News

More Americans are turning to surrogacy to build their families, as the practice becomes more common and more publicly discussed.

Why it matters: As surrogacy becomes more visible and accessible, ethical, legal and cultural tensions become harder to ignore...

This is the first part of the 14th 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. The series is organized by...

Without a federal law, surrogacy in the U.S. is governed by a patchwork of state regulations/

Why it matters: Confusing...

"MC0_8230" via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by 2.0 

This report documents a deliberate assault on disabled people in...

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...

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 ...