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...

A grayscale image of a person's hand is shown, as it gently holds a colorful image of earth in their hands.
By Françoise Baylis, Healthy Debate | 10.24.2017

20th anniversary celebration of the Oviedo Convention begins today, October 24, in Strasbourg, France. The goal of this international conference...

Grayscale image of a baby's fist, resting as they lay down.
By Andrew Joseph, STAT | 10.23.2017

In almost every way, the 2-year-old is the child that his moms dreamed of. He loves playing with cars and...

A pregnant woman lays on a bed of blankets with her arm extended, as another woman with medical tools touches her arm.
By Sharmila Rudrappa, The Conversation | 10.23.2017

Would you pay someone US$150,000 to have your baby?

The high cost of surrogacy in the U.S. has pushed many...

Landscape photo of the CA Capitol Building, against a blue sky and surrounded by trees,\.
By Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times | 10.20.2017

On Oct. 2, California took a major step to address an emerging public health crisis. That’s the day Gov. Jerry...

An empty, sealed bag labeled as evidence.
By Ashley Southall, New York Times | 10.19.2017

Freezing winds whipped the snow-covered coastline of Brooklyn’s Calvert Vaux Park on the day two years ago that a severed...

Close-up of an eye retina.
By Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic | 10.19.2017

And she isn’t the only one.

Last year, a 77-year-old woman traveled to a clinic in Georgia to have stem...

Blueprint sketch of a human head against a grid.
By Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei, Wall Street Journal | 10.18.2017

How to avoid the nightmare scenario of artificial intelligence? According to researchers from Elon Musk’s OpenAI, the trick is teaching

...
Illustrated image, featuring a graphic of a map of the seven continents. A vertical double helix appears at the center. Two horizontal curving lines appear faintly in the background. The letters ATCG are repeated across the horizontal lines.
By Jeff Lyon, JAMA | 10.18.2017

As CRISPR/Cas9 (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats–Cas9) and other gene-editing technologies hasten the feasibility of effective somatic and germline...