Barbara Zeughauser had lost so many relatives to cancer: Her mother, her uncle, her grandmother, her second cousin. She thought that ghost in the family line might come after her, too. So in 2009, Zeughauser took a test offered by Myriad Genetics. It analyzed her DNA for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that can make cancer more likely than not, raising the lifetime risk of breastcancer in women to between 55 and 85 percent, and to between 10 and 70 percent for ovariancancer.
Zeughauser was lucky and unlucky. She got a clear, unambiguous, and accurate answer from the test: She had a bad mutation. But she’d found it before she got cancer. She decided to have her ovaries removed and later had a double mastectomy, reducing her risk to almost average.
Her cousin Ken Deutsch wasn’t so lucky. In 2014, he was hit with bladder cancer. He also went...
A decade ago, researcher Haruko Obokata caused a sensation when she published two papers in the journal Nature, in which she claimed that she had discovered a way to create stem cells easily using the so-called STAP method.
By Yelena Biberman and Jonathan D. Moreno, Bioethics Forum | 04.16.2024
Aggregated News
A quiet biological revolution in warfare is underway. The genome is emerging as a new domain of conflict. The level of destruction that only nuclear weapons could previously achieve is fast becoming as accessible as a cyberattack.
CGS is excited to announce the launch of a new anti-eugenics initiative that has been years in the making. Legacies of Eugenics in Science, Medicine, and Technology kicks off with a monthly essay series published at the Los Angeles Review of Books that will expose and contest the reemergence of eugenic ideas in contemporary health sciences, human biotechnology, public health, and medicine. Community and campus-based events featuring the authors are also being planned. The project is a collaboration among CGS...
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...
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