In what sounds like a plot twist from a dystopic-future novel, Mississippi is now requiring hospitals to store the blood of babies born to mothers 16 and younger. The new law, which went into effect on Monday, July 1, is meant to discourage teen pregnancy, according to its drafters, but in a very roundabout way.
Any time a teen mom doesn’t know who the father is, or won’t say who the father is, or says the father is over 21, a hospital is required to take a blood sample from the baby’s umbilical cord and put it on ice. DNA will then be extracted from that blood and used to hunt down the (presumably) older men who had sex with the young women. They can be charged with statutory rape if they are more than 3 years older than the under-16 moms. The state hopes this will discourage cradle-robbers/cradle-makers in the future.
A U.K. watchdog balked at the cost-effectiveness of Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ CRISPR-based sickle cell disease therapy Thursday, recommending against funding the treatment unless uncertainties can be cleared up satisfactorily.
The U.K. became the first country to authorize Vertex’s Casgevy (exagamglogene...
Today, Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Kevin Esvelt is well known for his work on guided evolution technologies—creating systems for evolving biomolecules in the lab and developing techniques to shape the evolutionary trajectories of species in the wild—as well as...
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