News

During his 2015 State of the Union address, then-President Barack Obama announced what he promised would be an ambitious public health project. “Tonight, I’m launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes...

This is the 15th installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. You can read the first part here. The series...

Justin Schleede reaches onto a black lab bench to pick up a tray of small plastic tubes.

"These are saliva...

"If proven to be safe, we believe preventive gene editing could be one of the most important health technologies of...

DNA strand
By Marcelo Jauregui-Volpe, Wired | 04.24.2026

Two companies that launched last year with plans to create gene-edited babies have already shut down, citing money issues and...

Image of a man pointing at his ear.
By Rob Stein, NPR | 04.23.2026

The Food and Drug Administration approved the first gene therapy to restore hearing for people who were born deaf.

The...

gene therapy graphic
By Sriparna Roy, Reuters | 04.23.2026

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Regeneron’s gene therapy ‌for a rare genetic form of deafness, the company...

"superbaby" flies above DNA double helix
By John Donvan, WNYC and Open to Debate [with Marcy Darnovsky] | 04.23.2026

For complete introduction see Substack

Some call it eugenics, an unsettling step toward a world of “designer babies” reserved for...

sperm on blue background
By Emily Mullin, Wired | 04.23.2026

A STARTUP OUT of Utah, Paterna Biosciences, says it has successfully grown functional human sperm in a lab and used the...

biotech graphic
By Fyodor D. Urnov and Sadik H. Kassim, Nature | 04.21.2026

In February, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed a radical rethink of how scientists, physicians and manufacturers develop...

eugenics tree image
By Alex Aylward, Daniel J. Fairbanks, Maria Kiladi, and Gregory Radick , Heredity | 04.20.2026

Genetics and eugenics co-evolved at the beginning of the twentieth century and remained associated through the 1940s and beyond. Early...

images of embryo development
By Alfonso Martinez Arias, Nicolas Rivron, and Naomi Moris, BioNews | 04.20.2026

The ability of pluripotent stem cells to differentiate into different cell types has enabled the creation of stem-cell-based embryo models...