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...

Child getting his mouth swabbed by woman wearing red scrubs
By Jamie Williams AND Hayley Tsukayama, Electronic Frontier Foundation | 09.28.2018

California's kids now have common-sense protections against unwarranted DNA collection. Gov. Jerry Brown this week signed A.B. 1584, a...

Mosquito on skin with green background
By Michael Nedelman, CNN | 09.25.2018

Researchers have rendered a population of mosquitoes in a lab sterile using the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 by homing in on...

White pencil made out of a strand of DNA, on a blue background
By Catherine Bliss, Zocalo Public Square | 09.25.2018

Over the past 25 years, we’ve become surprisingly comfortable with the idea that genes play a large role in our...

Red and yellow musical symbols on red background
By Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic | 09.25.2018

Genetic-ancestry tests are having a moment. Look no further than Spotify: On Thursday, the music-streaming service—as in, the service used...

Blue double strand DNA on white background
By Nathaniel Comfort, Nature | 09.25.2018

It’s never a good time for another bout of genetic determinism, but it’s hard to imagine a worse one than...

Mosquito standing on leaf/green background
By Rob Stein, National Public Radio | 09.24.2018

For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that a controversial new kind of genetic engineering can rapidly spread a self-destructive...

Half-put together puzzle depicting strands of DNA, in a spotlight
By Linda Geddes, The Guardian | 09.21.2018

Evie Walker sits on her mother’s lap, playing a game she never grows tired of: turning her mother’s hand over...

Woman in lab coat looking at test tubes
By Greg Hampikian, The New York Times | 09.21.2018

Before you give the police a DNA sample, read an alarming new study of crime laboratories published this summer, the...