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...
Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D., the Nobel Laureate best known for co-inventing the CRISPR system that has become the foundation for gene editing, is dipping her toes into a new, buzzy field: AI-powered protein design.
About 100,000 babies were born through in vitro fertilization in 2024, according to the most recent U.S. data. But IVF commonly involves trying to create multiple embryos, because success is never guaranteed. If unused, those embryos can be frozen...
By Emily Packard Dawson and Lainie Friedman Ross , The Hastings Center for Bioethics | 07.16.2026
Aggregated News
Major news outlets recently reported – based on a bioRxiv preprint – that scientists had edited genes in human embryos with “startling precision.” The scientists’ decision to release this work ahead of peer review, coupled with the extensive media coverage...
Media coverage of recent developments in embryo gene editing might seem to suggest that gene-edited babies are close to becoming a reality. As tech billionaires eager to profit off of techno-eugenics invest in “designer baby” technologies, attempts to normalize heritable genome editing – which remains unsafe and raises significant ethical and societal concerns – are especially dangerous. It’s worth taking a closer look at these developments and what they mean, in a way that pushes back on narratives normalizing the...
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