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...

Sign says Proceed With Caution
By Dina Temple-Raston & Tim Mak, NPR | 07.29.2020

An NPR investigation has found irregularities in the process by which the Trump administration awarded a multi-million dollar contract to...

University campus in England
By Becca Muir, Prospect | 07.28.2020

Every so often in Britain, eugenics is accused of making a comeback. Recently, the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to...

Segregated pawns
By Isabel Wilkerson , The Guardian | 07.28.2020

In the winter of 1959, after leading the Montgomery bus boycott that arose from the arrest of Rosa Parks and...

Doctor examining a black patient
By Rod McCullom, Undark | 07.27.2020

THE POWER OF artificial intelligence has transformed health care by using massive datasets to improve diagnostics, treatment, records management, and patient...

Artist's impression of gene therapy
By Jon Hamilton, NPR | 07.27.2020

This is the story of a fatal genetic disease, a tenacious scientist and a family that never lost hope.

Conner...

By Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Current Affairs | 07.23.2020

Ray Kurzweil, popularizer of the Singularity

Once the dust settles, and we look back on the decade that has just ended...

Slaves at work
By Christine Kenneally, The New York Times | 07.23.2020

Photo by British Library on Unsplash

More than one and a half centuries after the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended, a...

By David Kaufman, The New York Times | 07.22.2020

While plenty of New Yorkers have formed families by gestational surrogacy, they almost certainly worked with carriers living elsewhere. Because ...