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...

Image of a woodland mosquito resting on a leaf.
By Rowan Jacobson, Pacific Standard | 06.20.2018

In a windowless London basement, behind three sets of locked steel doors and a wall of glass, thousands of Anopheles...

Illustration of a neanderthal skull.
By Jon Cohen, Science | 06.20.2018

Until now, researchers wanting to understand the Neanderthal brain and how it differed from our own had to study a...

Photograph of an empty doctor's office.
By Priyanka Vora, Scroll.in | 06.20.2018

Last year, shortly after she had donated her eggs for the eighth time since 2009, Shabana Memon* resolved never to...

Lonely road stretching into the distance with the U.S. Mexico border wall flanking it.
By Ian MacDougall, ProPublica | 06.19.2018

Amid a bipartisan backlash, President Trump has tried repeatedly to shift blame to Democrats for his own administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration...

An Indian woman gazes into the distance and appears to be thinking.
By Priyanka Vora, Scroll.in | 06.19.2018

In March, Mumbai resident Shaheeda Khan*, 26, spent 20 days at a fertility clinic in Kerala, where doctors gave her...

Microscope image of H1N1 virus
By Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR | 06.19.2018

New genetic tools are making it easier and cheaper to engineer viruses and bacteria, and a report commissioned by the...

A pregnant woman in a blue dress holds her stomach and gazes at the camera.
By Fay Schopen, The Guardian | 06.18.2018

I don’t consider myself to be lucky. I have never won the lottery, or even found a fiver in an...

A gloved hand inserts a pipette of clear liquid into a test tube.
By Maud Newton, The New York Times | 06.18.2018

By now, millions of us have taken ancestry tests. We’ve spit into tubes and allowed our genetic information to be...