News

A Chinese scientist horrified the world in 2018 when he revealed he had secretly engineered the birth of the world's first gene-edited babies.

His work was reviled as reckless and unethical because, among other reasons, gene-editing was so new...

INTRODUCTION

Baby bonuses. Motherhood medals. Fertility tracking. You may have heard of these policy proposals as solutions from the Trump administration to help encourage women to have more children.

Besides falling short of ensuring that people have what they need...

Adapted from Mitochondrial DNA at
National Human Genome Research Institute

Recently, media outlets around the world have been reporting on...

A newly available kind of genetic testing, called polygenic embryo screening, promises to screen for conditions that can include cancer...

Brown lizard on log
By Heather Murphy, The New York Times | 04.05.2019

Scientists have been altering the genes of mice, pigs, goats, chickens and butterflies for quite some time. But even as...

Blue DNA on black background with green vertical letters and numbers on top
By Oliver Morton, The Economist | 04.04.2019

1 A whole new world

Biology is a way of structuring matter at a molecular scale by slotting each atom...

Human embryo on blue background
By Julianna LeMieux, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 04.01.2019

An anonymous incubator space just off the New Jersey Turnpike is the unlikely setting for Genomic Prediction, a genetic testing...

Several fingerprints stamped on a white background
By Clive Thompson, Smithsonian | 04.01.2019

At 9:00 a.m. last December 14, a man in Orange County, California, discovered he’d been robbed. Someone had swiped his...

Gel DNA plate with UV illumination
By Jan Ransom and Ashley Southall, The New York Times | 03.31.2019

When Karina Vetrano was found beaten and strangled in a Queens park nearly three years ago, the New York Police...

Blue double helix DNA strand on dark blue background
By Landon J. Getz and Graham Dellaire, The Hastings Center | 03.29.2019

On March 13, Nature published a call for a global moratorium on heritable human genome editing signed by several prominent...

Padlock attached to a DNA strand on a blue background.
By Karen Gullo, Electronic Frontier Foundation [cites CGS and Pete Shanks] | 03.29.2019

Analyzing and indefinitely keeping the DNA profiles of thousands of Californians arrested for felonies, but never charged with a crime...

Three test tubes nect to gloved hand
By Elizabeth Joh, Slate | 03.29.2019

Sometimes a marketing pivot serves a truth-telling function. A new television ad for the consumer DNA database FamilyTreeDNA asks the...