About 20 years ago, Charles Boone and Brenda Andrews decided to do something slightly nuts. The yeast biologists, both professors at the University of Toronto, set out to systematically destroy or impair the genes in yeast, two by two, to get a sense of how the genes functionally connected to one another. Only about 1,000 of the 6,000 genes in the yeast genome, or roughly 17 percent, are considered essential for life: If a single one of them is...
At the beginning of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s blockbuster documentary You Can See Everything, Billy Evans (partner of Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes), says that they decided to do the film for one purpose: “radical transparency.” As they work on “Theranos 2.0,” Evans and Holmes want to show the public that she has been misunderstood –– painted as a liar and a fraud in the public imagination (and the courts) despite, as she claims in the...
We live in an era of endless optimization. Fitness trackers help us measure our lifespan, people are consuming piles of protein in an attempt to be their best selves, and there’s even an urge to maximize our morality. In...
In recent months, news came out about several distressing cases that have underscored the risks of gene therapy, which delivers DNA to a patient’s cells to treat disease. All of these cases have one thing in common that’s not apparent...
Heritable genome editing in human embryos is once again under intense scrutiny after the publication of an opinion piece in Trends in Genetics at the end of last month.1 In the paper, Cathy Tie, the founder and chief...
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