Criminal defendants still cite a ‘gene for violence.’ It doesn’t exist.
By Nita Farahany and Gene E. Robinson,
The Washington Post
| 03. 18. 2021
The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled last month on an extraordinarily important question: Should a criminal defendant be allowed to argue that a specific gene rendered him unable to control his violent behavior? The court concluded the answer was no, in this instance: It upheld the conviction for second-degree murder of Anthony Blas Yepez, who killed a man in 2012. Yepez had sought at trial to introduce evidence that he had what’s been called the “warrior gene” — a version of a gene known as MAOA, which has been linked to violence in some studies. The district court of Sante Fe County excluded expert testimony on that subject; later, the New Mexico appellate court ruled that the exclusion was a mistake but that it did not affect the outcome of the trial. The New Mexico Supreme Court has now found that the district court’s original rejection of the evidence was reasonable.
The state Supreme Court, however, missed an important opportunity: It did not go nearly far enough in batting down the scientifically suspect claim that there is a gene...
Related Articles
By Tristan Manalac, BioSpace | 04.02.2024
Verve Therapeutics has suspended enrollment in the Phase Ib Heart-1 study evaluating its lead gene editing program VERVE-101 following a serious adverse event, the company announced Tuesday.
A patient, who received a 0.45-mg/kg dose of VERVE-101, developed a grade 3...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...
By Harold Brubaker, The Philadelphia Inquirer | 04.04.2024
Acompany started by University of Pennsylvania scientist Jim Wilson has received FDA approval to test a form of gene editing in infants for the first time in the United States, the company said Thursday.
The Plymouth Meeting company, iECURE, is...
By Judith Levine, The Intercept | 04.04.2024
WHEN THE ALABAMA Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S. The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos...