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...

Baby shoes
By Christina Caron, New York Times | 03.22.2020

After nearly two years of trying to have a baby, Karen Rzonca, 32, was hoping that this would be the...

Vertical lines of diffuse blue lights on a dark background
By Donna Dickenson, Katie Hasson & Marcy Darnovsky, Project Syndicate | 03.17.2020

The announcement by the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui in November 2018 that he had created the world’s first gene-edited babies...

Home DNA test kit
By Sarah Elizabeth Richards, Washington Post | 03.15.2020

When Lisa DeAngelico found out she had Stage 4 breast cancer two years ago at age 47, she says one...

By Michael Slezak and Penny Timm, ABC Australia | 03.14.2020

It’s pitch black. The Sun won’t rise for another hour or so.

The ground around Tony Biffin’s dairy farm on...

By Cecile Janssens, eLife | 03.13.2020

Interest in using polygenic scores to make predictions is skyrocketing in many areas of life. For example, researchers are exploring...

By Jennifer Lynch, Electronic Frontier Foundation | 03.11.2020

This week, we filed an amicus brief in a South Dakota case arguing that the Fourth Amendment prohibits the police...

adult and child holding hands
By University of Bristol, Phys Org | 03.11.2020

Pupils' genetic data do not predict their educational outcomes with sufficient accuracy and shouldn't be used to design a genetically...

By Claire Tomkins, Forbes | 03.09.2020

In the U.S., birthrates have dipped to an all-time low of 1.73 births per mother.

More than anything, this is...