News

Surrogacy goes more mainstream

By Carly Mallenbaum, Axios [cites Emily Galpern] | 03.29.2026

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...

U.S. Federal

Eugenics and the Modern Synthesis, Part I

By Jessica Riskin, Los Ángeles Review of Books | 03.23.2026

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...

Civil Society

Surrogacy laws are all over the map

By Carly Mallenbaum, Axios [cites Surrogacy360] | 03.29.2026

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

Why it matters: Confusing...

Policies

Project Eugenics: The Rollback of Disability Rights

By Kiana Jackson and Shannon Stubblefield, New Disabled South | 02.09.2026

^{"MC0_8230" via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by 2.0}

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

U.S. States

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

Wealthy funder pays reparations for use of HeLa cells

By Alexandra Witze, Nature | 10.29.2020

A major biomedical-research organization has for the first time aimed to make financial reparation for the continuing experimental use of...

Biotech & Pharma