Some people getting their initial shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna coronavirus vaccines should consider waiting longer for their second dose, according to guidance the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated on Tuesday. The agency now suggests an eight-week interval between the first and second shots of those vaccines for some people older than 12, especially boys and men between 12 to 39 years.The new change, which does not affect those who have already been vaccinated, applies to about 33 million unvaccinated people. And the C.D.C. still recommends the original intervals — three weeks for Pfizer-BioNTech and four for Moderna — for certain people including those whose immune systems are moderately to severely immunocompromised, are 65 years or older, or are at risk of severe Covid.The change comes in light of research showing the longer interval between doses can increase vaccine effectiveness and reduce the risk of a serious but uncommon side effect called myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart. The overall incidence of post-vaccine myocarditis is low. A study conducted in Israel estimated that nearly 11 of every 100,000 males between 16 and 29 developed myocarditis.Earlier this month, an independent panel of scientific advisers to the C.D.C. reviewed research on myocarditis that supported an extended interval between doses. Research has shown that adolescent boys and young adult men have an increased risk of developing these heart problems after receiving their second dose of a Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine.Still, the absolute risk of myocarditis is very small, most cases are mild and short-lived, and research shows a coronavirus infection is much more likely to cause heart problems than a Covid-19 vaccine. Patients of all ages infected with the virus had nearly 16 times the risk for myocarditis than uninfected patients, according to a C.D.C. report.People who waited six to 14 weeks between the first two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines had higher antibody responses than those who waited a standard three or four weeks, according to a C.D.C. report presentation from the meeting. And the vaccines’ effectiveness against infection and hospitalization was also higher with an interval of six to eight weeks between the doses.When the vaccines first rolled out, the priority was to fully vaccinate people as quickly as possible, according to the presentation. Now, more than a year into the U.S. vaccination campaign, more data has become available to guide vaccination schedules, the presentation noted.Public health experts say a longer interval between doses means there is a risk of people getting infected after just one shot. But they say this change could sway some unvaccinated people and parents who are concerned about the potential risk of myocarditis.At the panel’s meeting, Dr. Matthew Daley, a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente in Colorado and a member of the advisory committee, said that “If the message is, ‘We already have a highly effective and highly safe vaccine or vaccines, and this is an approach to make them even safer,’ that might convince some folks.”Benjamin Mueller

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — For years, Zara Banks had been looking forward to her 14th birthday — the moment, last June, when her life would no longer be on pause.Ever since Zara, a transgender girl, was 8, she has been certain she wanted to grow up to be a woman. After conversations with her parents and sessions with a therapist, she began transitioning socially: changing her name to Zara and pronouns to she/her. When she turned 9, she began treatment with puberty blockers, drugs that would place her physiological development in limbo until she was old enough — 14 according to her doctor — to begin estrogen therapy and develop a feminine body.But last spring Arkansas enacted a law, the first of its kind in the nation, barring physicians from administering hormones or puberty blockers to transgender people younger than 18. The bill, called the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, overrode a veto by Gov. Asa Hutchinson and was to go into effect on July 28, about a month after Zara’s birthday. It is now on pause because of a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union.Zara has been able to get hormones while the court case proceeds, but worries about what the future holds. “I was just really happy, after finally waiting so long, to get something that I’ve needed for a very long time,” she said, sitting in her suburban backyard with her parents, Jasmine and Mo Banks, amid buzzing cicadas.In recent years a growing number of American teenagers have come out as transgender and sought medical care to better align their bodies with their gender identities. Even as the medical community grapples with how best to provide such care, states across the country have introduced legislation banning it outright; medical groups have condemned these laws as dangerous.Leading medical associations, including the Endocrine Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics, recommend that such care be made available to patients under 18. Still, clinicians remain divided over best practices. Last month an international group of experts focused on transgender health released a draft of new care guidelines recommending a more cautious stance on minors, who typically cannot give full legal consent until they are 18.Puberty blockers and hormone therapy, the two treatments primarily given to minors, are most effective around the ages of 8 to 14, as they can prevent the need for future surgeries in adulthood; for example, a transgender boy who took puberty blockers might not need a mastectomy later. There are risks to the drug therapies, including slowed bone growth and fertility loss, but evidence suggests that denying the care to adolescents who need it raises the risk of depression and suicide.The push to outlaw such care altogether gained momentum last year as Republicans across the country adopted the issue. Arkansas and Tennessee are the only states that have passed such laws — Tennessee banned gender-affirming care for children who have yet to reach puberty, a population that does not currently receive such care — and 19 more states have considered them, according to the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law.If upheld, the Arkansas law would also prohibit doctors from referring patients to other medical professionals for drugs or surgeries in gender-affirming care, even out of state. Any physicians who provided such care could lose their licenses or be subject to civil litigation. The law would also allow private insurers to refuse coverage of such care to transgender patients of all ages.A week before the law was to go into effect, however, it was temporarily blocked by a federal judge in response to the A.C.L.U.’s legal challenge. The trial is set for July. Transgender adolescents and their families are now living with uncertainty.“It’s pretty excruciating as a parent to be told by the state that it will become illegal to give your child what she needs to exist,” Jasmine Banks said.Zara added, “It’s not, like, other people’s decision who I am and what I’m not.”A year on the defenseSabrina Jennen, 16, and her family have joined a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against Arkansas’ Save Adolescents from Experimentation ActLiz Sanders for The New York TimesSabrina Jennen, 16, who lives in Fayetteville, has been thinking about ghosts — whether they exist, and what it would be like to encounter one.“People are much scarier than ghosts,” she said on a gusty day in Gulley Park, a sloping green space near her neighborhood.Transgender teenagers are generally prescribed gender-affirming hormones after they have gone through mental health assessments and displayed persistent distress from the gap between their bodies and their gender identities.Sabrina came out to her family in July 2020 at age 15. She saw a therapist, received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and had many conversations with her parents, Lacey and Aaron Jennen. By last January, she felt ready to start hormone therapy. Then the SAFE Act was passed.“It felt like my life was being signed away,” Sabrina said. She stayed awake at night imagining her future. “If it went into place, it would truly be the death of Sabrina,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to live and be myself.”When the bill passed, her parents asked if she wanted to be a plaintiff in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit. She did. “If it’s not me, it’s going to be someone else,” she said. “And if it’s not someone else, it’s going to be nobody.”In March 2021, Representative Robin Lundstrum, a sponsor of the bill, compared gender-affirming surgery to “mutilation” in a committee hearing on the bill. Representative Alan Clark, another of the bill’s sponsors, described hormone therapies as “experimental.” (Ms. Lundstrum and Mr. Clark did not respond to numerous interview requests.)(The latest suggested standards of care recommend 15 as the minimum age for chest surgery and 17 for genital surgery, with each patient’s case considered individually. No doctors in Arkansas currently perform any gender-affirming surgery on minors.)Dylan Brandt, 16, from Greenwood, is another plaintiff. He and his mother, Joanna Brandt, were in the State House during a hearing on the bill.“It was hard to listen to because they were saying awful things again about me and so many other people,” he said.Dr. Michele Hutchison, a pediatric endocrinologist who treats transgender adolescents in Arkansas, was one of several medical experts who testified in opposition to the bill. She told legislators that several of her young patients had attempted suicide after learning of the bill.Ms. Brandt, who also spoke at the hearing, called the experience “heartbreaking.” Dylan stood behind her; as she testified, Ms. Lundstrum approached and began talking to him, he said.Tips for Parents to Help Their Struggling TeensCard 1 of 6Are you concerned for your teen?

Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, warned on Sunday that the Omicron surge of coronavirus cases had not yet peaked nationally, saying that the next few weeks would be very difficult in many parts of the country as hospitalizations and deaths rise.In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Dr. Murthy noted the “good news” of the plateaus and drops in known cases in the Northeast, especially in New York City and New Jersey.But “the challenge is that the entire country is not moving at the same pace,” he said, adding “we shouldn’t expect a national peak in the coming days.”“The next few weeks will be tough,” he said.The highly contagious Omicron variant has fueled an explosive surge of known cases, with an average of more than 800,000 new cases a day reported on Saturday, according to a New York Times database.Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, also expressed concerns that the next several weeks would overwhelm hospitals and staff. “Right now we’re at about 150,000 people in the hospital with Covid,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “That’s more than we’ve ever had. I expect those numbers to get substantially higher.”How cases, hospitalizations and deaths are trending in the U.S.This chart shows how three key metrics compare to the corresponding peak per capita level reached nationwide last winter.

An international survey found that the pandemic had enhanced public faith in researchers and science, up from 2018.As the coronavirus pandemic put a spotlight on scientific research, people around the world gained trust in both science and scientists, according to a new survey released on Monday.Results from the public opinion poll, in a report published by the Wellcome Trust, a foundation focused on health research in London, showed that about 80 percent of people from 113 countries said they trusted science either “a lot” or “some.” About three-fourths of the 119,000 surveyed said they trusted scientists, either “a lot” or “some.”“I am not surprised by the results of the survey,” said Fatima Tokhmafshan, a geneticist and science communicator who was not involved with the poll. Ms. Tokhmafshan suggested the interdisciplinary response to the pandemic among scientists, in fields ranging from public health, to immunology, zoology and epidemiology, helped people to understand the connections between science and their own well-being.“The general public may not know scientists in real life, but most people know a doctor or a nurse,” Ms. Tokhmafshan said. “Now everyone has at least heard of a scientist or read something by a scientist.”Conducted by Gallup, the poll interviewed people from August 2020 to February 2021, while vaccine trials were underway and largely before Covid vaccines were publicly available in many countries.Worldwide, trust levels rose most substantially among people who said they knew “some,” “not much” or “nothing at all” about science since the poll was last conducted in 2018. This suggests that people without much experience with science may have gained awareness of its importance during the pandemic, according to the study’s authors.The percentage of people who said they had “a lot” of trust in science increased by at least 10 points in East Asia (especially China), Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.Within the United States, the survey found that 54 percent of Americans said they had “a lot” of trust in scientists, an increase of 9 percentage points from the 2018 poll. The most recent U.S. survey data was collected from August 2020 to October 2020, as confirmed coronavirus cases per 100,000 people rose by 60 percent.The results may surprise those who monitor the surge of misinformation about the virus, which has led many to question vaccines, to reject public health measures such as masking and distancing or to seek unapproved treatments like antimalarial drugs or ivermectin, which is mainly used as an animal deworming drug.A more recent Gallup poll conducted in July found confidence in science has increasingly diverged across partisan lines. Since the last poll was taken in 1975, Republican confidence in science fell by 27 points while Democrat confidence increased by 12 points. “The share of people who fall victim to conspiracy theories and misinformation has grown, just as the percentage of people who trust science and respect science has grown,” Ms. Tokhmafshan said. “It’s a growth that has happened on both sides.”Understand U.S.-China RelationsCard 1 of 6A tense era in U.S.-China ties.

An op-ed in Nature calls for higher ethical standards in the usage and analysis of genetic information from the Romani, a marginalized group in Europe.For decades, geneticists have collected the blood of thousands of Roma people, a marginalized group living in Europe, and deposited their DNA in public databases. The ostensible purpose of some of these studies was to learn more about the history and genetics of the Roma people.Now, a group of scientists has argued this research, which has made the Roma the most intensely studied population in Europe over the past 30 years in forensic genetic journals, is rife with ethical issues and may harm the Romani people.For five years, a team of researchers in Germany and the United Kingdom pored over more than 450 papers that used the DNA of Roma people to understand how geneticists and other scholars obtained, interpreted and shared that genetic information. Their analysis, published Wednesday in an op-ed in the journal Nature, revealed many instances of clear misuse or questionable ethics.In 1981, when scientists in Hungary sampled the blood of Roma people incarcerated in Hungarian prisons, they classified prisoners as Romani based solely on their appearance, which the authors of the new paper argue is unscientific. In 1993, another group sampling Romani DNA concluded that there were three distinct ethnic groups in the country, drawing a line between “the genuine Hungarian ethnical groups” and “Jews” and “Gypsies” — a research premise the authors of the new paper argue was racist. In the 2000s, papers on the genetics of Roma people still referred to the group with the outdated term “Gypsy,” which is considered a slur, or with pejorative terms such as “inbred” or “consanguineous.”“This is an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about ethical issues in genetic research,” said Deborah Bolnick, an anthropological geneticist at the University of Connecticut who was not involved with research. Much of this conversation has taken place in North America and Australia, not Europe, she added.“The unethical practices described here are unfortunately very familiar and not a surprise,” Dr. Bolnick added.“It’s just horrifying,” said Ethel Brooks, a Romani scholar and chair of the department of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “But of course, it’s all things we’ve known and suspected.”The analysis spanned papers published between 1921 and 2021, most of which were published in the last 30 years. The earlier papers included “so many shocking surprises,” said Veronika Lipphardt, a science historian at the University of Freiburg, Germany, such as the samples taken from incarcerated Roma people and many instances of racist language.“Many didn’t believe us,” Dr. Lipphardt said, “because it was simply so hard to believe” that such practices were “ongoing.”In Europe, the Roma people have been oppressed for hundreds of years and still experience significant discrimination. During the Holocaust, Nazis collected blood samples from Roma people imprisoned in Auschwitz and murdered hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti people. In 2015, the Slovakian government defended its practice of segregating Roma children in schools, falsely citing “mild mental disabilities” tied to “high levels of inbreeding” in Romani communities.“The slip from genetics to eugenics is one that can happen quite easily,” said Dr. Brooks.Mihai Surdu, a visiting sociologist at the University of Freiburg and an author on the paper, conceptualized the project when he was writing a book on the Roma people. While searching for publications with the words “Roma” or “Gypsies” in the titles, Dr. Surdu found what seemed like an outsized number of studies on Roma DNA — nearly 20 papers.When Dr. Surdu wrote to Dr. Lipphardt in 2012 about this phenomenon, he was unsure if it was a fluke. But over the course of their study, the researchers uncovered more than 450 genetic papers with Roma subjects.With funding from the German Research Foundation, the two researchers expanded the team to include scholars from diverse disciplines, and also consulted with Anja Reuss, a spokesman for the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, an advocacy group based in Heidelberg.They found that many studies did not adequately seek consent from the people they sampled, if they secured consent at all. Some studies cited oral consent, but “no one knows what the consent really was,” said Peter Pfaffelhuber, a mathematician at the University of Freiburg and an author on the paper.“In a way, our consent is never deemed necessary because we are not deemed able to give our consent,” Dr. Brooks said.A Roma settlement at the Lunik IX quarter of Kosice, Slovakia.Peter Lazar/Associated PressIn 2010, the main journal in the forensic genetics community, Forensic Science International: Genetics, adopted ethical requirements including informed consent. But although some papers published more recently state they were conducted with the written consent of all participants, they include DNA from earlier papers that were collected with murky procedures. “You cannot assume that consent from 30 years ago is still valid, that it can be extended forever for all possible uses,” Dr. Lipphardt said.One 2015 study pointing to Indian origins of the Roma people uploaded their amassed DNA data set to two public databases that law enforcement agencies across the world use for genetic references to solve crimes, a purpose to which the original participants likely did not consent.Even though much of this DNA was collected decades ago, its presence in public databases poses a present danger to modern communities. The 2015 study uploaded Roma DNA to the Y-STR Haplotype Reference Database, or YHRD, a searchable worldwide collection of anonymous Y-chromosome profiles that has become a crucial and contested tool helping police solve crimes. In YHRD, the national database for Bulgaria lists 52.7 percent of its data sets as “Romani” even though Roma people only make up 4.9 percent of the country’s population. If a minority population is disproportionately represented in a DNA database, this could create bias against “suspect populations,” some scholars argue. Some of these profiles came from population studies where the researchers thanked police forces for collecting the DNA.Marginalized groups like the Roma people are subject to increased surveillance and policing because of personal, institutional and cultural bias, said Matthias Wienroth, a social scientist and ethicist at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom and an author on the paper. “The continued use of genetic samples and data from marginalized communities further marginalizes these communities.”Part of the allure of Romani DNA to geneticists is the assumption that the group has been genetically isolated for hundreds of years. But the authors argue that many researchers rely on biased samples from isolated populations while intentionally excluding data from Romani people with mixed ancestry.“It was probably the most easy to get the blood samples from these places,” said Gudrun Rappold, a human geneticist at the University of Heidelberg and an author on the paper. “But then to draw conclusions with regard to these millions and millions of Roma people? This is just leading to the wrong conclusion.”Dr. Surdu added, “They’ve maintained this narrative contrary to evidence.”These highly sampled, isolated data sets, which often name specific villages, could also endanger the anonymity of individuals, especially those with rare genetic diseases, the authors argue.To ensure that Romani DNA is used ethically in the future, the researchers proposed four concrete changes. They looked to existing models for ethical DNA use for guidance, such as the Indigenous-led SING Consortium and the ethics code drafted by the San people of South Africa governing the use of their own genome, Dr. Lipphardt said.The authors recommend forming an international oversight board to investigate the DNA information from oppressed groups that is currently held in public databases, to benefit the Roma and other communities. They also call for more training on the ethics of collecting genetic data from marginalized communities, so that researchers can understand the societal implications of their work.The authors also ask journals to investigate or retract ethically fraught studies that include Romani DNA, citing Springer Nature’s recent retraction of six papers using DNA from Chinese minority ethnic groups.Finally, the researchers call for more conversations between scientists and participants, so that Roma people can learn about the benefits and risks of donating DNA.Most genetic studies of Roma DNA either seek to identify the origins of the Roma people in India or pinpoint their unique genetic mutations. But few studies aim to benefit the health and welfare of the Romani community, many of whom live in segregated settlements with less access to resources like housing and education. Dr. Lipphardt cautioned that even if genetic studies on Roma DNA led to treatments for rare diseases, there was no guarantee that those therapies would be made easily accessible to Roma people.The authors suggest scientists collaborate with and train Roma people to pursue research questions relevant to their communities. Only one paper of the 450 they examined mentioned community involvement, including training Roma doctors, nurses and midwives and conducting educational health screenings.But Dr. Surdu viewed this involvement as insufficient since the researchers did not let Romani concerns guide the research or engage the larger community, but only recruited Roma mediators to carry out a planned study. He added that he sees this access to health care and social services as a basic human right. “Informed consent for samples collected for genetic research should be fully voluntary,” Dr. Surdu said.These entrenched barriers to education are part of the reason there are fewer Romani scholars, Dr. Brooks noted. She said she felt excited about the prospect of Romani people having oversight of their DNA, both in the context of outside research and their own families.“To really open up space for these kinds of discussions within marginalized communities?” Dr. Brooks said. “It would be a scientific revolution.”

The Biden administration is “prepared to defend” sweeping new coronavirus vaccine rules for large companies amid new legal challenges, Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, said on Sunday.The administration last week set Jan. 4 as the deadline for companies with 100 or more employees to mandate Covid vaccinations or implement weekly testing of workers. The mandate would allow for medical or religious exemptions, and companies that fail to comply may be fined.“The president and the administration wouldn’t have put these requirements in place if they didn’t think that they were appropriate and necessary,” Dr. Murthy said on ABC’s “This Week.”Dr. Murthy pointed to the nation’s history as precedent: George Washington required troops to be inoculated against smallpox in 1777.The sweeping move already has raised legal challenges, with opponents arguing that the requirement is unconstitutional. One coalition of businesses, religious groups, advocacy organizations and several states filed a petition on Friday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Louisiana, arguing that the administration overstepped its authority.On Saturday, a panel of the court temporarily blocked the new mandate, writing “the petitions give cause to believe there are grave statutory and constitutional issues with the mandate.”The stay does not have immediate impact, as the first major deadline in the rule is Dec. 5, when companies with at least 100 employees must require unvaccinated employees to wear masks indoors. But the move provides momentum for the mandate’s opponents.The legal challenge questions whether the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has the authority to issue the rule, or whether such a mandate must be passed by Congress.It was unclear whether the stay will be a procedural blip for the Biden administration, or the first step in the unwinding of the mandate. A separate lawsuit against the mandate was filed on Friday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis by 11 Republican-led states.So far, legal challenges to vaccine mandates have fallen short.On Sunday, the White House chief of staff Ron Klain said he was “quite confident” the mandate would be upheld in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”“If OSHA can tell people to wear a hard hat on the job, to be careful around chemicals, it can put in place these simple measures to keep our workers safe,” Mr. Klain said.

New, international standards for handling ancient genetic material draw support from many scientists, criticism from others.In 2017, a team of scientists successfully extracted the DNA of members of a Pueblo community who were buried starting around 1,300 years ago in what is now Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. The DNA suggested that these people had lived in a matrilineal society, with power passed down through generations of mothers.The paper was a powerful example of how ancient DNA could illuminate the lives of people who died long ago.It was also a case study in poor ethics, some researchers contended at the time. They alleged that the scientists had failed to consult with local tribes and used culturally insensitive terms, such as referring to a tribal ancestor as “cranium 14.”Such criticisms have grown more numerous in the past decade as the practice of extracting DNA from ancient human remains has become more widespread, thanks to advances in genetic-sequencing technologies.On Wednesday, an international group of researchers who work on ancient DNA articulated a set of ethical guidelines to ensure that their work does no harm, either to the once-living people they study or to the modern communities who have a stake in the matter. Their perspective, published in the journal Nature and translated into more than 20 languages, listed 64 authors from 31 countries, and represented every continent except for Antarctica.The group met virtually starting in November 2020 to hash out the guidelines.“This paper sets the steps toward new policies in aDNA research,” Hiba Babiker, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, and an author on the paper, wrote in a message.The researchers hope the guidelines “will be taken up by the wider community engaged in ancient DNA research,” Rodrigo Nores, a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina and an author on the paper, wrote in an email.The paper specifies five general guidelines for ancient DNA researchers: that they follow local regulations, prepare a detailed plan before any study, minimize damage to human bones, make data available for re-examination and, to ensure respect and sensitivity, engage with all stakeholders before starting any study.Many scientists who were not involved in the virtual meeting expressed support for the guidelines.“I will say that it’s encouraging to see a group of scientists like this say we have talked about this standard of behavior and we’re willing to agree to it,” said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved with the paper. “It’s a step forward for them to say at least we’re going to follow the law.”But some researchers criticized the past actions of some authors of the guidelines, including several who worked on the Chaco Canyon paper.“If I look at the five principles they’ve come up with,” said Maui Hudson, an associate professor at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, “they seem like they’re stating what they should be doing anyway and not really pushing toward the place where Indigenous communities would like them to be.”Some outside researchers found the guidelines vague. “We need to be as sophisticated in our applications and understandings of bioethics and decolonial practice as we are with ancient DNA,” said Rick W.A. Smith, a biocultural anthropologist at George Mason University, who was not involved with the research.Still other scientists, many of them Indigenous, who have written extensively about ethics in ancient DNA research, wondered why they were not asked to be involved.A technician in the lab of David Reich, a paleogeneticist at Harvard, sandblasting a bone several thousand years old to isolate and extract DNA.Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times“I was a bit surprised that a meeting like this happened and that I was not invited,” said Nanibaa’ Garrison, a bioethicist and geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who works on the project aDNA Ethics, which is focused on the ethics of studying North American ancient DNA. “They talk about community engagement but fail to engage the community of researchers who have been involved in that space, too.”Krystal Tsosie, a genetics researcher at Vanderbilt University, wrote in an email, “I feel like this entire paper is really geared toward excusing paleogenomicists’ extraction of data without the consent of communities.”The authors of the new paper intentionally chose to invite only active practitioners of ancient DNA research, according to Kendra Sirak, a paleogeneticist at Harvard Medical School and one of the authors. They also emphasize that these guidelines come from a particular group of scholars in the ancient DNA community.“We realized that what’s lacking in this field is a statement from a group of practitioners from all over the world, so that’s what we wanted to contribute here,” said Dr. Sirak, who works in the lab of David Reich, one of the leading experts in ancient DNA.The new paper is not the first published set of ethical guidelines on the issue. In 2018, a group of scientists based in North America published guidelines for ancient DNA research — the first recommendations approved by a professional organization, the American Society of Human Genetics.But concerns arose during the virtual workshop that the guidelines of that paper could not be extended worldwide, the authors said. “Our lab is global, and we heard from a lot of our collaborators who said those guidelines are good steppingstones but not universally applicable,” said Jakob Sedig, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Reich’s lab.The task of creating globally applicable guidelines for ancient DNA research is daunting, as historical and cultural context and regulations vary widely across the world, the authors noted in the new paper. In the United States and Hawaii, where Indigenous peoples were historically displaced by white settlers, “it is critical to center Indigenous perspectives,” said Nathan Nakatsuka, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and an author on the paper. Elsewhere in the world, the authors contend that consulting with communities who live in the vicinity of a site or profess ties to it does not always make sense.The fourth recommendation in the new paper, on making data available after publication to check the scientific findings, garnered much debate. The guidelines call making data fully open a “best practice,” but would require only that other researchers be allowed to confirm the accuracy of the original study.Many authors made the case for fully open data, Dr. Sirak said; restricted data access could tilt the availability of such data to larger, well-funded labs, they argued. “But we saw instances where we could possibly justify limiting data if there were concerns,” Dr. Sirak said.If any researcher can gain access to ancient DNA for new purposes, Mr. Hudson said, related communities would lose the opportunity to determine how the data is used.Dr. Hawks suggested that ancient DNA could offer an unethical shortcut to modern DNA. “If you’re working on skeletal remains from a region of the world that we know historically was occupied by ancestors or relatives of an Indigenous group today, that’s an avenue to capitalize on information from an Indigenous group while circumventing these research ethics,” Dr. Hawks said.The final guideline asks that researchers engage with stakeholders to ensure the research is conducted with respect and sensitivity to all people involved, living and dead.Some outside researchers felt this guidelines siloed researchers and stakeholders. “Most of these guidelines seem to be about ancient DNA researchers working in isolation of communities and not with communities,” said Ripan Malhi, a genetic anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was not involved with the paper.The authors on the new paper say they hope to continue the conversation around the ethics of ancient DNA. “I think every single one of us is open to having discussions now with a wider group of people,” Dr. Sirak said.Dr. Malhi said: “I do like the conversation. But I guess I would want to see the conversation not erasing guidelines and topics and people that have been talking about ethics for a long time on genetics in the past.”

Using Crispr, scientists have taken the first step toward creating a mosquito that is blind to human hosts.If you could have just one superpower, flight or invisibility, which would you choose? And would your answer change if you could become invisible to mosquitoes?Sure, you might never soar among eagles or brush your cheek against a wisp of cloud. But you would also no longer flee from swarming clouds of mosquitoes, and you would be protected from the deadly diseases that the insects spread.For the first time, scientists have used the gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9 to render humans effectively invisible in the eyes of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which use dark visual cues to hunt, according to a paper recently published in the journal Current Biology. By eliminating two of that mosquito’s light-sensing receptors, the researchers knocked out its ability to visually target hosts.“Nobody has studied this before,” said Neha Thakre, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego, who studies Crispr as a mosquito control tool. Dr. Thakre, who was not involved with the research, said she saw the study as a “great start” to understanding what controls mosquito vision.Aedes aegypti is a salt-and-pepper scourge on humans across the world. The females, in search of the blood they need to lay their eggs, infect tens of millions of people each year with flaviviruses that lead to dengue, yellow fever and Zika.“The better we understand how they sense the human, the better we can control the mosquito in an eco-friendly manner,” said Yinpeng Zhan, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the lead author on the paper.Anopheles mosquitoes, which spread malaria, hunt at night, whereas Aedes aegypti hunts under the sun, at dawn and dusk. The species depends on a fleet of senses to find blood. A mere whiff of carbon dioxide, a sign that someone or something has just exhaled nearby, sends the mosquito into a frenzied flight.“They can also detect some of the organic cues from our skin,” such as heat, humidity and stench, said Craig Montell, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author on the study. But if there is no suitable host, the mosquito will fly straight to the closest-seeming target: a dark spot.In 1937, scientists observed that Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were specifically attracted to people with dark clothing. But the molecular mechanism by which mosquitoes visually sensed their targets was largely unknown.Many experiments on mosquito vision take place in wind tunnels, large chambers that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. In prior experiments, mosquitoes placed in the wind tunnel and given a whiff of carbon dioxide chose to fly to a dark spot over a white one.Dr. Montell’s lab does not have a wind tunnel, so Dr. Zhan designed an inexpensive setup — a cage with a black circle and a white circle inside — that cost less than $100 and delivered the same results as a wind tunnel. In the spring of 2019, Dr. Zhan conducted spot tests in the cage. In the fall, Jeff Riffell, a biologist at the University of Washington, along with Claire Rusch, a graduate student, and Diego Alonso San Alberto, a postdoctoral fellow, ran the same experiments using a wind tunnel to double-check the original results.Dr. Montell and Dr. Zhan suspected that one of the five light-sensing proteins expressed in the mosquito’s eye might be the key to eliminating its ability to visually seek out human hosts by sensing dark colors. First, they decided to knock out the rhodopsin protein Op1. Op1, the most widely expressed vision protein in the mosquito’s compound eyes, seemed the best candidate for interfering with the mosquito’s vision. Dr. Zhan injected the mutation into thousands of tiny mosquito eggs using a tool with a special needle with a very tiny tip.After his wee mutants had grown into adults, Dr. Zhan sucked 10 or so females into a tube using a mouth-controlled aspirator. With each group, he held his breath, walked over to the cage and released the females with one big exhale.The Op1 mutants behaved exactly like the wild-type Aedes aegypti: After huffing carbon dioxide, they flew directly to the black dot in the cage. Dr. Montell and Dr. Zhan tried again, this time knocking out Op2, a closely related rhodopsin. Still, the Op2 mutants showed no meaningful decline in their vision.But when the researchers knocked out both proteins, the mosquitoes whizzed around aimlessly, showing no preference between the white circle and black circles. They had lost their ability to seek dark-colored hosts.Were the mosquitoes blind altogether, or just blind to people? To answer this question, Dr. Montell and Dr. Zhan ran a series of tests to see how the double mutants responded to light.First, they tested whether the double mutants would move toward light. Next, they connected electrodes to the double mutants’ eyes to measure if the eyes displayed voltage changes in response to light. Finally, they placed the double mutants in rotating cylinders with vertical black and white stripes to see if the insects would walk in the direction of the moving stripes. The double mutants passed all three tests, although they had a weaker response than the wild types in the last two tests.The mosquitoes were not blind, after all. “My first transgenic mosquito,” Dr. Zhan said proudly. “We had a happy ending.”The new paper could inform future strategies to control mosquito populations. If female mosquitoes were unable to see hosts, they would have a harder time finding the blood required for their eggs to develop. “The population would crash,” Dr. Montell said.The researchers have yet to expose the double mutants to hosts. If and when they do, Dr. Thakre is curious to know exactly how impaired vision affects the ability of mosquitoes to actually feed on blood, given the insects’ many other senses. “The thing you want to control is a mosquito bite,” Dr. Thakre said.As climate change heats up regions of the planet, it lays out an unwelcome welcome mat for Aedes aegypti to enter new areas, including parts of China and North America.“Every year there’s a pandemic from mosquito-borne diseases,” Dr. Montell said from his home in Santa Barbara. In California, Aedes aegypti was first spotted in 2011 in Los Angeles County and has now spread as far north as Sacramento. The mosquitoes will only continue to spread, their eggs glued to our suitcases and cars, awaiting the day when they hatch into adults and begin hunting, compound eyes wide open.

A new workshop explores the right of Indigenous people to govern the collection, ownership and use of their biological and cultural data.When Krystal Tsosie introduces her genomics students to the concept of biocommercialism — the extraction of biological resources from Indigenous communities without benefit — she always uses the same example: the Human Genome Diversity Project.The researchers who conceived of the project in the 1990s aimed to collect samples from human populations around the world, with particular emphasis on what they deemed “vanishing” Indigenous populations. “A lot of that information is now publicly available to advance the course of science,” said Ms. Tsosie, a genetics researcher at Vanderbilt University and a member of the Navajo Nation. “But who accesses these data sets?”Ms. Tsosie, answering her own question, cited as examples Ancestry and 23andMe, two companies that commercialize and profit from Indigenous genomic data sourced without consent from people in Central and South America. In 2018, 23andMe sold access to its database of digital sequence information to GlaxoSmithKline for $300 million. In 2020, 23andMe licensed a drug compound it developed from its trove of genetic information.Accordingly, Ms. Tsosie helped to organize IndigiData, a four-day remote workshop that took place for the first time in June. The workshop’s core goal was to introduce data science skills to undergraduates and graduates, and the definition of data was expansive, from the genetic sequences of soil microbiomes to traditional worldviews.“If you can’t view oral history as data, as something that can be parsed and archived and used to predict things, then you’re missing out on a whole data set,” said Keolu Fox, a Native Hawaiian geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, who presented at the workshop.Ms. Tsosie helped to organize IndigiData, a four-day remote workshop that took place for the first time in June. Tomás Karmelo Amaya for The New York TimesThe workshop centered on Indigenous data sovereignty, the idea that nations have the right to govern the collection, ownership and application of their own data. The movement pushes back on a long history of how researchers have taken Native data without permission, often stigmatizing the communities who participated or disregarding their customs surrounding the dead. In one infamous example, an Arizona State University researcher studying the high rates of diabetes in the Havasupai Tribe, who live near the Grand Canyon, gave other researchers access to the samples without the tribe’s consent. When the Havasupai learned of this, they went to court, won their samples back and banished the university from their borders.“Why are we over here spitting in tubes, giving our genomes away when we know that type of information can be used to make pharmaceutical drugs?” Dr. Fox asked. “Why not position ourselves so we’re in control of a treasure chest of data?”Organizing the ConferenceMs. Tsosie, one of the leaders of the conference, started her career in cancer biology. But she realized early on that any success she might have developing a cancer therapy drug might never reach her own community. Ms. Tsosie’s father worked for the Phoenix Indian Medical Center in Arizona for 42 years, and she remembered how difficult it was for her tribal community to access specialty services.“What am I doing in cancer biology?” Ms. Tsosie remembered thinking. She switched her academic focus and is now a graduate student in genomics and health disparities.In 2012, Ms. Tsosie met Joseph M. Yracheta, who is of the P’urhepecha and Raramuri peoples, through the Summer Internship for Indigenous Peoples in Genomics, a workshop that trains researchers in genetic science. They started talking about data ethics, and a few years later Matt Anderson, a microbiologist at Ohio State University and a descendant of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, joined the conversation. The organizers recognized that there were limited resources to train Indigenous people how to think about and interpret their data.In January, with funding from the Amgen Foundation and the National Science Foundation, the workshop began to take shape. The participants hail from Indigenous communities across the country and internationally, and have wide-ranging research interests, such as archaeology and pollinators. “What ties us together is colonialism,” Dr. Fox said, and laughed.The Environmental MicrobiomeThe theme of the inaugural conference was environmental microbiomes, which the organizers felt would resonate with participants. An individual’s microbiomes — the communities of microorganisms that live inside and on a person — is deeply intertwined with the surroundings; for instance, the composition of the gut microbiome can be altered by diet as well as air pollution.In recent years, the “vanishing” rhetoric of the Human Genome Diversity Project has shifted to refer to the “vanishing” microbiome of traditional communities, Dr. Anderson said. “Except instead of people, they’re talking about the microbes associated with people,” Dr. Anderson said. One 2018 article in the journal Science emphasized the need to collect samples from “traditional peoples in developing countries” in order “to capture and preserve the human microbiota while it still exists.”Ms. Tsosie started her career in cancer biology but is now a graduate student in genomics and health disparities.Tomás Karmelo Amaya for The New York TimesMr. Yracheta, who is the managing director of the Native BioData Consortium — the first biobank in the U.S. led by Indigenous scientists and tribal members — believes the microbiome will be one of the next targeted data sets that Western scientists may seek from Indigenous communities. In Tanzania, the Hadza people have been studied extensively for the “richness and biodiversity” of their gut microbiota.“Native DNA is so sought after that people are looking for proxy data, and one of the big proxy data is the microbiome” Mr. Yracheta said. “If you’re a Native person, you have to consider all these variables if you want to protect your people and your culture.”In a presentation at the conference, Joslynn Lee, a member of the Navajo, Laguna Pueblo and Acoma Pueblo Nations and a biochemist at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo., spoke about her experience tracking the changes in microbial communities in rivers that experienced a mine wastewater spill in Silverton, Colo. Dr. Lee also offered practical tips on how to plan a microbiome analysis, from collecting a sample to processing it.In a data-science career panel, Rebecca Pollet, a biochemist and a member of the Cherokee Nation, noted how many mainstream pharmaceutical drugs were developed based on the traditional knowledge and plant medicine of Native people. The anti-malarial drug quinine, for example, was developed from the bark of a species of Cinchona trees, which the Quechua people historically used as medicine. Dr. Pollet, who studies the effects of pharmaceutical drugs and traditional food on the gut microbiome, asked: “How do we honor that traditional knowledge and make up for what’s been covered up?”One participant, the Lakota elder Les Ducheneaux, added that he believed that medicine derived from traditional knowledge wrongly removed the prayers and rituals that would traditionally accompany the treatment, rendering the medicine less effective. “You constantly have to weigh the scientific part of medicine with the cultural and spiritual part of what you’re doing,” he said.IndigiData in the FutureOver the course of the IndigiData conference, participants also discussed ways to take charge of their own data to serve their communities.Mason Grimshaw, a data scientist and a board member of Indigenous in A.I., talked about his research with language data on the International Wakashan A.I. Consortium. The consortium, led by an engineer, Michael Running Wolf, is developing an automatic speech recognition A.I. for Wakashan languages, a family of endangered languages spoken among several First Nations communities. The researchers believe automatic speech recognition models can preserve fluency in Wakashan languages and revitalize their use by future generations.Mason Grimshaw is a data scientist and a board member of Indigenous in A.I., in Rapid City, S.D.Dawnee LeBeau for The New York TimesTypical language models, such as Apple’s voice-controlled Siri, often try to predict the next word, or set of words, based on the start of a sentence or a prompt. But such models might falter under the cultural nuances of many Indigenous languages, Mr. Grimshaw noted. “The Wakashan folks have certain stories you would only tell in certain kinds of weather or at certain times of day,” he said, by way of example.Additionally, many Indigenous languages are polysynthetic; they do not have fixed vocabularies but rely instead on the recombinations of small building blocks of words. A polysynthetic language like Lakota technically allows there to be infinite words, Mr. Grimshaw said. Indigenous languages often have much less recorded language data to analyze, such as audio files of speakers in conversation, than more common languages do.Mr. Grimshaw sees these complications not as a problem but as a puzzle to be unscrambled. When asked about his wildest data dreams by a participant at the conference, Mr. Grimshaw smiled. “I want a Lakota version of Siri,” he said.IndigiData has funding for the next four years, and the organizers hope that the conference next year will be held in person at the Native BioData Consortium on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. That location, Dr. Anderson noted, is a one-day drive from 13 tribal colleges.Dr. Fox hopes the conference will train the next generation of Indigenous data scientists not just to protect their data but to be empowered by its possibilities.“I’m not saying that I like capitalism,” he said. “But data is power, and that’s the way for us to revitalize our communities.”