The First Cohort
Medical research, with the receipts
Sunday, July 26, 2026
A Gene-Editing Trial Killed a 6-Year-Old. Nature Published the Science and Left Her Out of the Record.
Her parents paid $860,000 to base-edit their daughter's brain. She died of an immune reaction within a week, and the published paper never says so.
The published record of a base-editing trial that ended in a child's death.
We Checked
Claims doing the rounds, tested against the evidence.
The Nose-Spray TB Vaccine in Your Feed This Week Has Only Ever Worked in Mice
Johns Hopkins fused two genes into a nasal spray and cleared tuberculosis faster in mice.
What the evidence showsDNA vaccines have dazzled mice for thirty years.
A Petri Dish of Angry Immune Cells, a Little Ultrasound, and a Very Big Headline
UAH researchers used sound waves to shift immune cells from attack mode toward repair. The press release said "stop arthritis before it starts."
What the evidence showsThe experiment never left the dish.
Anti-Tau Alzheimer's Drugs Keep Hitting Their Target and Missing the Disease
Tau is the new headliner at the Alzheimer's conference, but the anti-tau antibodies keep proving they bind the protein while doing nothing for patients.
The GLP-1s That Barely Move the Scale Don't Cause Hair Loss, and That's the Clue Everyone Missed
Women on semaglutide shed hair at about twice the rate of men, and the weakest GLP-1s show almost no signal.
In the Lab, Coffee Flipped an Anti-Aging Switch. The Caffeine Barely Did.
Stephen Safe's lab reported that coffee's polyphenols, more than its caffeine, switch on a cellular stress-defense receptor. Every experiment ran in a dish.
New Findings
Research that landed this week, and what it actually shows.
Orforglipron Reaches Deep Into the Brain's Reward Circuit and Turns the Dopamine Down
David Ho's Lab Built an Antibody to Neutralize Nearly Every Strain of HIV. Its First Test in People Held for Two Weeks.
Pregnancy Stations Killer T Cells in the Milk Ducts, and a Decade Later They Haven't Left
The Blue Light Over Your Fish Tank Is Now Building Drug Molecules
The Sweeteners Sold to Diabetics as the Safe Swap Tracked With Faster Brain Aging
Five Years After COVID, Japan Is Still Dying at Pandemic Rates, and Confirmed COVID Explains Only a Tenth
The Mice Ate More and Got Leaner. The Switch Was One Amino Acid, Turned Down.
A Chinese Bark Compound Reached the Black-Box Arthritis Drugs' Pathway From Upstream, in Rats
Investigations
Primary documents, named names, and what the record shows.
NEJM Retracted the Study That Approved Amgen's Vasculitis Drug. It Had Never Done That in 200 Years.
The FDA says the drug's superiority result came from re-scoring nine patients after the trial was unblinded. It is still on U.S. shelves.
A Pharma-Funded Nonprofit Is Lobbying the FDA to Kill Seven Peptides It Can't Sell You
The Partnership for Safe Medicines has deep ties to the drug lobby. Now it is urging the FDA to permanently block BPC-157, MOTS-c and five other off-patent peptides.
For Years, a Foreign Factory Could Put the Active Ingredient in Your Medicine and Never Tell the FDA
Also published today
Everything else from 26 July.
Pepsi Paid $1.95 Billion for Poppi, in a Category That Averages as Much Sugar as Fiber
The Evolutionary Fix for Drug Resistance Works Best on a Tumor Too Small to Find
The FDA Revoked Two Petroleum Dyes That Industry Abandoned Before Most Americans Were Born
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