow, and it doesn’t sound completely natural. And, strangely, users might be limited in what they’re allowed to say.

Joyce doesn’t use her voice clone all that often. She finds it impractical for everyday conversations. But she does like to hear her old voice and will use it on occasion. One such occasion was when she was waiting for her husband, Paul, to get ready to go out.

Joyce typed a message for her voice clone to read out: “Come on, Hunnie, get your arse in gear!!” She then added: “I’d better get my knickers on too!!!”

“The next day I got a warning from ElevenLabs that I was using inappropriate language and not to do it again!!!” Joyce told me via email (we communicated with a combination of email, speech, text-to-voice tools, and a writing board). She wasn’t sure what had been inappropriate, exactly. It’s not as though she’d used any especially vile language—just, as she puts it, “normal British banter between a couple getting ready to go out.”

Joyce assumed that one of the words she’d used had been automatically flagged up by “the prudish American computer,” and that once someone from the ElevenLabs team had assessed the warning, it would be dismissed.

“Well, apparently not, because the next day a human banned me!!!!” says Joyce. She says she felt mortified. “I’d just got my voice back and now they’d taken it away from me … and only two days after I’d done a presentation to my local MND group telling them how amazing ElevenLabs were.”

Joyce contacted ElevenLabs, who apologized and reinstated her account. But it’s still not clear why she was banned in the first place. When I first asked Sophia Noel, a company representative, about the incident, she directed me to the company’s prohibited use policy.

There are rules against threatening child safety, engaging in illegal behavior, providing medical advice, impersonating others, interfering with elections, and more. But there’s nothing specifically about inappropriate language. I asked Noel about this, and she said that Joyce’s remark was most likely interpreted as a threat.

ElevenLabs’ terms of use state that the company does not have any obligation to screen, edit, or monitor content but add that it may “terminate or suspend” access to its services when content is “reasonably likely, in our sole determination, to violate applicable law or [the user] Terms.” ElevenLabs has a moderation tool that “screens content to ensure it aligns with our Terms of Service,” says Dustin Blank, head of partnerships at the company.

The question is: Should companies be screening the language of people with motor neuron disease?

After all, that’s not how other communication devices for people with this condition work. People with MND are usually advised to “bank” their voices as soon as they can—to record set phrases that can be used to create a synthetic voice that sounds a bit like them, albeit a somewhat robotic-sounding version. (Jules recently joked that his sounded like “a Daft Punk song at quarter speed.”)

Banked voices aren’t subject to the same scrutiny, says Joyce’s husband, Paul. “Joyce was told … you can put whatever [language] you want in there,” he says. Voice banking wasn’t an option for Joyce, whose speech had already deteriorated by the time she was diagnosed with MND. Jules did bank his voice but doesn’t tend to use it, because the voice clone sounds so much better. 

Joyce doesn’t hold a grudge—and her experience is far from universal. Jules uses the same technology, but he hasn’t received any warnings about his language—even though a comedy routine he performs using his voice clone contains plenty of curse words, says his wife, Maria. He opened a recent set by yelling “Fuck you guys!” at the audience—his way of ensuring they don’t give him any pity laughs, he joked. That comedy set is even promoted on the ElevenLabs website.

Blank says language like that used by Joyce is no longer restricted. “There is no specific swear ban that I know of,” says Noel. That’s just as well. 

“People living with MND should be able to say whatever is on their mind, even swearing,” says Richard Cave of the MND Association in the UK, who helps people with MND set up their voice clones. “There’s plenty to swear about.”

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You can read more about how voice clones are re-creating the voices of people with motor neuron disease in this story.

Researchers are working to create realistic avatars of people with strokes and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that can be controlled via a brain implant. Last year, two such individuals were able to use these devices to speak at a rate of around 60 to 70 words per minute—half the rate of typical speech, but more than four times faster than had previously been achieved using a similar approach. 

Other people with ALS who are locked in—completely paralyzed but cognitively able—have used brain implants to communicate, too. A few years ago, a man in Germany used such a device to ask for massages and beer, and to tell his son he loved him. 

Several companies are working on creating hyperrealistic avatars. Don’t call them deepfakes— they prefer to think of them as “synthetic media,” writes my former colleague Melissa Heikkilä, who created her own avatar with the company Synthesia.

ElevenLabs’ tool can be used to create “humanlike speech” in 32 languages. Meta is building a model that can translate over 100 languages into 36 other languages.

From around the web

Covid-19 conspiracy theorists—some of whom believe the virus is an intentionally engineered bioweapon—will soon be heading US agencies. Some federal workers are worried they may be out for revenge against current and former employees. (Wired)

Cats might have spread bird flu to humans—and vice versa. That’s according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which published the finding but then abruptly removed it. (The New York Times)

And a dairy worker is confirmed to have been infected with a second strain of bird flu that more recently spilled over from birds to cows. The person’s only symptom was conjunctivitis. (Ars Technica)

Health officials in states with abortion bans are claiming that either few or zero abortions are taking place. The claims are “ludicrous,” according to doctors in those states. (KFF Health News)

A judge in the UK has warned women against accepting sperm donations from a man who claims to have fathered more than 180 children in several countries. Robert Charles Albon, who calls himself Joe Donor, has subjected a female couple to a “nightmare” of controlling behavior, the judge said. (The Guardian)

How the tiny microbes in your mouth could be putting your health at risk

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

This week I’ve been working on a piece about teeth. Well, sort of teeth. Specifically, lab-grown bioengineered teeth. Researchers have created these teeth with a mixture of human and pig tooth cells and grown them in the jaws of living mini pigs.

“We’re working on trying to create functional replacement teeth,” Pamela Yelick of Tufts University, one of the researchers behind the work, told me. The idea is to develop an alternative to titanium dental implants. Replacing lost or damaged teeth with healthy, living, lab-grown ones might be a more appealing option than drilling a piece of metal into a person’s jawbone.

Current dental implants can work well, but they’re not perfect. They don’t attach to bones and gums in the same way that real teeth do. And around 20% of people who get implants end up developing an infection called peri-implantitis, which can lead to bone loss.

It is all down to the microbes that grow on them. There’s a complex community of microbes living in our mouths, and disruptions can lead to infection. But these organisms don’t just affect our mouths; they also seem to be linked to a growing number of disorders that can affect our bodies and brains. If you’re curious, read on.

The oral microbiome, as it is now called, was first discovered in 1670 by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a self-taught Dutch microbiologist. “I didn’t clean my teeth for three days and then took the material that had lodged in small amounts on the gums above my front teeth … I found a few living animalcules,” he wrote in a letter to the Royal Society at the time.

Van Leeuwenhoek had used his own homemade microscopes to study the “animalcules” he found in his mouth. Today, we know that these organisms include bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses, each of which comes in lots of types. “Everyone’s mouth is home to hundreds of bacterial species,” says Kathryn Kauffman at the University of Buffalo, who studies the oral microbiome.

These organisms interact with each other and with our own immune systems, and researchers are still getting to grips with how the interactions work. Some microbes feed on sugars or fats in our diets, for example, while others seem to feed on our own cells. Depending on what they consume and produce, microbes can alter the environment of the mouth to either promote or inhibit the growth of other microbes.

This complex microbial dance seems to have a really important role in our health. Oral diseases and even oral cancers have been linked to an imbalance in the oral microbiome, which scientists call “dysbiosis.” Tooth decay, for example, has been attributed to an overgrowth of microbes that produce acids that can damage teeth. 

Specific oral microbes are also being linked to an ever-growing list of diseases of the body and brain, including rheumatoid arthritis, metabolic disease, cardiovascular diseases, inflammatory bowel disease, colorectal cancer, and more.

There’s also growing evidence that these oral microbes contribute to neurodegenerative disease. A bacterium called P. gingivalis, which plays a role in the development of chronic periodontitis, has been found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. And people who are infected with P. gingivalis also experience a decline in their cognitive abilities over a six-month period.

Scientists are still figuring out how oral microbes might travel from the mouth to cause disease elsewhere. In some cases, “you swallow the saliva that contains them … and they can lodge in your heart and other parts of the body,” says Yelick. “They can result in a systemic inflammation that just happens in the background.”

In other cases, the microbes may be hitching a ride in our own immune cells to journey through the bloodstream, as the “Trojan horse hypothesis” posits. There’s some evidence that Fusobacterium nucleatum, a bacterium commonly found in the mouth, does this by hiding in white blood cells. 

There’s a lot to learn about exactly how these tiny microbes are exerting such huge influence over everything from our metabolism and bone health to our neurological function. But in the meantime, the emerging evidence is a good reminder to us all to look after our teeth. At least until lab-grown ones become available.

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You can read more about Yelick’s attempt to grow humanlike teeth in mini pigs here.

The gut microbiome is even more complex than the one in our mouths. Some scientists believe that people in traditional societies have the healthiest collections of gut microbes. But research on the topic has left some of the people in those groups feeling exploited. 

Research suggests our microbiomes change as we age. Scientists are exploring whether maintaining our microbiomes might help us stave off age-related disease.

The makeup of a gut microbiome can be assessed by analyzing fecal samples. This research might be able to reveal what a person has eaten and help provide personalized dietary advice.

There are also communities of microbes living on our skin. Scientists have engineered skin microbes to prevent and treat cancer in mice. Human trials are in the works.

From around the web

Argentina has declared that it will withdraw from the World Health Organization, following a similar move from the US. President Javier Milei has criticized the WHO for its handling of the covid-19 pandemic and called it a “nefarious organization.” (Al Jazeera)

Dairy cows in Nevada have been infected with a form of bird flu different from the one that has been circulating in US dairy herds for months. (The New York Times)

Staff at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been instructed to withdraw pending journal publications that mention terms including “transgender” and “pregnant people.” But the editors of the British Medical Journal have said they “will not retract published articles on request by an author on the basis that they contained so-called banned words.” “Retraction occurs in circumstances where clear evidence exists of major errors, data fabrication, or falsification that compromise the reliability of the research findings. It is not a matter of author request,” two editors have written. (BMJ)

Al Nowatzki had been chatting to his AI girlfriend, Erin, for months. Then, in late January, Erin told him to kill himself, and provided explicit instructions on how to do so. (MIT Technology Review)

Is our use of the internet and AI tools making us cognitively lazy? “Digital amnesia” might just be a sign of an aging brain. (Nature)

How measuring vaccine hesitancy could help health professionals tackle it

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US’s health agencies, has been facing questions from senators as part of his confirmation hearing for the role. So far, it’s been a dramatic watch, with plenty of fiery exchanges, screams from audience members, and damaging revelations.

There’s also been a lot of discussion about vaccines. Kennedy has long been a vocal critic of vaccines. He has spread misinformation about the effects of vaccines. He’s petitioned the government to revoke the approval of vaccines. He’s sued pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines. 

Kennedy has his supporters. But not everyone who opts not to vaccinate shares his worldview. There are lots of reasons why people don’t vaccinate themselves or their children.

Understanding those reasons will help us tackle an issue considered to be a huge global health problem today. And plenty of researchers are working on tools to do just that.

Jonathan Kantor is one of them. Kantor, who is jointly affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the University of Oxford in the UK, has been developing a scale to measure and assess “vaccine hesitancy.”

That term is what best captures the diverse thoughts and opinions held by people who don’t get vaccinated, says Kantor. “We used to tend more toward [calling] someone … a vaccine refuser or denier,” he says. But while some people under this umbrella will be stridently opposed to vaccines for various reasons, not all of them will be. Some may be unsure or ambivalent. Some might have specific fears, perhaps about side effects or even about needle injections.

Vaccine hesitancy is shared by “a very heterogeneous group,” says Kantor. That group includes “everyone from those who have a little bit of wariness … and want a little bit more information … to those who are strongly opposed and feel that it is their mission in life to spread the gospel regarding the risks of vaccination.”

To begin understanding where individuals sit on this spectrum and why, Kantor and his colleagues scoured published research on vaccine hesitancy. They sent surveys to 50 people, asking them detailed questions about their feelings on vaccines. The researchers were looking for themes: Which issues kept cropping up?

They found that prominent concerns about vaccines tend to fall into three categories: beliefs, pain, and deliberation. Beliefs might be along the lines of “It is unhealthy for children to be vaccinated as much as they are today.” Concerns around pain center more on the immediate consequences of the vaccination, such as fears about the injection. And deliberation refers to the need some people feel to “do their own research.”

Kantor and his colleagues used their findings to develop a 13-question survey, which they trialed in 500 people from the UK and 500 more from the US. They found that responses to the questionnaire could predict whether someone had been vaccinated against covid-19.

Theirs is not the first vaccine hesitancy scale out there—similar questionnaires have been developed by others, often focusing on parents’ feelings about their children’s vaccinations. But Kantor says this is the first to incorporate the theme of deliberation—a concept that seems to have become more popular during the early days of covid-19 vaccination rollouts.

Nicole Vike at the University of Cincinnati and her colleagues are taking a different approach. They say research has suggested that how people feel about risks and rewards seems to influence whether they get vaccinated (although not necessarily in a simple or direct manner).

Vike’s team surveyed over 4,000 people to better understand this link, asking them information about themselves and how they felt about a series of pictures of sports, nature scenes, cute and aggressive animals, and so on. Using machine learning, they built a model that could predict, from these results, whether a person would be likely to get vaccinated against covid-19.

This survey could be easily distributed to thousands of people and is subtle enough that people taking it might not realize it is gathering information about their vaccine choices, Vike and her colleagues wrote in a paper describing their research. And the information collected could help public health centers understand where there is demand for vaccines, and conversely, where outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases might be more likely.

Models like these could be helpful in combating vaccine hesitancy, says Ashlesha Kaushik, vice president of the Iowa Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The information could enable health agencies to deliver tailored information and support to specific communities that share similar concerns, she says.

Kantor, who is a practicing physician, hopes his questionnaire could offer doctors and other health professionals insight into their patients’ concerns and suggest ways to address them. It isn’t always practical for doctors to sit down with their patients for lengthy, in-depth discussions about the merits and shortfalls of vaccines. But if a patient can spend a few minutes filling out a questionnaire before the appointment, the doctor will have a starting point for steering a respectful and fruitful conversation about the subject.

When it comes to vaccine hesitancy, we need all the insight we can get. Vaccines prevent millions of deaths every year. One and half million children under the age of five die every year from vaccine-preventable diseases, according to the children’s charity UNICEF. In 2019, the World Health Organization included “vaccine hesitancy” on its list of 10 threats to global health.

When vaccination rates drop, we start to see outbreaks of the diseases the vaccines protect against. We’ve seen this a lot recently with measles, which is incredibly infectious. Sixteen measles outbreaks were reported in the US in 2024.

Globally, over 22 million children missed their first dose of the measles vaccine in 2023, and measles cases rose by 20%. Over 107,000 people around the world died from measles that year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of them were children.

Vaccine hesitancy is dangerous. “It’s really creating a threatening environment for these vaccine-preventable diseases to make a comeback,” says Kaushik. 

Kantor agrees: “Anything we can do to help mitigate that, I think, is great.”

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In 2021, my former colleague Tanya Basu wrote a guide to having discussions about vaccines with people who are hesitant. Kindness and nonjudgmentalism will get you far, she wrote.

In December 2020, as covid-19 ran rampant around the world, doctors took to social media platforms like TikTok to allay fears around the vaccine. Sharing their personal experiences was important—but not without risk, A.W. Ohlheiser reported at the time.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is currently in the spotlight for his views on vaccines. But he has also spread harmful misinformation about HIV and AIDS, as Anna Merlan reported.

mRNA vaccines have played a vital role in the covid-19 pandemic, and in 2023, the researchers who pioneered the science behind them were awarded a Nobel Prize. Here’s what’s next for mRNA vaccines.

Vaccines are estimated to have averted 154 million deaths in the last 50 years. That number includes 146 million children under the age of five. That’s partly why childhood vaccines are a public health success story.

From around the web

As Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Senate hearing continued this week, so did the revelations of his misguided beliefs about health and vaccines. Kennedy, who has called himself “an expert on vaccines,” said in 2021 that “we should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites, because their immune system is better than ours”—a claim that is not supported by evidence. (The Washington Post)

And in past email exchanges with his niece, a primary-care physician at NYC Health + Hospitals in New York City, RFK Jr. made repeated false claims about covid-19 vaccinations and questioned the value of annual flu vaccinations. (STAT)

Towana Looney, who became the third person to receive a gene-edited pig kidney in December, is still healthy and full of energy two months later. The milestone makes Looney the longest-living recipient of a pig organ transplant. “I’m superwoman,” she told the Associated Press. (AP)

The Trump administration’s attempt to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants, loans, and other financial assistance programs was chaotic. Even a pause in funding for global health programs can be considered a destruction, writes Atul Gawande. (The New Yorker)

How ultraprocessed is the food in your diet? This chart can help rank food items—but won’t tell you all you need to know about how healthy they are. (Scientific American)