News

The Mysterious Eugenics of Aesthetic Taste

By Michael Rossi, The Los Angeles Review of Books | 01.11.2026

This is the 10th 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. The series is organized by Osagie K. Obasogie in...

Arts & Culture

The mirage of AI deregulation

By Alondra Nelson, Science | 01.15.2026

One of the most interventionist approaches to technology governance in the United States in a generation has cloaked itself in the language of deregulation. In early December 2025, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to announce a forthcoming “One...

Global Governance

More and “Better” Babies: The Dark Side of the Pronatalist Movement

By Daphne O. Martschenko and Julia E. H. Brown, Hastings Bioethics Forum | 01.14.2026

There is growing concern that falling fertility rates will lead to economic and demographic catastrophe. The social and political movement...

Genetic Selection

Bay Area Startups Want to Make Genetically Engineered Babies. What Could Go Wrong?

By Grace Won, KQED Forum [with CGS' Katie Hasson] | 12.02.2025

In the U.S., it’s illegal to edit genes in human embryos with the intention of creating a genetically engineered baby...

Genetic Selection
syringe filled with pink liquid

Q&A: Bioethicist Leigh Turner on the worrisome boom in unregulated stem cell clinics

By Megan Molteni, STAT | 11.08.2021

In 2016, the Food and Drug Administration put the emerging stem cell cottage industry on notice. At the time...

Policies
newborn baby feet with ankle bands

‘Nightmare’ IVF mix-up leaves L.A. couple giving birth to other family’s baby

By Hayley Smith, The Los Angeles Times | 11.08.2021

When Daphna Cardinale gave birth to her second daughter in September 2019, she and her husband, Alexander, were immediately puzzled...

U.S. States
brown eggs in a basket with a pink piggy bank

I sold my eggs for an Ivy League education – but was it worth it?

By Ellie Houghtaling, The Guardian | 11.07.2021

My eyes flutter open. I’m surrounded by four nurses holding me upside down. They shake me back and forth, urging...

Bioethics

All Those 23andMe Spit Tests Were Part of a Bigger Plan

By Kristen V Brown, Bloomberg | 11.04.2021

A few months ago, on the morning 23andMe Holding Co. was about to go public, Chief Executive Officer Anne Wojcicki...

Society

Becoming Without: Making Transgenic Mosquitoes and Disease Control in Brazil

By Luísa Reis-Castro, Duke University Press | 11.01.2021

The First Bite

At the end of a day of fieldwork in Juazeiro, a city in Northeast Brazil, I sat...

Animal Biotechnologies
Blue Instagram advertisement for Modern Fertility, reading "Want kids one day?"

Hounded by fertility ads on Instagram? Don't let them stress you out.

By Rachel Kraus, Mashable | 10.31.2021

Photo: screenshot from Instagram

On Instagram, I scroll past a blonde toddler's second birthday, a senior dog that's up for...

Society
test tubes of blood with purple and red stoppers in a yellow grid

How Silicon Valley hatched a plan to turn blood into human eggs

By Antonio Regalado, MIT Tech Review | 10.28.2021

image "Blood Samples" by Daniel Sone from the website of the National Cancer Institute

A few years ago, a young man...

Animal Biotechnologies

Imagine CRISPR cures

By Fyodor D. Urnov, Molecular Therapy | 10.27.2021

A decade of progress in sequencing and in CRISPR/Cas technologies has created a situation without precedent in the history of...

Stem Cells