The First Cohort
Medical research, with the receipts
Sunday, July 26, 2026 · Evidence-led medical research news
The Investigation
What the record shows when someone actually reads it.
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.
More Investigations
Primary documents, named names, receipts.
NEJM Retracted the Study That Approved Amgen's Vasculitis Drug. It Had Never Done That in 200 Years.
A Pharma-Funded Nonprofit Is Lobbying the FDA to Kill Seven Peptides It Can't Sell You
For Years, a Foreign Factory Could Put the Active Ingredient in Your Medicine and Never Tell the FDA
The Research Desk
The findings we covered this week, by condition.
The Sweeteners Sold to Diabetics as the Safe Swap Tracked With Faster Brain Aging
Anti-Tau Alzheimer's Drugs Keep Hitting Their Target and Missing the Disease
Your First Pregnancy Rewires the Brain for One Baby. Your Second Rewires It for the Chaos of Two.
Orforglipron Reaches Deep Into the Brain's Reward Circuit and Turns the Dopamine Down
The GLP-1s That Barely Move the Scale Don't Cause Hair Loss, and That's the Clue Everyone Missed
The Mice Ate More and Got Leaner. The Switch Was One Amino Acid, Turned Down.
Five Years After COVID, Japan Is Still Dying at Pandemic Rates, and Confirmed COVID Explains Only a Tenth
The Nose-Spray TB Vaccine in Your Feed This Week Has Only Ever Worked in Mice
Against Omicron, a Second COVID Dose Added Almost Nothing for Kids Who Were Already Infected
We Checked
Claims doing the rounds, tested against the evidence.
A Petri Dish of Angry Immune Cells, a Little Ultrasound, and a Very Big Headline
In the Lab, Coffee Flipped an Anti-Aging Switch. The Caffeine Barely Did.
The Evolutionary Fix for Drug Resistance Works Best on a Tumor Too Small to Find
Browse by Condition
198 stories in the archive.
Newsletter
The Sunday Cohort
One weekly dispatch. The stories that held up.