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...

Baby genome
By Eben Kirksey, Sapiens | 01.27.2021

Surreal artwork in the hotel lobby—a gorilla peeking out of a peeled orange, smoking a cigarette; an astronaut riding a...

Virginia State Capitol
By Ellen Wayland-Smith, Boston Review | 01.27.2021

Image: Skip Plitt - C'ville Photography,
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

When Elizabeth Catte began researching Pure America...

Bare jail cell
By Jacob Stern, Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic | 01.27.2021

The victims of the so-called Golden State Killer lived in subdivisions and middle-class neighborhoods. They included a nurse, a medical...

Hospital room
By Kristen V Brown , Bloomberg | 01.27.2021

DNA-testing company 23andMe Inc. has launched a new tool that aims to predict an infected person’s risk of developing a...

Eric Lander
By Eli Hager, The Marshall Project | 01.26.2021

This image is distributed under the CC-BY 2.0 license.

In November 1988, at a secretive conference center in the...

DNA samples
By Emily Mullin, Future Human | 01.21.2021

Over the past few years, the online DNA database GEDmatch has become a powerful tool for solving cold cases...

Egg freezing
By Danielle Pacia and Jacob Howard, Bioethics Forum | 01.21.2021

In the midst of the pandemic, life has been put on hold in a multitude of ways. Many women are...

By Justine Barron , FAIR | 01.20.2021

In the sticky conversations around rationing life-saving treatments and vaccines during the Covid pandemic, corporate media have elevated some experts...