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.

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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

Black Americans Don’t Trust Medicine Because Of Racism. That’s Bad In A Pandemic.

By Dan Vergano and Kadia Goba, Buzzfeed | 05.04.2020

WASHINGTON — Outside the grocery store in Congress Heights, people are playing dominoes in the parking lot, close together without...

Eugenics

Fertility Clinics Stay Open Despite Unclear Guidelines

By Natalie Lampert, New York Times | 05.01.2020

Since March, fertility clinics across the country have halted treatments for tens of thousands of people because of Covid-19, forcing...

Assisted Reproduction

Disease Has Never Been Just Disease for Native Americans

By Jeffrey Ostler, The Atlantic | 04.29.2020

As the death toll from COVID-19 mounts, people of color are clearly at greater risk than others. Among the most...

Eugenics

Genetic Engineering Could Make a COVID-19 Vaccine in Months Rather Than Years

By Charles Schmidt, Scientific American | 04.29.2020

On January 10, when Chinese researchers published the genome of a mysterious, fast-spreading, virus, it confirmed Dan Barouch’s greatest worry...

Genomics

COVID-19 Immunity Testing: A Passport to Inequity

By Françoise Baylis and Natalie Kofler, Issues in Science and Technology | 04.29.2020

As COVID-19 case numbers start to plateau in various places, some governments are now focusing on how best to ease...

Bioethics

Did this virus come from a lab? Maybe not — but it exposes the threat of a biowarfare arms race

By Sam Husseini, Salon | 04.24.2020

There has been no scientific finding that the novel coronavirus was bioengineered, but its origins are not entirely clear. Deadly pathogens discovered...

Fertility clinics push back

By Alison Motluk, HeyReprotech Newsletter | 04.21.2020

Several of the fertility world's top advisory bodies have strongly urged fertility clinics to stop or severely scale back services...

Assisted Reproduction

blue and black double helix superimposed on map of the world

Ethics and Global Governance of Human Germline Genome Editing: The Problem of Techno-Scientific Colonialist Paternalism

By Gabriela Arguedas-Ramírez, CRISPR Journal (paywall) | 04.21.2020

Abstract

I want to enrich the debate about the ethics and governance of human germline editing (HGE) by emphasizing an...

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