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Senators challenge Robert Kennedy Jr. on vaccines in confirmation hearing as health secretary

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Senators challenge Robert Kennedy Jr. on vaccines in confirmation hearing as health secretary

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pledged to “make America healthy again” as President Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, faced aggressive questions Wednesday from senators who were troubled by his skepticism of vaccines, embrace of debunked medical claims, financial conflicts of interest and 11th-hour changes on issues such as abortion rights.

Kennedy portrayed himself as an advocate for regular folks who feel outgunned by entrenched interests.

“In my advocacy, I’ve often disturbed the status quo by asking uncomfortable questions,” the Brentwood resident said. “Well, I’m not going to apologize for that. We have massive health problems in this country that we must face honestly, and the first thing I’ve done every morning for the past 20 years is to get on my knees and pray to God that he would put me in a position to end the chronic disease epidemic and to help America’s children.”

He was met with tough questions, especially from Democrats, but also from some Republicans.

“The receipts show that Mr. Kennedy has embraced conspiracy theories, quacks and charlatans, especially when it comes to the safety, the efficacy of vaccines,” Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Finance Committee, said in the opening minutes of the hearing.

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“He has made it his life’s work to sow doubt and discourage parents from getting their kids life-saving vaccines,” Wyden said. “It has been lucrative for him and put him on the verge of immense power. This is the profile of someone who chases money and influence wherever they lead, even if that means the tragic deaths of children and other vulnerable people.”

In his testimony, Kennedy frequently contradicted his past positions, appeared to not fully grasp details of major health programs he will be charged with running if confirmed and said that allegations he is a conspiracy theorist have been leveled against him because of his willingness to challenge conventional scientific wisdom.

“That is a pejorative … that’s applied to me mainly to keep me from asking difficult questions of powerful interests,” said Kennedy, 71, the son of former Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy.

Wednesday’s hearing was the first of two for senators to consider Kennedy’s nomination to lead a sprawling federal health bureaucracy with a $1.8-billion budget and 90,000 employees. The Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health fall under the department’s umbrella. A committee vote on whether to advance the nomination to the full Senate has not yet been scheduled, and his chances for confirmation remain unclear.

Kennedy’s wife, actor Cheryl Hines, and other family members sat behind him during the 3½-hour session. A few hundred people crowded the chamber, mostly Kennedy supporters who wore T-shirts from his unsuccessful 2024 presidential bid and “Make America Healthy Again” baseball caps.

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But there were some opponents, two of whom were ejected from the Senate committee hearing room after interrupting the proceedings. One screamed, “He lies!” and the other waved a sign that read “Vaccines save lives.” Members of the crowd yelled, “We love you, Bobby!” as the latter was led out by Capitol Police officers.

Many of the senators’ questions focused on Kennedy’s past skepticism of vaccines. After being a lauded environmental attorney, Kennedy served for several years as the chair of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that falsely claims childhood vaccines cause autism.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) displayed pictures of organic infant onesies sold by the group for $25.99 that read “Unvaxxed, Unafraid” and “No vax. No problem,” then pressed Kennedy to disavow them.

Kennedy responded that he had no control over the organization, which he recently left. “I’m supportive of vaccines,” he said.

Earlier, Kennedy argued that news reports about his views on vaccines were misleading, noting that all of his children were vaccinated, and said that he supported the childhood vaccination schedule.

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“The only thing I want is good science,” he said.

But his purported role in a deadly outbreak of measles in Samoa was raised frequently during the hearing.

The outbreak was prompted by the deaths of two children who received vaccines prepared with an expired muscle relaxant instead of water. The Samoan government halted vaccinations for 10 months while it investigated. During that period, Kennedy visited Samoa and met with prominent anti-vaccine activists and engaged in “a significant disinformation campaign” that undermined confidence in the measles shots, Alec Ekeroma, the country’s director general of health, told the Guardian.

By the time the outbreak ended, more than 5,700 people had been sickened by measles and 83 of them died. Nearly all of them were infants, toddlers and children under the age of 5.

Sen. Bernie Sanders points to a display of anti-vaccination infant onesies during Robert Kennedy’s confirmation hearing.

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(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)

Kennedy, who sent a letter to the Samoan prime minister urging him to investigate whether the vaccines themselves could have caused the illnesses, said Wednesday he had no role in the outbreak.

On Wednesday, Kennedy expressed his support for the measles vaccine, as well as the polio vaccine, potentially an attempt to win the support of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who suffered from the disease as a child.

Kennedy tried to focus his remarks on issues where there is broad agreement, such as nutrition and substance abuse.

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Senators expressed support for Kennedy’s goal of improving the quality of food available through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Currently, the program can be used to buy snack foods such as potato chips and sugary sodas.

Kennedy blamed the nation’s worsening health in part on the rise of “highly chemical-intensive processed foods.” He noted that items such as French fries and breakfast cereals contain more ingredients in the U.S. than in other countries and said, without evidence, that scientists have made “a deliberate choice not to study the things that are truly making us sick.”

“We need to fix our food supply,” he said.

During an exchange about mental health and substance abuse, Kennedy mentioned his well-known 14-year heroin addiction — an issue that resonates with Americans grappling with the fentanyl crisis and in the aftermath of the opioid crisis.

Caroline Kennedy, a former Democratic ambassador and the daughter of John. F. Kennedy, touched upon her cousin’s drug use in a letter released Tuesday arguing against his confirmation.

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In addition to describing his earlier abodes as drug dens that led other family members into addiction, she blasted Kennedy for his views on vaccines, said he is addicted to power and described disturbing scenes where he would use a blender to mince chickens and mice to feed his hawks. The letter was first reported by the Washington Post.

The nominee was a Democrat for decades before unsuccessfully running for president as an independent in 2024. He dropped out of the race in August and endorsed Trump, a man he had previously described as “probably a sociopath.”

Senators on both sides of the aisle sought to use Kennedy’s past liberal positions to their advantage.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) thanked Kennedy for his environmental and children’s health advocacy and recalled when Kennedy called him to discuss working with Trump about a shared goal — addressing the root causes of chronic illnesses, which afflict 60% of Americans.

“We need to get to the answers of this, but even more, we need to heal and unify this divided nation,” Johnson said. “I thought, wow, here’s somebody from the left, somebody I don’t agree with on many issues politically, coming together with President Trump, and focusing on an area of agreement, something that the American people desperately want.”

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Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi shakes hands with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his 2019 visit.

Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi shakes hands with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his 2019 visit.

(Misiona Simo/Samoa Observer via Associated Press)

Democrats highlighted Kennedy’s public support for abortion rights to needle their GOP colleagues.

“It is remarkable that you have such a long record of fighting for women’s reproductive freedom, and it’s really great that my Republican colleagues are so open to voting for a pro-choice HHS secretary,” Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) said.

Kennedy was peppered with questions about his ability to work for a president who has already taken steps to restrict abortion access. He replied by pointing to disagreements about the issue in his large Catholic family.

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“I came from a family that was split on life and choice. I have cousins today who believe that abortion at any stage is equivalent to homicide,” Kennedy said. “Now there are other people who believe the opposite. But the good thing with my family that I really loved is that we were able to have those conversations and respect each other, and I wish that we could do that nationally.”

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Assn., said after the hearing that he was troubled by Kennedy’s lack of experience in both healthcare and management, and that the nominee didn’t seem to understand the difference between the Medicaid program and the exchanges where people can shop for insurance plans.

“He hasn’t given me any confidence that he follows the evidence of science,” said Benjamin, who previously served as secretary of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

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Dickson Despommier, Who Championed Farming in Skyscrapers, Dies at 84

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Dickson Despommier, Who Championed Farming in Skyscrapers, Dies at 84

Dickson Despommier, a microbiologist who proposed that cities should grow food in high-rises, popularizing the term “vertical farming” — an idea that crossed over from the realm of the purely fanciful to become a reality around the globe — died on Feb. 7 in Manhattan. He was 84.

His wife, Marlene Bloom, confirmed the death, in a hospital. He lived in Fort Lee, N.J.

Dr. Despommier (pronounced de-POM-ee-yay), who was a professor for 38 years at Columbia’s School of Public Health, specialized in parasitic diseases, but he gained far wider influence as a guru of vertical farming.

In 2001, he and students in a medical ecology class designed a 30-story building that theoretically could grow food for 50,000 people. Some 100 varieties of fruits and vegetables would be grown on upper floors, with chickens housed lower down. Fish would feed on plant waste.

Dr. Despommier argued that vertical farms would use 70 to 90 percent less water than traditional farms, allowing agricultural land to return to a natural state and helping to remediate climate change. He evangelized at TEDx talks and in a book, “The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century.”

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Dr. Despommier said that when his book “The Vertical Farm” was published in 2010, no such farms existed. That changed.Credit…Thomas Dunne Books

“When my book came out, in 2010, there were no functioning vertical farms that I was aware of,” he told The New Yorker several years later. “By the time I published a revised edition in 2011, vertical farms had been built in England, Holland, Japan and Korea.”

Tech investors poured money into vertical farming. The operations generally substituted indoor LED lights for sunlight and used watering systems that spritzed plant roots — no soil needed. The farms sprouted in places as varied as downtown Newark and Dubai, on the Persian Gulf.

The Guardian estimated that there were more than 2,000 vertical farms in the U.S. in 2022, raising vegetables and fruits in stacked trays or long columns, some several stories high, some tended by robots. That year, Walmart announced that it would harvest salad greens from a vertical farm in Compton, Calif., to be run by a company named Plenty.

More recently, the industry has stumbled. High interest rates and energy costs have caused many operations to close or declare bankruptcy. They include the one in Compton and the one in Newark, AeroFarms, which The New Yorker featured prominently in its article about Dr. Despommier in 2017. A company with farms in three Eastern states, Bowery Farming, whose investors included Justin Timberlake and Natalie Portman and which was once valued at $2.3 billion, shut down last year.

Critics questioned if vertical farming really lowers carbon emissions and called it a fad. Others said the industry is merely going through a shakeout and will endure.

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Dickson Donald Despommier was born on June 5, 1940, in New Orleans to Roland and Beverly (Wood) Despommier. His father was an accountant for a shipping line. His parents divorced when Dickson was young.

He received a B.S. in biology from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1962, an M.S. in medical parasitology from Columbia in 1964 and a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Notre Dame in 1967.

Dr. Despommier joined Columbia’s faculty in 1971 as an assistant professor of microbiology. He taught a required course in parasitic diseases to second-year medical students for three decades. His research focused on tropical diseases; he was co-author of a textbook, “Parasitic Diseases,” and a director of the website “Parasites Without Borders.”

Besides his wife, he is survived by his sister, Duane Despommier Kuykendall; his sons, Bruce and Bradley; a stepdaughter, Molly Bloom; a stepson, Michael Goodwin; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. An earlier marriage, to Judith Forman, ended in divorce.

The idea of vertical farming emerged when students told Dr. Despommier in 2000 that they were bored with his course on medical ecology. He redirected the semester by posing a question, “What will the world be like in 2050?” and a follow-up question, “What would you like the world to be like in 2050?”

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The discussion focused on how densely crowded the planet would be in 50 years and how food would have to be grown then with less water and less pollution from chemical fertilizers. Students said New York City should source all its food from close by. They suggested using the city’s rooftops for agriculture. But then they calculated that if every rooftop in all five boroughs were turned into a garden, the growing acreage would feed only about 2 percent of the population.

Dr. Despommier then thought of raising crops in glass and steel skyscrapers, with plants stacked on multiple levels, just like their human inhabitants. He continued to refine designs with each year’s class of ecology students. In 2001, he adopted the term vertical farming.

After he appeared on the Comedy Central late-night show “The Colbert Report” in 2008 to discuss his eggplants-in-the-sky idea, traffic to his website shot up to 400,000 visitors overnight.

Many of the start-ups that turned Dr. Despommier’s vision into a reality built vertical farms that were only two or three stories high, compared with the 30-story behemoths he had proposed. One was attached to a parking garage in Jackson, Wyo. Others were housed in shipping crates.

But the idea traversed the globe, with a nonprofit, the Association for Vertical Farming, starting up in Germany in 2013.

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All along, skeptics questioned whether the cost and the carbon footprint of indoor farming was an improvement over the traditional kind practiced by humanity for some 12,000 years.

“It’s such an appealing idea — ‘Press floor 10 for lettuce’ — that people picked up on it right away,” Bruce Bugbee, a professor of crop physiology at Utah State University, told The New York Times in 2016. “The fundamental problem is that plants need a lot of light. It’s free outside. If we’re going to do it inside, it will require the burning of a lot of fossil fuels.”

The industry shakeout has been brutal, with the editor of the news site Vertical Farming Today declaring in 2023 that venture capital investments in vertical farming had fallen by about 90 percent.

Unfazed, Dr. Despommier kept brainstorming about how modern life could thrive in the face of a dangerously changing climate. In his last book, “The New City: How to Build Our Sustainable Urban Future” (2023), he proposed that cities henceforth be built of wood.

The carbon footprint of making concrete and steel, he explained, is enormous, whereas wood is a carbon sink — trees absorb carbon from the air as they grow — and new technologies for engineering timbers allowed very tall buildings to be built.

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“It sounds like we’ll be using up all the wood,” he said last year, “but the fact is that, if vertical farming succeeds, there’ll be a lot more land to grow trees.”

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A proposed law could force California health insurers to explain claim denials

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A proposed law could force California health insurers to explain claim denials

When Colleen Henderson’s 3-year-old daughter complained of pain while using the bathroom, doctors brushed it off as a urinary tract infection or constipation, common maladies in the potty-training years.

Henderson, however, suspected it could be something worse, and asked for an ultrasound. The doctor and ultrasound technician told her that her insurance provider, UnitedHealthcare, would not cover it, but Henderson decided to do it anyway, charging the $6,000 procedure to her credit card. Then came the news: There was a grapefruit-sized tumor in her toddler’s bladder.

That was in 2008. The next five years, Henderson said, became a protracted battle with UnitedHealthcare over paying for the specialists who finally diagnosed and treated her daughter’s rare condition, inflammatory pseudotumor. She appealed denial of coverage for hospital stays, surgeries and medication to the insurer and state regulators, to no avail. The Sacramento-area family racked up more than $1 million in medical debt, she said, because UnitedHealthcare had decided that treatments recommended by doctors were unnecessary. The family declared bankruptcy.

“If I had not fought tooth and nail every step of the way, my daughter would be dead,” said Henderson, whose daughter eventually recovered and is now a thriving 20-year-old junior at Oregon State University. “You pay a lot of money to have health insurance, and you hope that your health insurance has your well-being at the forefront, but that’s not happening at all.”

While insurance denials are on the rise, surveys show few Americans appeal them. Various analyses have found that many of those who escalate complaints to government regulators successfully get denials overturned (unlike the Hendersons). Consumer advocates and policymakers say that’s a clear sign insurance companies routinely deny care they shouldn’t. Now a proposal in the California legislature seeks to penalize insurers who repeatedly make the wrong call.

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While the measure, Senate Bill 363, would cover only about a third of insured Californians whose health plans are regulated by the state, experts say it could be one of the boldest attempts in the nation to rein in health insurer denials — before and after care is given. And California could become one of only a handful of states that require insurers to disclose denial rates and reasoning, data the industry often considers proprietary information.

The measure also seeks to force insurers to be more judicious with denials, by fining them up to $1 million per case if more than half of appeals filed with regulators are overturned in a year.

In 2023, state data show, about 72% of appeals made to the Department of Managed Health Care, which regulates the vast majority of health plans, resulted in an insurer’s initial denial being reversed.

“When you have health insurance, you should have confidence that it’s going to cover your healthcare needs,” said Sen. Scott Wiener, the San Francisco Democrat who introduced the bill. “They can just delay, deny, obstruct, and, in many cases, avoid having to cover medically necessary care, and it’s unacceptable.”

A spokesperson for the California Assn. of Health Plans declined to comment, saying the group was still reviewing the bill‘s language. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s spokesperson Elana Ross said his office generally does not comment on pending legislation.

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Concerned about spiraling consumer health costs, lawmakers in states across the nation have increasingly looked for ways to verify that insurers are paying claims fairly.

In 2024, 17 states enacted legislation dealing with prior authorization of care by private insurers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. For example, Connecticut, which has one of the most robust denial rate disclosure laws, publishes an annual report card detailing the number and percentage of claims each insurer has denied, as well as the share that ends up getting reversed. Oregon published similar information until recently, when state disclosure requirements lapsed.

In California, there’s no way to know how often insurers deny care, which health experts say is especially troubling as mental health needs are reaching crisis levels among children and young adults. According to Keith Humphreys, a health policy professor at Stanford University, it’s easier to deny mental health care because a diagnosis of, say, depression can be more subjective than that of a broken limb or cancer.

“We think it’s unacceptable that the state has absolutely no idea how big of a problem this is,” said Lishaun Francis, senior director of behavioral health for the advocacy group Children Now, a sponsor of the bill.

Under Wiener’s proposal, private insurers regulated by the state’s Department of Managed Health Care or Department of Insurance, or both, would be required to submit detailed data about denials and appeals. They would also need to explain those denials and report the outcomes of the appeals.

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For appeals that make it to the state’s independent medical review process, or IMR, insurers whose denials are overturned more than half of the time would face staggering penalties. The first case that brings a company above the 50% threshold would trigger a fine of $50,000, with a penalty ranging from $100,000 to $400,000 for a second. Each one after that would cost the company $1 million.

If passed, the measure would apply to roughly 12.8 million Californians on private insurance. It would not apply to patients on Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, or Medicare, and it would exclude self-insured plans offered by large employers, which are regulated by the U.S. Department of Labor and cover roughly 5.6 million Californians.

The phrase “deny and delay” continues to reverberate across the healthcare industry after the killing of UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson in December. In a survey by the research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, conducted shortly after the attack, 7 in 10 respondents said they believed denials for health coverage and profits by health insurance companies bore a great deal or a moderate amount of responsibility for Thompson’s death.

Following Thompson’s death, UnitedHealthcare said in statements that “highly inaccurate and grossly misleading information” had been circulated about the way the company treats claims, and that insurers, which are highly regulated, “typically have low- to mid-single digit margins.”

Wiener called Thompson’s killing a “cold-blooded assassination,” and said his measure had grown out of a narrower proposal that failed last year aimed at improving mental health coverage for children and adults under age 26. But he acknowledged that the public’s reaction to the killing underscored the long-simmering anger many Americans feel about health insurers’ practices and the urgent need for reform.

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Humphreys, the Stanford professor, said the U.S. health system creates strong financial incentives for insurers to deny care. And, he added, state and federal penalties are paltry enough to be written off as a cost of doing business.

“The more care they deny, the more money they make,” he said.

Increasingly, large employers are starting to include language in contracts with claim administrators that would penalize insurance providers for approving too many or too few claims, said Shawn Gremminger, president of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions.

Gremminger represents mostly large employers that fund their own insurance, are federally regulated, and would be excluded from Wiener’s bill. But even for the so-called self-funded plans, it can be nearly impossible to determine denial rates for the insurance companies hired simply to administer claims, he said.

While the bill may be too late for many families, Sandra Maturino of Rialto said she hopes lawmakers tackle insurance denials so other Californians can avoid the saga she endured to get her niece treatment.

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She adopted the girl, now 13, after her sister died. Her niece had long struggled with self-harm and violent behavior, but when therapists recommended inpatient psychiatric care, her insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, would cover it for only 30 days.

For more than a year, Maturino said, her niece cycled in and out of facilities and counseling because her insurance wouldn’t cover a long-term stay. Doctors tested a laundry list of prescription drugs and doses. None of them worked.

Anthem declined to comment for this story.

Unlike so many others in similar situations, Maturino was eventually able to get outside assistance to remedy the situation. She asked her adoption agency for help, and it ended up covering the cost of her niece’s stay in a residential program in Utah, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and has been undergoing treatment for a year.

Maturino said she didn’t have the energy to appeal to Anthem.

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“I wasn’t going to wait around for the insurance to kill her, or for her to hurt somebody,” Maturino said.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

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The Gene That Made Mice Squeak Strangely

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The Gene That Made Mice Squeak Strangely

Scientists have long struggled to understand how human language evolved. Words and sentences don’t leave fossils behind for paleontologists to dig up.

A genetic study published on Tuesday offers an important new clue. Researchers found that, between 250,000 and 500,000 years ago, a gene known as NOVA1 underwent a profound evolutionary change in our ancestors. When the scientists put the human version of NOVA1 into mice, the animals made more complex sounds.

Erich Jarvis, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University and a co-author of the new study, cautioned that NOVA1 alone did not suddenly switch on our ancestors’ language abilities.

“I wouldn’t say it’s ‘the’ language gene,” Dr. Jarvis said.

Instead, over millions of years, language arose thanks to mutations in hundreds of genes.

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“But where does NOVA1 fit into that whole combination? It’s one of the last steps,” Dr. Jarvis said.

NOVA1 drew scientific attention in 2012 when it appeared on a special list of genes that produced proteins that were identical in most mammals, but produced a different form in humans. Out of more than 20,000 protein-coding genes, only 23 made the list. All were probably crucial to the evolution of our species.

That NOVA1 made the list surprised Dr. Robert Darnell, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University who had discovered the gene in 1993. He was startled because the gene appears to be essential to all mammals. A mouse engineered without NOVA1 will die during development. Nothing in Dr. Darnell’s research had hinted that the gene had played a distinctive role in human evolution.

Dr. Darnell began collaborating with evolutionary biologists to find out more. One of them, Adam Siepel of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in New York, led an effort to reconstruct the gene’s history. He looked at the gene’s sequence in the DNA of extinct humans, as well as genetic information from more than 650,000 living people.

Dr. Siepel found that NOVA1 underwent a dramatic change not long after our ancestors split from Neanderthals and Denisovans, providing an evolutionary advantage to early humans who inherited the change. Eventually, it swamped the original version of NOVA1.

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Ever since, Dr. Siepel said, that version of the gene has remained overwhelmingly dominant in the human population. Mutations that reversed NOVA1 to its original form must have been harmful, because they are extremely rare. Of the 650,000 people registered in the database, only six carried the original version of the gene.

The researchers do not know anything about who those six people are. Dr. Darnell is now searching for carriers of the original NOVA1, in the hopes of testing them for speech skills.

In the meantime, Dr. Darnell and his colleagues have engineered mice that carry the human version of NOVA1, instead of the one found in other mammals. To all outward appearances, the NOVA1 mice seemed ordinary. But they harbored some telling differences.

The human version of NOVA1 oversaw the production of 200 proteins in mouse brains that the ordinary version of the gene did not. And many of those proteins played a role in how the animals produce sounds.

“For me, that was like, ‘Bingo!’” Dr. Darnell said.

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If NOVA1 had shaped the evolution of human language, Dr. Darnell reasoned, then the human version of it might change the way that the mice produce sounds. Dr. Jarvis, an expert on animal vocalization, helped Dr. Darnell eavesdrop on the animals.

Mice typically produce pulses of ultrasonic squeaks that resemble syllables in human language.

But mice carrying the human version of NOVA1 made peculiar squeaks, the scientists found. The difference was especially noticeable when males sang courtship songs to females. Their songs contained more complex sounds, and the mice switched between those sounds in more intricate patterns.

The intriguing changes in NOVA1’s evolution happened after our ancestors split from Neanderthals and Denisovans. But another language gene, known as FOXP2, underwent a burst of important changes before that split. And studies have shown that mice carrying human FOXP2 genes also make strange squeaks.

Some scientists speculated that the two genes both independently altered human brain regions that produce complex sounds.

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“The exciting thing about NOVA1 is that there is now another kid on the block,” said Wolfgang Enard, a geneticist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who worked on the FOXP2 mice.

Dr. Jarvis said that he thinks the common ancestor of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans could talk, perhaps thanks to genes such as FOXP2. But mutations to other genes, including NOVA1, may have endowed modern humans alone with the ability to produce a wider range of complex sounds, expanding the power of language.

To test that hypothesis, Dr. Jarvis hopes to engineer mice with mutations in NOVA1, FOXP2 and other genes that may have been important in the rise of language. Together, these mutations may let mice produce even more complex calls.

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