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...

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

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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...

Portrait that frames a person in a business suit's upper body. They hold a sign in front of them, which reads in bold letters "Read the fine print."
By Kristen V. Brown, Gizmodo | 10.18.2017

You probably wouldn’t hand out your social security number without having a pretty good idea of how that information was...

An empty hospital room, with two beds and screens, separated by a curtain
By Liz Szabo, Kaiser Health News | 10.17.2017

Outrage over the high cost of cancer care has focused on skyrocketing drug prices, including the $475,000 price tag for...

A young woman of color with an intravenous line is dressed in a hospital gown, and lays on the hospital bed, looking over to a newborn child that is supported by a gloved hand against the back of their head.
By Erin Blakemore, Washington Post | 10.15.2017

If you work at such places as Google, Facebook and Apple, your health insurance includes an unusual feature: coverage for...

Six pills are in focus on a white table. A medicine bottle is blurred in the background.
By Charles Piller, STAT | 10.12.2017

The anarchist grew animated as he explained his plan to subvert a pillar of global capitalism by teaching the poor...