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...

an ad for surrogacy
By Shanti Das, The Guardian | 12.18.2022

Women recruited by an international surrogacy agency to carry babies for wealthy clients are being asked to undergo “unethical” medical...

100 dollar bills
By Angela Saini, Undark | 12.16.2022

In 1961, a new journal of ethnology and anthropology appeared on academic bookshelves. Nearly every page betrayed an obsession with...

black lives matter protest
By Charles M. Blow, Undark | 12.15.2022

n his 1940 essay “Dusk of Dawn,” the renowned scholar W.E.B. Du Bois reflected back to his early-career...

ivf taking place in a Petrie dish
By Caitlin Huey-Burns, CBS News | 12.15.2022

While the prospects of codifying Roe v. Wade into federal law face high hurdles, Democrats on Capitol Hill are pushing...

genes in a syringe
By Gemma Conroy, Nature | 12.14.2022

In a landmark 1972 paper1, physician Theodore Friedmann and biochemist Richard Roblin foresaw a future in which DNA could be...

police man using a computer
By Jonathan Moens, Undark | 12.14.2022

In October of this year, police officials in Edmonton, Canada were struggling to solve a 2019 sexual assault case in...

cancer cells
By Rob Stein, NPR | 12.13.2022

Katie Pope Kopp went through round after round of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant to treat her non-Hodgkin lymphoma...

a person of African descent standing against a pole
By Jenni Quilter, Slate | 12.13.2022

Most people understand in-vitro fertilization to be privilege for the wealthy, the well-insured, or those living in a country with...