Once again all of the good bits this month are in the life sciences but at least it’s heartening news.

• Among the most positive developments is a gene-editing therapy for certain patients with high cholesterol. It applies only for those with so-called gain-of-function mutations of the PCSK9 gene and the enzyme it produces. Such patients often have high levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, leading to heart disease. The VERVE-102 therapy consists of a single intravenous infusion of a messenger RNA encoding an adenine base-editor protein and a guide RNA targeting PCSK9. The current is very small and observed patients over a very short duration only. Nonetheless it has so far proved to be safe and extremely effective, lowering LDL levels by 9% to 62%. I consider this to be a fantastic example of the coming wave of gene therapies.
• Doomsayers often warn that rising life expectancy will inevitably impose unbearable pressures on healthcare and retirement costs. This paper focusing on thirty years worth of data from the US however points out, among other things, that while demographic changes inevitably lead to higher Social Security spending, Medicare spending has not increased by as much as previously expected. This is attributed to the fact that the increased life expectancy were entirely healthy. I consider this to be great news that societies can indeed adapt to a world with longer human lifespans in an economically sustainable manner.
• This next one I included more because of the clever way that the project exploited a natural experiment rather than any specific findings. It’s about the Pakistan Genome Resource, a biobank established to expand the breadth of the available data on human genetic variation by sequencing the genomes of hundreds of thousands of participants across Pakistan. Specifically because of a high incidence of cousin marriages in the country, it is more common to discover instances of genes in which both of the alleles inherited from parents are of the identical loss-of-function variants. Effectively these are natural versions of ‘knockouts’ in which the gene has been turned off. This understandably makes it a valuable treasure trove of genetic data, obliviating the need to deliberately knock out genes to study the effects on human development.
• Finally the last bit of news is just plain weird without any real explanation so far. Even the discovery was pure happenstance, coming from videos taken to study how many people could share a space while keeping a safe distance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers simply noticed from these videos that crowds overwhelmingly walked in an anticlockwise direction. Further experiments yielded similar results and the bias seems to hold true across cultures, right-handedness, men or women and so on. So far no one knows why this bias exists though one theory is that it stems from human biomechanics as our bodies aren’t perfectly symmetrical.