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 mouse sitting on gloved hand
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 03.26.2019

Since its invention, CRISPR has let scientists introduce DNA changes at specific locations in a genome. Often these precise changes...

By Anna Maria Romero, The Independent | 03.21.2019

Mumbai—A Malaysian national has been detained at the Mumbai International Airport after it was discovered that he was carrying live...

Two pairs of scissors cutting a strand of DNA
By Stephen Buranyi, The New York Review of Books | 03.21.2019

When the journal Science chose the radical gene-editing technology CRISPR as its 2015 breakthrough of the year, the editorial team...

satellite image of Earth
By Jon Cohen, Science | 03.19.2019

There’s an “urgent need” to create a transparent global registry that would list all experiments related to human genome editing...

Woman with hands on computer
By Raquel Cool, We Are Egg Donors | 03.18.2019

We Are Egg Donors has been a long-time partner with Dr. Diane Tober, a medical anthropologist at UCSF who is...

A family of five silhouetted in front of a sunset.
By Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic | 03.18.2019

The first Facebook message arrived when Heather Woock was packing for vacation, in August 2017. It was from a stranger claiming to...

Photo of He Jiankui in a blue collard shirt who experimented to make CRISPR'd twins who were delivered last November.
By Donna Dickenson, Marcy Darnovsky, Nature Biotechnology | 03.15.2019

To the Editor — The claim last November by He Jiankui to have engineered the first CRISPR-edited babies has ignited...

A close-up photograph of a light-skinned newborn baby with its face obscured
By Landon J. Getz and Graham Dellaire, The Conversation | 03.15.2019

In a newly published article in Nature, a group of prominent scientists and ethicists have called for a moratorium...