Despite a pervasive sense that 2025 was a rough year, several important indicators improved. Clinicians used a personalized CRISPR base-edit to correct a fatal single-gene defect in an infant — a potential model for individualized therapies. U.S. homicide, overdose and some mortality figures declined, alcohol use hit its lowest share since 1939, and self-reported obesity edged down, partly due to GLP-1 drugs. The Antarctic ozone hole also continued to shrink thanks to the Montreal Protocol.
2025 Felt Terrible — But Data and Breakthroughs Offer Real Reasons for Optimism
Most readers will agree: 2025 often felt chaotic and dispiriting. Yet beneath the barrage of alarming headlines, several measurable improvements and breakthrough successes quietly unfolded. Taken together, they suggest the year wasn’t only decline and doom — it also delivered progress in medicine, public health and the environment.
A Medical Breakthrough: Personalized CRISPR Therapy
Last August, infant KJ Muldoon was born with a severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 (CPS1) deficiency — an ultra-rare, often fatal genetic condition that prevents the liver from clearing ammonia. In a remarkable, fast-tracked effort, clinicians at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), researchers at UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute and collaborators developed a personalized in vivo base-editing therapy using CRISPR to correct a single erroneous DNA letter in KJ’s genome.
After an FDA emergency authorization in February, KJ received his first infusion. Clinicians observed improvement by April, and after 307 days in hospital he was discharged in June — the first documented case of a patient effectively cured by a bespoke in vivo gene-editing treatment. KJ will need lifelong monitoring, but his recovery — including taking his first steps — points to a future where rapid, individualized genetic interventions may become feasible for many rare diseases.
Public-Health Trends Moving in the Right Direction
Several of the United States’ most troubling statistics showed notable improvements in 2024–2025. Across 42 large U.S. cities, homicides fell about 17% in the first half of 2025 compared with the first half of 2024, with many jurisdictions returning to pre-pandemic homicide levels. Drug overdose deaths, which peaked near 110,000 in 2023, dropped to roughly 80,000 in 2024 — a near 27% decline and the largest single-year drop on record for the CDC. The national suicide total edged down slightly in 2024 to about 48,800 deaths.
Motor-vehicle fatalities, which rose during the pandemic, have declined for several consecutive years. The government estimates about 39,000 traffic deaths in 2024 (down from ~41,000 in 2023), and early 2025 projections indicate another ~8% decline in the first half of the year despite increased driving.
Context matters: many of these gains come after pandemic-era peaks. Still, the magnitude and consistency of the improvements suggest 2025 may mark the start of a longer-term reversal in several harms, not just a short dip back to the mean.
Healthier Habits: Less Drinking, Modest Weight Declines
Everyday measures of health also nudged in a positive direction. Gallup finds that just 54% of Americans now report drinking alcohol at all — the lowest share since the question began in 1939 — and reported drinking frequency and per-capita consumption have fallen. Teen drinking has plunged compared with the 1990s, with 12th-grade drinking rates shrinking from roughly three in four to about two in five.
Self-reported adult obesity showed a modest decline on Gallup’s National Health and Well-Being Index, moving from about 40% in 2022 to roughly 37% in 2025. A major factor appears to be wider adoption of GLP-1 medications (e.g., Ozempic, Wegovy), which suppress appetite and produce average weight loss in the 15–20% range for many patients, bringing downstream benefits for diabetes and cardiovascular risk.
Environmental Win: The Ozone Layer Is Recovering
Forty years after the Montreal Protocol began phasing out chlorofluorocarbons and other ozone-depleting substances, the ozone layer shows clear signs of recovery. In 2025, scientists reported that the Antarctic ozone hole was the smallest since 2019 and among the smallest since the early 1990s. Nearly 99% of banned ozone-depleting chemicals have been eliminated from production and use.
Experts project that — if countries continue complying — the ozone layer over most regions will return to 1980 conditions by around 2040, the Arctic by about 2045, and the Antarctic hole by roughly 2066. Phasing out these chemicals also avoided an additional 0.5–1.0°C of warming that would otherwise have been locked into the climate.
Perspective helps. Compared with catastrophic historical years — like 536 AD, when volcanic ash plunged large regions into darkness and precipitated famine and plague — 2025’s problems, however real, look less existential.
It’s fair to say 2025 felt rough. But progress often arrives quietly: a cured infant, falling overdose and homicide rates, a small but meaningful dip in obesity and alcohol use, and a healing ozone layer. Those are real outcomes that matter to millions of lives.
A version of this piece originally appeared in the Good News newsletter.
