News

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...

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...

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

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

A lab mouse
By Michael Le Page, New Scientist | 05.13.2020

Biologists have created mouse-human chimeras whose bodies were composed of up to 4 per cent human cells when the early...

By Rebecca Robbins, STAT | 05.13.2020

As researchers probe DNA in search of clues about why some Covid-19 patients get so much sicker than others, they’re...

Photo of Judith Butler
By Francis Wade, The Nation | 05.13.2020

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Judith Butler has achieved a status that few other living academics have acquired: For each published...

By Tamsin Shaw, The New York Review of Books | 05.13.2020

America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has exposed a shocking lack of preparedness for public health emergencies. But it has...

By Alana Lentin, The Guardian | 05.12.2020

As coronavirus continues to rampage across the globe, it has become apparent that, while biologically the virus may not discriminate...

A colorized image of sperm
By Alison Motluk, HeyReprotech Newsletter | 05.12.2020

Genes from the virus that causes COVID-19 have been found in the semen of men who had the disease, according...

A white doctor injecting a black research subject at Tuskegee
By Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker | 05.07.2020

Evelynn Hammonds, who chairs Harvard’s department of the history of science, has spent her career studying the intersection of race...

Unemployed workers in line
By Aaron Ross Coleman, Vox | 05.06.2020

Black Americans experience recessions the way front-seat passengers do head-on collisions. During the Great Depression, when national unemployment reached 24...