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...

Spermbank
By Nellie Bowles, The New York Times | 01.08.2020

The sperm kings of America are exhausted.

These men are flying all over the place. They are shipping their sperm...

man in a business suit stealing money
By Ellen Trachman, Above the Law | 01.08.2020

You might not have heard the news, given the holiday season, but the alarming case of a scam surrogacy agency...

Silhouettes of prisoners behind a fence.
By Emily Mullin, Medium One Zero [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 01.08.2020

This week, the United States government will begin collecting DNA samples from thousands of people detained by immigration officials, including...

He Jiankui speaking at the the international genome editing summit in Hong Kong
By Françoise Baylis, The Boston Globe | 01.05.2020

Three babies, three scientists, three years in jail, and a three million yuan fine. This is the story of He...

Photo of Françoise Baylis, a white woman with brown hair, smiling
By Françoise Baylis, The Conversation | 01.05.2020

A month ago, there were countless commentaries on the one-year anniversary of the news that Chinese researcher He Jiankui had...

Black and white logo for The Hasting Center featuring the name and a silhouette of a tree
By Ruipeng Lei and Renzong Qiu, The Hastings Center Bioethics Forum | 01.04.2020

Professionals and the public in China first learned of the jail sentence of He Jiankui from the report of Xinhua...

Illustration of scientists constructing DNA
By Sarah Ruth Bates, WBUR Boston | 01.03.2020

Gene-editing technologies have huge potential to alleviate human suffering. But, like all very powerful technologies, they also carry enormous risks...

Artistic rendering of DNA being severed by CRISPR
By Theresa Machemer, Smithsonian Magazine [Cites CGS' Marcy Darnovsky] | 12.31.2019

On Monday, a court in Shenzhen sentenced He Jiankui—the scientist who performed CRISPR gene-editing on twin human embryos—to three years...