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Two-year-old Giselle Ghattas is fearless, funny and affectionate, according to her parents. She loves diving headfirst down playground slides and climbing onto anything she can reach. Giselle seems like any other lively toddler, despite having a rare genetic disorder that threatens to rev her immune system at full throttle. The controversial embryo tests that promise
Mice All mice were group-housed and experiments were conducted in accordance with procedures approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Tufts University School of Medicine and NIH guidelines. All mice were housed in a 12-h (7:00 to 19:00) light–dark colony room at 22–24 °C, 30–50% humidity and
Credit: Jakub Zerdzicki/Alamy In May 2024, four years into my postgraduate career, I decided that I wanted to finish my PhD by the end of 2025. The problem was that, despite working on many ongoing projects, I had not yet published a paper discussing my PhD work. My days were full and I was spending
Neanderthals are known to have had physiological differences from Homo sapiens, including thicker bones and defined brow ridges, as in this model.Credit: Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Two genetic changes in the genomes of Neanderthals contributed to the extinct hominin’s characteristic robust physique — and the differences persist in modern humans. The variants make carriers
RESEARCH BRIEFINGS 05 August 2026 A study of more than one million people shows that rare genetic variants that disrupt the FNIP1 gene are associated with a favourable metabolic profile and a roughly 60% lower risk of cardiometabolic disease than the general population. Silencing genes in the FNIP1 pathway in mice induces fat breakdown and