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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...

Sickle cell anemia blood under microscope
By Elizabeth Cooney, STAT | 02.17.2021

Image licensed under the CC BY 3.0

Novartis and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are joining forces to discover...

sickle cells
By Adam Feuerstein, STAT | 02.16.2021

Bluebird Bio said Tuesday that it has suspended clinical trials involving its gene therapy for sickle cell disease after receiving...

Gene therapy in lab
By Jocelyn Kaiser, Science | 02.16.2021

A company has stopped its clinical studies of a promising gene therapy for the blood disorder sickle cell disease after...

Covid-19 vaccine
By Mihir Zaveri, The New York Times | 02.16.2021

Officials in New York City released new data by ZIP codes on Tuesday that they said underscored troubling disparities in...

Magnifying glass
By GMWatch Staff, GMWatch | 02.16.2021

UK farm and environment ministry DEFRA published an “Explainer” document on gene editing as a guide for members of the...

scissors cutting DNA
By Sandy Sufian and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Scientific American | 02.16.2021

Americans have celebrated the fact that the Biden administration is embracing science and returning the country to evidence-based policymaking. We...

facial recognition
By Matthew Hutson, The New Yorker | 02.15.2021

In computer science, the main outlets for peer-reviewed research are not journals but conferences, where accepted papers are presented in...

Donor egg
By Diane Tober, Salon | 02.15.2021

*Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Janine* was raised by a single mother in the San Francisco Bay Area. With...