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...

Eugenics tree diagram
By Science News Staff, Science News | 03.24.2022

Image from Wikicommons

In late 2019, with the 100th birthday of Science News a few years off, our team considered...

tweezers are used to take a DNA strand apart
By Tim Brinkhof, Big Think [cites CGS' Marcy Darnovsky] | 03.23.2022

George Church is one of the world’s most famous pioneers of genetics and biotechnology. He has made colossal contributions to...

sickle cell blood smear
By Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker | 03.22.2022

In September, 1904, a twenty-year-old Grenadian man named Walter Clement Noel disembarked in New York after an eight-day voyage from...

By Kelly Servick, Science | 03.22.2022

In its final stages, the neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) can bring extreme isolation. People lose control of their...

Person in black uniform typing on a laptop
By Troy Closson, The New York Times | 03.22.2022

Three years ago, Shakira Leslie was returning home from a cousin’s birthday party in the Bronx when officers pulled over...

a human hand with tech imbedded in it.
By Susan B. Levin, Slate | 03.22.2022

If, through biotechnology, we could drastically enhance ourselves—such that our ability to absorb and manipulate information was unlimited, we experienced...

3 early human embryos in grayscale
By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, Science | 03.21.2022

Photo by ZEISS Microscopy on Flickr

A California company says it can decipher almost all the DNA code of a...

IVF with the cells in the embryo in the shape of a question mark
By Josephine Johnston & Lucas J. Matthews , Nature | 03.21.2022

In fertility medicine, preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) has been developed for two purposes: first, to improve in vitro fertilization (IVF)...