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...
By Emily Baumgaertner Nunn, The New York Times | 06.30.2026
Aggregated News
A research program at the National Institutes of Health released the world’s largest database of human genomes and paired them with clinical data, officials announced Tuesday, paving the way for a new era of study in personalized medicine.
Ever since Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing technology emerged in the early 2010s, ethical questions around genetically altered humans, so-called designer babies, have become increasingly urgent. There is already a worldwide legal prohibition. No country currently allows human germline editing (meaning genetic changes...
By Anna Louie Sussman, The New York Times | 07.01.2026
Aggregated News
Birthrates in much of the developed world are at record lows, but there’s one demographic group that’s exploring new frontiers of fertility: ultrawealthy men. Deploying nearly limitless resources, a small number of them are reproducing at such an extraordinary scale...
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