News

Palantir Has a Hand in NIH’s Most Ambitious Health Initiative

By Julia Métraux, Mother Jones [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 07.07.2026

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...

U.S. Federal

The Measured Listener

By Daniel Shanahan, Los Angeles Review of Books | 05.31.2026

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...

U.S. States

These companies help parents try to pick their babies' traits. Experts are wary

By Rob Stein, NPR [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 05.06.2026

Justin Schleede reaches onto a black lab bench to pick up a tray of small plastic tubes.

"These are saliva...

Genetic Selection

The start-ups dreaming of creating genetically modified babies

By Alexandre Piquard, Le Monde [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 05.22.2026

"If proven to be safe, we believe preventive gene editing could be one of the most important health technologies of...

U.S. Federal
Woman with hands on computer

INTERVIEW: Inside Dr. Diane Tober’s Research on Egg Donors

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...

Assisted Reproduction
A family of five silhouetted in front of a sunset.

The Fertility Doctor’s Secret

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...

Assisted Reproduction
Photo of He Jiankui in a blue collard shirt who experimented to make CRISPR'd twins who were delivered last November.

Did a Permissive Scientific Culture Encourage the ‘CRISPR babies’ experiment?

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...

Genomics
A close-up photograph of a light-skinned newborn baby with its face obscured

CRISPR Gene Editing: Why We Need Slow Science

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...

Technologies

Editing genes shouldn’t be too scary — unless they are the ones that get passed to future generations

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...

Technologies
A busy urban street scene from Tokyo, Japan

Japan to pay compensation to people sterilised under eugenics law modelled on Nazi programmes

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 ...

Eugenics
White pencil writing a double strand of DNA on a blue background

Scientists Call for a Moratorium on Editing Inherited Genes

By Karen Weintraub, Scientific American [cites CGS' Marcy Darnovsky] | 03.13.2019

A group of 18 prominent scientists—including some who helped develop CRISPR–Cas9, the current leading tool for gene editing—issued a call...

Human Genetic Modification
Depiction of CRISPR--purple strand of DNA being cut from them middle of two orange strands

Call For Global Moratorium On Creating Gene-Edited Babies

By Rob Stein , National Public Radio [cites CGS' Marcy Darnovsky] | 03.13.2019

A group of prominent scientists and bioethicists is calling for a global moratorium on any new attempts to bring gene-edited...

Human Genetic Modification