New federal autism committee head has financial ties to leucovorin

STAT News' Morning Rounds begins with a headline finding that the new head of a federal autism committee has financial ties to leucovorin, though the provided excerpt does not elaborate on that report.

The excerpt also discusses teen social media bans in Australia, Indonesia, and the European Union. Researcher Camilla Iannone asked young people how to determine whether such bans are working and what "working" means; their feedback reframed the debate by asking researchers to focus on the role social media currently plays in young people's lives and what might replace it if access is restricted.

It then highlights a Penn State study on AI and medical ethics. Researchers asked prominent large language models to choose who should receive a donor kidney, an issue where there is often no single objective correct answer and decisions rely on nuanced human and moral judgments. The AI diverged from human judgment: it was less indecisive, tending toward deterministic recommendations even when abstention was explicitly permitted, and it rarely chose against the majority choice, potentially failing to capture the plurality inherent in moral values.

Finally, the excerpt reports that Congress pushed back on an effort to let political appointees control NIH grants. At an Oval Office meeting Friday, OMB head Russell Vought encouraged Trump to sign an executive order establishing a commission of political appointees to review all NIH grants, saying current research is too "woke." Lawmakers on both sides warned this would be contrary to congressional intent, the latest example of Vought seeking more political control over NIH-funded research. The newsletter notes STAT's Anil Oza and Chelsea Cirruzzo have more on where NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya stands. The excerpt ends with a teaser about a new paper suggesting an unexpected division in how our brains developed.