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In a world first, two people were injected with red blood cells grown in a lab as part of a clinical trial, the research team announced this week. It’s a first step toward seeing if lab-grown blood cells are safe and work in the body — which would be a major advance for people living with rare blood types or blood disorders. (Wetsman, 11/8)

The research could eventually make a difference for people with sickle cell disease, those who develop antibodies against most donor blood types, or those with genetic disorders in which their body can’t make red blood cells or the blood cells they make don’t work well. Red blood cells are the helper cells that carry oxygen from the lungs to the body’s tissues, which use this oxygen to produce energy. The process also generates waste in the form of carbon dioxide that the red blood cells take to the lungs to be exhaled out. (Christensen, 11/9)

A toddler is thriving after doctors in the U.S. and Canada used a novel technique to treat her before she was born for a rare genetic disease that caused the deaths of two of her sisters. Ayla Bashir, a 16-month-old from Ottawa, Ontario, is the first child treated as fetus for Pompe disease, an inherited and often fatal disorder in which the body fails to make some or all of a crucial protein. (Aleccia, 11/9)

For the first time, doctors have successfully treated a fetus by infusing a crucial enzyme into its minuscule umbilical cord, halting an otherwise fatal inherited disorder known as severe infantile Pompe disease. The baby, Ayla Bashir, now 16 months old, is developing normally, giggling and babbling and toddling in her home in Ottawa. Behind the result of Ayla’s treatment, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, is a medical drama featuring passionate researchers at three medical centers and the doctors who were moved by the family’s plight. (Kolata, 11/9)

Rayyan Gorashi is keeping her options open. After all, she’s still a second-year bioengineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego, and there are so many careers to explore. There are many jobs the 24-year-old can imagine doing. Well, except for one. “I came into grad school knowing that I do not want to go into academia. Sad as it is, it’s a tough system that doesn’t favor people who are not systemically privileged,” said Gorashi. (Wosen, 11/10)

The tiny ivory comb came from ancient ruins in central Israel and was about the size of a child’s thumb. A number of its teeth had snapped. It was so encrusted in dirt that the archaeologist who found it initially added it to a bag of assorted bones. More than half a decade later, by a stroke of luck, scientists found letters faintly inscribed on the object: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” (Whang, 11/9)