News

These companies help parents try to pick their babies' traits. Experts are wary

By Rob Stein, NPR [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 05.06.2026

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

"These are saliva samples as well as blood," says Schleede, a geneticist who runs Herasight Inc.'s lab in Morrisville, N.C. "We also...

Genetic Selection

The Measured Listener

By Daniel Shanahan, Los Angeles Review of Books | 05.31.2026

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...

U.S. States

The start-ups dreaming of creating genetically modified babies

By Alexandre Piquard, Le Monde [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 05.22.2026

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

U.S. Federal

Natural Election

By Jonathan Basile, Los Ángeles Review of Books | 04.29.2026

WILLIAM BATESON, a foundational figure in the science of genetics at the turn of the last century, once recounted the...

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

Inside the lawsuit that ended US gene patenting

By Heidi Ledford, Nature | 10.25.2021

Not so long ago, if you asked someone about the US Patent and Trademark Office’s practice of granting patents on...

Policies

California’s shameful history of forced sterilization

By Editorial Board, The Press Democrat | 10.24.2021

^{Photo of Sonoma Developmental Center

licensed for use under CC BY-SA 4.0 on WikiCommons}

Staff Writer Phil Barber’s startling account...

Bioethics

image of coronavirus - a red sphere with green spikes

COVID-19 and the rebiologisation of racial difference

By Wingel Xue, Alexandre White, The Lancet | 10.23.2021

In the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, early dashboards set up by the US Centers for Disease Control and...

Public Opinion

What Dune Reveals about Reproductive Control and Eugenics

By Andrew J. Mongue and Caitlin E. McDonough-Goldstein, Scientific American | 10.22.2021

Few fictional creatures are as iconic or as synonymous with their franchise as the giant apex predators of the desert...

Society

No, scientists are not any closer to pig-to-human transplants than they were last week

By Jason Mast, Endpoints News | 10.22.2021

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put...

Biotech & Pharma

States Are Toughening Up Privacy Laws for At-Home DNA Tests

By Emily Mullin, Wired | 10.21.2021

IF YOU’VE EVER spit into a plastic tube or swabbed your cheek and mailed your saliva away to learn about your...

Policies