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...

Mother kissing smiling baby on the cheek
By Lesley McClurg, National Public Radio | 04.08.2019

It wasn't hard for Shara Watkins to get pregnant. It was hard for her to stay pregnant.

In 2016, she...

Mother with three children--kissing one on the cheek and holding one
By Ellen Matloff, Forbes | 04.07.2019

For over a century parents had the option of placing a child for adoption anonymously – meaning that the child...

Dollar bill with DNA in the middle
By James Paton, Bloomberg | 04.06.2019

Dozens of revolutionary gene therapies that mend faulty strands of DNA are on their way, bringing the power to eliminate...

Pacifier frozen in petri dish
By Jasmin Rosemberg, The New York Times | 04.05.2019

Perhaps it started with the fortuneteller.

Though I’d spent my 32 years steering clear of all tarot card readers and...

Brown lizard on log
By Heather Murphy, The New York Times | 04.05.2019

Scientists have been altering the genes of mice, pigs, goats, chickens and butterflies for quite some time. But even as...

Blue DNA on black background with green vertical letters and numbers on top
By Oliver Morton, The Economist | 04.04.2019

1 A whole new world

Biology is a way of structuring matter at a molecular scale by slotting each atom...

Human embryo on blue background
By Julianna LeMieux, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News | 04.01.2019

An anonymous incubator space just off the New Jersey Turnpike is the unlikely setting for Genomic Prediction, a genetic testing...

Several fingerprints stamped on a white background
By Clive Thompson, Smithsonian | 04.01.2019

At 9:00 a.m. last December 14, a man in Orange County, California, discovered he’d been robbed. Someone had swiped his...