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...

Three cows grazing in grass
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 03.12.2018

The home page of the Minnesota biotech company Recombinetics shouts “The Gene Editing Revolution Is Here.” 

Or it would be, if only...

Scientist pipetting into plate
By Mary Warnock, The Guardian | 03.11.2018

The Royal Society has recently published the results of an extensive survey of the attitudes of the general public to...

Women operating machinery at a fertility clinic
By Amy Goldstein , Washington Post | 03.11.2018

A long-established San Francisco fertility clinic experienced a liquid nitrogen failure in a storage tank holding thousands of frozen eggs...

Pink background one side and blue background on the other with a DNA strand in the middle
By Joyce Bichler, Breast Cancer Action | 03.07.2018

Yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first time approved an at-home genetic testing kit without a doctor’s...

Bright yellow fluorescent fish in water
By Ian Sample, The Guardian | 03.07.2018

Britons are broadly in favour of rewriting the genetic code of human embryos to prevent children from inheriting devastating diseases...

A grainy, grayscale image showing the process of Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI). A slender needle tip touching the edge of an egg, held by pipette.
By Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph | 03.06.2018

Women are unfairly paying the price for men's falling fertility,  scientists have warned.

Mens sperm counts have reduced by...

7 bright yellow images of "x-shaped" chromosomes
By Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic | 03.06.2018

On Tuesday, 23andMe announced it will start telling customers of its mail-in DNA-testing kit about three mutations in the breast-cancer...

Dog
By Jessica Pierce, New York Times | 03.06.2018

Why, people want to know, did Barbra Streisand decide to clone Samantha, her coton de tulear? What would compel someone...