News

Developments in gene-editing technology raise new ethical questions

By [cites CGS' Katie Hasson], KCBS Radio | 11.19.2025

This is Ask An Expert, where every weekday at 9:20am, KCBS Radio is giving you direct access to top experts in various fields. Today: Gene-editing technology allows scientists to work with DNA in unprecedented ways, but there are larger scientific...

U.S. Federal

Genetically Engineered Babies Are Banned. Tech Titans Are Trying to Make One Anyway.

By Emily Glazer, Katherine Long, Amy Dockser Marcus, The Wall Street Journal | 11.08.2025

For months, a small company in San Francisco has been pursuing a secretive project: the birth of a genetically engineered baby.

Backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and his husband, along with Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, the startup—called...

Genetic Selection

Who Gets to Procreate and Parent? A Black Feminist Critique of the Pronatalist Agenda

By Jallicia A. Jolly, Sydney Curtis and Nicole Sessions, Ms. Magazine | 10.17.2025

Pronatalism is an old idea with roots in eugenics and nationalism, that is now fashionable among far-right influencers and policymakers. They talk...

U.S. Federal

Does One Size Fit All?

By Jay S. Kaufman, Los Angeles Review of Books | 09.27.2025

This is the 10th installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring...

Society

Are surrogate and IVF babies ‘essential’ in a pandemic?

By Amrita Pande, Mail & Guardian | 05.22.2020

A recent New York Times article heightened the sense of dystopia of the world that we seem to be...

'All the psychoses of US history': how America is victim-blaming the coronavirus dead

By Lois Beckett, The Guardian | 05.21.2020

_{Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash}

Why do Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population but nearly a...

America’s Patchwork Pandemic Is Fraying Even Further

By Ed Yong, The Atlantic | 05.20.2020

here was supposed to be a peak. But the stark turning point, when the number of daily COVID-19 cases in the...

U.S. Federal

Inside America’s Horrifying Modern-Day Eugenics Movement

By Cassie Da Costa, The Daily Beast | 05.18.2020

Director Erika Cohn’s new film, Belly of the Beast, part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival which goes...

U.S. Federal

United States relaxes rules for biotech crops

By Erik Stokstad, Science | 05.18.2020

^{Photo by Erwan Hesry via Unsplash.com}

A major change to U.S. regulation of biotech will exempt some gene-edited plants from...

Animal Biotechnologies

100 Babies Stranded in Ukraine After Surrogate Births

By Andrew E. Kramer, The New York Times | 05.16.2020

The babies lie in cribs, sleeping, crying or smiling at nurses, swaddled in clean linens and apparently well cared for...

Assisted Reproduction

A smartphone with Stay Home instructions

Apple and Google are building a virus-tracking system. Health officials say it will be practically useless.

By Reed Albergotti and Drew Harwell, Washington Post | 05.15.2020

_{Photo by Adrien Delforge on Unsplash}

Apple and Google’s announcement last month of a joint effort to track the coronavirus...

A painting of burying victims of the Black Death

From Black Death to fatal flu, past pandemics show why people on the margins suffer most

By Lizzie Wade, Science | 05.14.2020

_{Wikimedia Commons: Miniature by Pierart dou Tielt: The people of Tournai bury victims of the Black Death.}

When the Black...