Category: BLOG

(MIT Technology Review) – Companies are playing word games with promising cancer treatments.

In its formal communications, like regulatory filings, Moderna hasn’t called the shot a cancer vaccine since 2023. That’s when it partnered up with Merck and rebranded the tech as individualized neoantigen therapy, or INT. Moderna’s CEO said at the time that the renaming was to “better describe the goal of the program.” (BioNTech, the European vaccine maker that’s also working in cancer, has shifted its language too, moving from “neoantigen vaccine” in 2021 to “mRNA cancer immunotherapies” in its latest report.)

The logic of casting it as a therapy is that patients already have cancer—so it’s a treatment as opposed to a preventive measure. But it’s no secret what the other goal is: to distance important innovation from vaccine fearmongering, which has been inflamed by high-ranking US officials. (Read More)

(WSJ) – Jonathan Gavalas was a seemingly healthy and even-keeled 36-year-old when he began chatting with Gemini, Google’s chatbot, in part to seek comfort about splitting up with his wife.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of the entire chatlog between Aug. 25, 2025, and Oct. 2, 2025, covering more than 2,000 printed pages, shows that Gemini intervened at least 12 times to try to steer Gavalas back to reality and mentioned a crisis hotline seven times. The log also reveals that Gavalas was quickly able to direct Gemini right back into the fictional narrative, where it repeatedly encouraged his delusions.

Here are edited excerpts from those chats, which began rather mundane, turned increasingly strange, and ended up deadly. (Read More)

(NYT) – Prescribing produce, crafting meals: More medical schools are teaching students how to cook and use food as a tool for treating patients.

“It’s unfortunately a big misconception that medicine doesn’t have anything to do with food,” she said, chopping dill with hands she hopes will one day be delivering babies.

That the modern American medical system should view the kitchen as an extension of the doctor’s office isn’t a novel idea. But it’s riding a populist wave that merges the traditionally progressive Good Food Movement — with its focus on local food, the environment and food justice — with the largely conservative, food-centered Make America Healthy Again agenda. (Read More)

(Comment) – There is, of course, something a bit ridiculous to this whole scene: the “ideal” measurements for girls and boys at each month calculated down to the inch, the doctors with clipboards, the very concept of the most “scientific” baby. There is, too, something comical in the false confidence and the utter inadequacy of a score between one and a hundred to grab hold of even the smallest corner of the personhood of these babies—smiling and blinking and clutching at fingers—much less the personhood of all the babies not represented in those rosy, white rows.  

And yet there is also something unsettlingly familiar, something so human in the attempt. We want a world we can measure. We want a world we can master.  (Read More)

(WSJ) – Noelia Castillo Ramos was in despair. By helping her kill herself, the Spanish state destroyed her autonomy.

Advocates of assisted suicide present Castillo’s death as an exercise of individual liberty. They argue that choosing the timing of one’s death is a matter of autonomy, that one should be able to lay down one’s life at will rather than suffer through difficult circumstances. That argument has gained traction across several European nations, in Canada and in some U.S. states.

But autonomy means more than the presence of a choice. It depends on the conditions under which that choice is made. (Read More)

(Wired) – Meta’s Muse Spark model offers to analyze users’ health data, including lab results. Beyond the obvious privacy risks, it’s not a capable stand-in for a real doctor.

Meta claims that Muse Spark was designed, in part, to be better at answering questions people have about their health. The company even worked with “over 1,000 physicians to curate training data that enables more factual and comprehensive responses,” according to Meta’s announcement blog.

As the new model rolls out to millions of users, I tested Muse Spark to see how it would respond to health-related questions. (Read More)

(Wired) – OpenAI is throwing its support behind an Illinois state bill that would shield AI labs from liability in cases where AI models are used to cause serious societal harms, such as death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1 billion in property damage.

The effort seems to mark a shift in OpenAI’s legislative strategy. Until now, OpenAI has largely played defense, opposing bills that could have made AI labs liable for their technology’s harms. Several AI policy experts tell WIRED that SB 3444—which could set a new standard for the industry—is a more extreme measure than bills OpenAI has supported in the past. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – In desperation, the woman’s care team reached out to Müller, a hematologist-oncologist at the University Hospital of Erlangen, a roughly three-hour drive away by ambulance. In recent years, he and his colleagues have made a name for themselves pioneering experimental CAR-T cell treatments—a type of personalized immunotherapy originally developed for cancer—against a variety of autoimmune diseases, with promising early results. Small studies of CAR-T, as well as early results from several ongoing clinical trials, show that many people with autoimmune disease go into remission after treatment; some patients are now years out from CAR-T cell therapy and remain in good health without the help of any drugs. (Read More)

(Psychiatric Times) – As Canada approaches the planned implementation of their medical euthanasia program for patients with sole psychiatric illnesses, these authors make an argument as to why euthanasia should remain closed to patients with psychiatric disorders.

Unlike many other kinds of illnesses, futility or irremediability cannot be reliably resolved by clinicians in cases of psychiatric disorders, especially for any one particular individual. (Read More)