News

More Americans are turning to surrogacy to build their families, as the practice becomes more common and more publicly discussed.

Why it matters: As surrogacy becomes more visible and accessible, ethical, legal and cultural tensions become harder to ignore...

This is the first part of the 14th 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...

Without a federal law, surrogacy in the U.S. is governed by a patchwork of state regulations/

Why it matters: Confusing...

"MC0_8230" via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by 2.0 

This report documents a deliberate assault on disabled people in...

mosquito on skin
By Taylor White, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | 04.19.2021

This spring, the biotechnology company Oxitec plans to release genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in the Florida Keys. Oxitec says its technology...

By Alexis McGill Johnson, New York Times | 04.17.2021

We need to talk about Margaret Sanger.

For the 11 years that I’ve been involved with Planned Parenthood, founded by...

By Katherine Rosman, The New York Times | 04.16.2021

When the first letter from Women & Infants Hospital arrived in the mail in July 2017, Elaine Meyer thought perhaps...

monkey mother and child
By Rob Stein, NPR | 04.15.2021

Photo by Darrell Fraser on Unsplash

For the first time, scientists have created embryos that are a mix of human...

courtroom
By Mark Joseph Stern, Slate | 04.15.2021

On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld an Ohio law that prohibits doctors from...

lab work
By Svetlana Reiter, Alexander Ershov, and Farida Rustamova, Meduza | 04.14.2021

Until recently, the Russian authorities showed little interest in genetics. The breakthrough came in 2019, when the government allocated 127...

By Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review | 04.13.2021

AI researchers often say good machine learning is really more art than science. The same could be said for effective...

Stained-glass window
By Eric Michael Johnson, This View of Life | 04.12.2021

Photo by Schutz, stained glass designed by Maria McClafferty,
CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

While Black Lives Matter protests...