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...

By Eleanor Feingold, The Conversation | 03.15.2019

Gene editing is one of the scarier things in the science news, but not all gene editing is the...

A busy urban street scene from Tokyo, Japan
By Tom Barnes, The Independent | 03.15.2019

The Japanese government will pay millions of yen to victims of a now-defunct state sterilisation programme modelled on the laws of ...

White pencil writing a double strand of DNA on a blue background
By Karen Weintraub, Scientific American [cites CGS' Marcy Darnovsky] | 03.13.2019

A group of 18 prominent scientists—including some who helped develop CRISPR–Cas9, the current leading tool for gene editing—issued a call...

Depiction of CRISPR--purple strand of DNA being cut from them middle of two orange strands
By Rob Stein , National Public Radio [cites CGS' Marcy Darnovsky] | 03.13.2019

A group of prominent scientists and bioethicists is calling for a global moratorium on any new attempts to bring gene-edited...

By Eric Lander, Françoise Baylis, Feng Zhang, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Paul Berg et al., Nature | 03.13.2019

We call for a global moratorium on all clinical uses of human germline editing — that is, changing heritable DNA...

Ultrasound of child with down syndrome
By George J. Annas, Science | 03.10.2019

In 2011, poet and writer George Estreich wrote about the impact of biotechnology on family life in his first book, ...

Family tree with 7 generations
By Tim Flannery, The New York Review of Books [Cites CGS' Marcy Darnovsky] | 03.07.2019

Tracing genealogies has become immensely popular of late, and numerous companies offer to help you search through historical records or...

A gloved hand holds a large syringe that is partially filled with bone marrow
By Kate Sheridan, STAT | 03.04.2019

For the second time, doctors appear to have put HIV into “sustained remission” with a stem cell transplant — effectively...