This week, I’ve been working on a big story about a controversial treatment that creates babies with three genetic parents. The “three-parent baby” technique was thought to help parents avoid passing diseases on to their kids. But new evidence suggests it doesn’t always work—and could create babies at risk of severe diseases.
The evidence comes from two babies born after the procedure was used to help couples with a different problem: infertility. It’s lucky we found the problem in these cases—these babies didn’t have parents with disease-causing mutations, so they should be fine.
By Laura DeFrancesco, Nature Biotechnology | 03.17.2026
Aggregated News
The first gene editors designed to fix genetic lesions in mutation-agnostic ways are poised to enter the clinic. Tessera Therapeutics and Alltrna, two Flagship Pioneering-funded companies, are gearing up to test novel genetic medicines in humans. Tessera received regulatory clearance...
A new method for safely inserting large chunks of DNA into genomes has now measured up in mice, potentially paving the way for the next generation of gene editing medicines.
The approach, which is described in a Nature paper...
When Talaya Reid was in high school, in a quiet suburb of Philadelphia, she developed fatigue so severe that she spent afternoons napping instead of going out with friends. She was lethargic at school and her grades suffered, but after...
By Scott Solomon, The MIT Press Reader | 02.12.2026
Aggregated News
Chris Mason is a man in a hurry.
“Sometimes walking from the subway to the lab takes too long, so I’ll start running,” he told me over breakfast at a bistro near his home in Brooklyn on a crisp...
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