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...

Gel DNA plate with UV illumination
By Jan Ransom and Ashley Southall, The New York Times | 03.31.2019

When Karina Vetrano was found beaten and strangled in a Queens park nearly three years ago, the New York Police...

Blue double helix DNA strand on dark blue background
By Landon J. Getz and Graham Dellaire, The Hastings Center | 03.29.2019

On March 13, Nature published a call for a global moratorium on heritable human genome editing signed by several prominent...

Padlock attached to a DNA strand on a blue background.
By Karen Gullo, Electronic Frontier Foundation [cites CGS and Pete Shanks] | 03.29.2019

Analyzing and indefinitely keeping the DNA profiles of thousands of Californians arrested for felonies, but never charged with a crime...

Three test tubes nect to gloved hand
By Elizabeth Joh, Slate | 03.29.2019

Sometimes a marketing pivot serves a truth-telling function. A new television ad for the consumer DNA database FamilyTreeDNA asks the...

Brown mouse sitting on gloved hand
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 03.26.2019

Since its invention, CRISPR has let scientists introduce DNA changes at specific locations in a genome. Often these precise changes...

By Anna Maria Romero, The Independent | 03.21.2019

Mumbai—A Malaysian national has been detained at the Mumbai International Airport after it was discovered that he was carrying live...

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...