There is a traditional historiography and some recently published books that argue that everything began with the Goths. At school, many generations had to memorize the endless list of their kings to consolidate an official narrative that saw in those Germanic elites the first stone of the future Spanish state. Genetically, however, their impact was much smaller, as demonstrated by an international study led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona, Harvard University, and the University of the Basque Country (EHU), and published in the journal Cell.

In 2018, humanity took perhaps the most radical step forward in all of history. It is not an exaggeration: it was the year that the first genetically modified humans were born, thanks to the experiments of He Jiankui. What evolution takes millennia to sculpt, the selection of favorable characteristics for survival, we can now achieve in a few months of work in a laboratory. Few discoveries have had such profound implications for our future.

A research team from the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (Idibell), with participation from Bellvitge Hospital, has identified a new rare disease previously unknown worldwide. The condition has so far been confirmed in only 13 people from eight unrelated families, one of whom is a patient at Bellvitge Hospital.

When Evelyn was born, her parents cried. A scan of the baby confirmed the news they had hoped not to receive: she suffered from spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the same devastating disease that had already caused the death of their first child, Josephine, at just 15 months old.