News

'Superbabies' Startup Seeks Funds for Controversial Gene Editing Push

By Sophie Alexander and Ike Swetlitz, Bloomberg | 06.25.2025

A California-startup focused on genetically editing human embryos — a step toward creating so-called designer babies — is raising money as many of Silicon Valley’s ultra-rich turn their attention to one of the most controversial technologies in medicine.

Bootstrap Bio...

Patents & Other IP

Can doctors test embryos for autism? And should they?

By Brittany Luse, Liam McBain, and Neena Pathak, NPR [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 05.28.2025

A newly available kind of genetic testing, called polygenic embryo screening, promises to screen for conditions that can include cancer, obesity, autism, bipolar disorder, even celiac disease. These conditions are informed by many genetic variants and environmental factors - so...

Genetic Selection

Why Deleting Your 23andMe Data Is a Political Imperative

By Katie Sagaser, The DNA Exchange | 05.27.2025

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this piece are solely my own and do not represent those of my...

U.S. Federal

Trumpian “Common Sense” and the History of IQ Tests

By Pepper Stetler, Los Angeles Review of Books | 05.08.2025

^{"Donald Trump Signs The Pledge" by Michael Vadon

is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.}

This is...

Society

The genes we’re dealt

By Erik Parens, Aeon | 11.10.2020

Over the past decade, economists, sociologists and psychologists have begun collaborating with geneticists to investigate how genomic differences among human...

Society

Proponent of using IQ tests to screen immigrants named to senior NIST post

By Jeffrey Mervis, Science | 11.09.2020

An advocate for using IQ tests to select who is allowed to legally immigrate to the United States has been...

Genomics

International Reporting Mechanism for Unethical Germline Gene Editing Experiments Is Needed

By G. Owen Schaefer, Markus K. Labude, Yujia Zhu, Roger Sik-Yin Foo, Vicki Xafis, Trends in Biotechnology | 11.04.2020

The 2018 revelation of the birth of the first babies whose DNA had been edited shocked the world and was...

Policies

Men and women in early Americas shared hunting duties equally

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre, NewScientist | 11.04.2020

^{Illustration of Hunters and Glyptodon by Heinrich Harder, 1920, via Wikimedia}

A young woman buried with stone tools including spearheads...

Civil Society

Schools Adopt Face Recognition in the Name of Fighting Covid

By Gregory Barber, Wired | 11.03.2020

IN JUNE, THE school board in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, was facing a series of votes on the budget for an...

U.S. States

Racism is baked into patent systems

By Shobita Parthasarathy, Nature | 11.02.2020

The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans Anjali Vats Stanford Univ. Press (2020)

In July...

It’s 2020 and anti-Semitism is an electoral tactic again

By Tate Ryan-Mosley, MIT Technology Review | 11.02.2020

There were 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents reported in the US in 2019—a record-breaking year as tracked by the Anti-Defamation League, and...

Perspectives

Study: There Is No Country Where Heritable Human Genome Editing Is Permitted

By Farah Qaiser, Forbes [cites CGS' Marcy Darnovsky] | 10.31.2020

In a new study, four researchers reviewed policy documents from 106 countries to map out the policy landscape regarding...

Genomics