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...

By Sheetal Soni, South African Journal of Bioethics and Law | 06.01.2021

Gene-editing tools such as the CRISPR-Cas9 system create an opportunity for individuals to have their DNA edited for specific purposes...

Police Searching a database on a laptop
By Virginia Hughes, The New York Times | 05.31.2021

New laws in Maryland and Montana are the first in the nation to restrict law enforcement’s use of genetic genealogy...

stethoscope on baby's back
By David Jensen, The California Stem Cell Report | 05.28.2021

Orchard Therapeutics this morning formally announced it was giving up on its life-saving treatment for the bubble baby disease and...

Plastic models of various stages of embryonic development
By Françoise Baylis, The Conversation | 05.27.2021

Image via Flickr CC BY 2.0

The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), which bills itself as “the...

DNA in magnifying glass
By Melody Petersen, Los Angeles Times | 05.26.2021

The decision of whether to have a child can be hard even under the best of circumstances. For those with...

By Kelly Servick, Science | 05.26.2021

The world’s largest stem cell society this week signaled a willingness to reconsider a long-standing restriction on laboratory efforts to...

And eight-cell embryo
By Nidhi Subbaraman, Nature | 05.26.2021

The international body representing stem-cell scientists has torn up a decades-old limit on the length of time that scientists should...

A human embryo
By Rob Stein, NPR | 05.26.2021

For decades, scientists have been prohibited from keeping human embryos alive in their labs for more than 14 days. The...