Lena Marshall
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Terence Tao Fears a Cancer Cure Nobody Can Explain. The FDA Clears Cancer Drugs That Never Proved They Extend Life.
Terence Tao says he would want a human expert to understand an AI cancer cure before taking it. The oncologist Vinay Prasad says that misses how medicine already works, and the receipts show the cancer drugs worth fearing are the legible ones approved on a shrinking tumor that never proved they help
Nutrition & FoodSugar on the Hospital Tray Tracked With Deeper Antibiotic Damage to the Gut
Among 173 transplant patients on antibiotics, each extra 100 grams of sugar went with 24 percent lower gut diversity, and the nutrition shakes hospitals often recommend appeared to do the most harm.
Drugs & FDAGaming a Cancer Trial Is 'Cheap and Easy,' Says a Former Top FDA Official
Vinay Prasad says nobody needs AI to fake a phase 3 cancer win, and a Mayo Clinic audit found 16 of 96 FDA cancer approvals rested on control arms its authors judged suboptimal.
CancerThe 80.5 Percent Headline, and the Three Confirmed Responses Behind It
Vividion led its colorectal announcement with an 80.5 percent disease-control rate. In that same group, three tumors shrank enough to count as a response.
InvestigationsThe Mandatory Drug-Pricing Rule Nearly Every Major Drugmaker Was Allowed to Skip
Medicare's actuaries scored the final rule at $440 million in savings. The proposal they started with was worth $12 billion.
InvestigationsThe FDA Is Recruiting New Advisers Without Publishing the Rule for Who's Too Conflicted to Sit
Acting commissioner Kyle Diamantas is inviting scientists and 'consumer voices' onto the FDA's advisory panels. The agency has never published how it decides which of them carries a disqualifying conflict, thirteen years after Congress ordered it to.
CancerThe Inherited Lung Cancer Gene That Rode Out of Appalachia on a Wagon Road
Carriers were about 25 times as likely to develop lung cancer as everyone else, more than 60 times if they never smoked. The variant came over with British and Irish settlers, concentrated in Southern Appalachia after a founder event two centuries ago, and surfaced in a consumer spit-kit database, n
InvestigationsThe Fraud Hunter Says She Can No Longer Tell Fake Science From Real
Journals retracted more than 10,000 papers in a single year. In one test, 2 of 3 biomedical experts could not tell AI-fabricated images from real ones, and Elisabeth Bik, the field's most relentless fraud hunter, says peer review is not prepared.
InvestigationsKennedy's Ultra-Processed Food Rule Leaves Open the Loophole He Promised to Close
In February he vowed to act on the petition that demanded real safety review of food additives. In August his FDA proposed a rule that still lets companies certify their own chemicals as safe, and sell them before anyone at the agency looks.
InvestigationsBritain Is Building a National Genetic Screening Service on Scores That Miss Nine of Every Ten Cases
In 2019 the same company's test convinced a health secretary he might die of prostate cancer. He was near average. Now its scores are heading into a biobank of five million Britons and the NHS's new prevention service.
CancerA 34-Year Mammography Advocate Co-Wrote the Study That Shrinks Screening's Biggest Harm
Overdiagnosis, the risk that screening treats cancers that never would have killed you, was pegged as high as 50 percent. A reinterpretation of eight old trials now puts it under 5, with an author who has promoted screening for 34 years.
CancerThe Company Behind the CRISPR Leukemia Breakthrough Shut Itself Down a Year Before the Paper Ran
Thirty patients with aggressive blood cancers got a CRISPR-edited transplant that worked as designed. Vor Biopharma, the company that built it, had already laid off 95 percent of its staff and left the program behind.
InvestigationsA Warehouse Stored Infant Formula Among 26 Rodents. After 32 Inspections, No One Was Charged.
The FDA found infant formula stored among 26 rodents at a Minneapolis warehouse the state had inspected 26 times since 2013. The remedy was a cleanup order and no charges, the same month the Justice Department let Abbott pay nearly $385 million and close its own formula criminal case with no one cha
Drugs & FDAThe FDA's New Fast Lane for Experimental Drugs Is Run by a Lawyer Who Defended the Food and Tobacco Industries
Operation TrialBlazer lets drug sponsors feed their first-in-human safety data to the FDA in pieces, on a rolling clock, to shave months off the wait. The review it speeds is the one that decides whether an untested drug can go into a person at all.
Drugs & FDAThe FDA Warned a Generation Off Hormones. A Danish Registry Puts the Clot Risk in the Pill, Not the Patch.
Oral hormone therapy was tied to more clots, and to strokes and heart attacks at higher doses taken longer. The patches and gels carried no general increase. The warning that scared a generation of women off never drew the line.
CancerThe Compound That Outsmarts Cancer's Defenses: Eight Cell Lines, a Few Mice, and a Startup
Baylor researchers say CS18 dismantles the survival switch tumors use to resist treatment. It works in eight cell lines and a handful of mice, and its inventors just incorporated a company around it.
Drugs & FDANo FDA-Approved Drug Stops Preterm Labor: a Vanderbilt Screen of All 1,191 Approved Drugs Landed on an Asthma Steroid
Every drug used to halt preterm contractions is borrowed off-label; the FDA has never approved one for the job. A Vanderbilt team screened all 1,191 approved drugs and landed on an asthma steroid.
Nutrition & FoodCalcium and Vitamin D Cut Hip Fractures 16 Percent. The Authors Called That 'Little to No Meaningful Benefit.'
The combined calcium and vitamin D arm cut hip fractures with a confidence interval that cleared significance. Then a bar the researchers set for themselves, one that would take more than halving hip fractures to meet, turned the result into a headline telling people to stop.
Infectious DiseaseFor Nineteen Years, Bundibugyo Was a Footnote in the Ebola Family. It Has Killed More Than 3,000 People Since Congo Confirmed It in May.
Congo confirmed a little-known Ebola cousin on May 15. By September it had reached 61 health zones, killed nearly half of its confirmed patients, and traveled abroad in infected and evacuated people, and the celebrated Ebola vaccine was never built to stop it.
CancerThe Healing Cells That Cheat Death Carry a Catch: Their Offspring Are Seven Times Harder to Kill
A radiation-blasted fruit fly rebuilt half its ruined tissue in two days, and the cells that pulled it off left descendants 7 times harder to kill, which may be close to how some tumors outlast the treatments meant to finish them.
InvestigationsThey Called It GoodBrother: Four Years of Teaching the Elderly to Accept Cameras in Their Homes
The project's own charter says the aim is to 'increase user acceptance' of audio and video monitoring in the homes of older and frail people. On World Patient Safety Day, they call that safety.
Drugs & FDAThe FDA Approved a $3.95 Million Gene Therapy It Rejected Fourteen Months Ago
In July 2025 the FDA refused to approve this Sanfilippo gene therapy and faulted the factory, not the science. Fourteen months later it is the first treatment for a fatal childhood brain disease, cleared on 17 treated children against a comparison group the maker built, at $3.95 million a dose.
CancerThe Mesothelioma Drug in This Month's Headlines Was Tested in Fifteen People
The scientist whose lab found the drug's target is also chief science officer of the company selling it, a conflict the breakthrough headlines tuck into a job title.
Drugs & FDAThe Data on the First Sanfilippo Gene Therapy Were Ready Last Summer. The FDA Spent the Next Year on the Factory.
The FDA said Ultragenyx's clinical data were robust in July 2025, then rejected its Sanfilippo gene therapy over manufacturing questions. Approval came fourteen months later, for children who lose skills and die on a clock.