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...

Picture of DNA
By Marcy Darnovsky, Leah Lowthorp, and Katie Hasson, OpenGlobalRights | 02.15.2018

What do recent advances in molecular genetics have to do with human rights? Quite a lot, it turns out. And...

An undifferentiated cell being differentiated into different cells. A switch is used to symbolize the changes made that allow the cell to differentiate differently.
By David Jensen, California Stem Cell Report [cites CGS' Marcy Darnovsky] | 02.14.2018

California is counting its first royalties from a 13-year-old effort to develop stem cell cures and has declared that it...

Buildings in Kiev, Ukraine
By Kevin Ponniah, BBC | 02.13.2018

Ukraine, one of Europe's poorest nations, is fast becoming the place to go for people desperate to find a surrogate...

Close-up view of microscope lens
By Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic | 02.12.2018

BOSTON—Out on an old Navy dry dock, a biotech company called Ginkgo Bioworks is growing genetically modified organisms by the...

A calculator and eye glasses rest on piles of paper
By Paul Kleutghen, David Mitchell, Aaron S. Kesselheim, Mehdi Najafzadeh, and Ameet Sarpatwari, HealthAffairs | 02.08.2018

In a system in which life-saving drugs are developed with direct and indirect taxpayer support and afforded market protection through ...

Pencil above DNA strand (pencil represents gene editing)
By Matthew Herper, Forbes | 02.07.2018

Jim Wilson has been one of gene therapy's pioneers. Now he's raising concerns about the safety of a technology he...

A symbol for cryptocurrrency Bitcoin is shown as a coin falling against a solid black background.
By Emily Mullin, MIT Technology Review | 02.07.2018

People will be able to earn cryptocurrency in exchange for letting pharma companies use their data.

Cryptocurrency in exchange for...

Toddler not looking at camera
By Sarah Elizabeth Richards, Smithsonian | 02.05.2018

Genomics is cheaper and more available then ever, but its usefulness for parents has yet to be proven

Before Cheryl...