Worries at the genome-editing summit, upping diversity under affirmative action ban, & finding insurance after Medicaid changes

A hot-button issue came up right away on the opening day of the Third International Genome Editing Summit in London.

March 7, 2023 Check out STAT+

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By Elizabeth Cooney Reporter, Morning Rounds Writer

Good morning. Today we have a dispatch from the genome-editing summit in London, a novel way Connecticut is training people to help each other get insurance, and a remarkable story of increasing diversity at a California medical school — without weighing race in admissions.

science At genome summit, experts worry rule changes on embryo research aren't enough Researchers at the Third International Genome Editing Summit in London wasted no time in addressing the elephant in the room. On the summit's first day, Chinese scientists detailed how they are working to prevent a repeat of the scandal that broke on the eve of the summit five years ago, when the since-disgraced and imprisoned He Jiankui said he'd created the first gene-edited children.  Over the intervening five years, nearly a dozen laws limiting human genome editing have been written or refined, Peng Yaojin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said. Speaking after Peng, Joy Y. Zhang, who studies science in China at the University of Kent, called these changes insufficient. "The new measures fail to directly address how privately funded research and other social ventures will be monitored," she said. It was in a private lab that He edited the embryos of two girls later known as "CRISPR babies." STAT's Megan Molteni has more from London. health care One state's idea for keeping people insured after they lose Medicaid coverage  Timothy Tai for STAT When pandemic-era eligibility rules expire come April 1, Medicaid can cut people from its rolls. That means more people will need to shop for health insurance — never an easy task. If you don't have access to a federal or employer program, you might try an insurance broker. But what if there are none near you? In Connecticut, you can turn to Broker Academy, the brainchild of the state's Obamacare chief James Michel. The state program trains candidates of color in the jargon and the specifics of how to sign people up for health insurance, so that people seeking coverage can get culturally competent help. "There are a lot of people living in our community who think they can't afford health care, but the truth is, we really can't afford not to have health care," Monica Forbes, a newly trained broker (above with her husband Venton, also a new broker), told STAT's Rachel Cohrs. Read more.  health tech What 'bothers' the FDA commissioner, and the agency's hiring challenges FDA Commissioner Robert Califf told STAT it "bothers" him that Novo Nordisk, which makes weight-loss drug Wegovy, funded the development of obesity coursework for medical schools. "I think it's a shame that you would need to depend on a pharmaceutical company for an educational program about something that's affecting half of Americans," he added yesterday. More points from Cardiff's interview:  On social media: "We can make what I think is a very rational decision that 20 years ago people would have accepted and … now the FDA puts out a press release, and five minutes later, there's an army of people disagreeing with it." On hiring: "The hyper-intensity of the criticisms, the public villainization of individuals, the physical threats. … You could be an endowed professor at a university and have everyone tell you you're great, or you could go to work at the FDA and be on the front page of the newspaper for any decision that you make." Read the full interview here.

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Closer Look How one medical school achieved diversity, even under an affirmative action ban There's a Supreme Court decision looming on affirmative action that worries people in higher education tasked with improving the diversity of their student bodies. Perhaps they can look to University of California, Davis, which — despite a state law barring affirmative action at state universities — boasts the country's most diverse medical school after the historically Black Howard and Hispanic-serving Florida International. Mark Henderson, the physician who revamped the admissions process at Davis's medical school when he took over 16 years ago, has said he's dedicated to revolutionizing how medical students are chosen.  At medical schools, training future physicians who are as diverse as their patients is a matter of life and death. "I can't say this strongly enough," Geoffrey Young, who leads a national plan to transform the health care workforce, told STAT's Usha Lee McFarling. "Diversity saves lives." Read how UC Davis did it. public health Why people do — or don't — trust public health  Public health has been hammered over the last three years, suffering from underfunding and understaffing during a historic pandemic. Its reputation has also taken a hit during Covid-19, as researchers explored in a recent February 2022 survey of more than 4,000 Americans. Writing in Health Affairs, the authors report that about 4 in 10 adults said they had a great deal of trust in the CDC, while about 3 in 10 felt that way about their local health departments.  Those with lower levels of trust in agencies cited a perception of political influence and a pattern of too many conflicting recommendations. People with higher levels of trust said they believed agencies offered evidence-based policies and provided important resources such as tests and vaccines. health Kids raised by LGBTQ parents do as well or better than kids with opposite-sex parents The kids are all right, no matter what their parents' sexual orientation, according to new research comparing children growing up in "sexual minority" families to children with parents of the opposite sex. The paper in BMJ Global Health analyzed 34 studies published between 1989 and 2022 conducted in countries where same-sex relationships were legal. Its authors defined sexual minority families as those with parents whose sexual orientation was considered outside cultural, societal, or physiological norms. Family outcomes were similar across measures such as children's mental and physical health, parents' mental health and parenting stress, and parent–child relationships. Among preschoolers in particular, child psychological adjustment and child-parent relationships were better in sexual minority families. "Parents' sexual orientation is not, in and of itself, an important determinant of children's development," the authors write. by the numbers

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Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,

elizabeth.cooney@statnews.com

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