News

More Americans are turning to surrogacy to build their families, as the practice becomes more common and more publicly discussed.

Why it matters: As surrogacy becomes more visible and accessible, ethical, legal and cultural tensions become harder to ignore...

This is the first part of the 14th 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. The series is organized by...

Without a federal law, surrogacy in the U.S. is governed by a patchwork of state regulations/

Why it matters: Confusing...

"MC0_8230" via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by 2.0 

This report documents a deliberate assault on disabled people in...

A genome sequence printed inside of a book.
By Alex Harding, Xconomy | 11.28.2016

Scientists are engineering a new living thing: a radically modified version of the lowly bacterium E. coli. In an ...

Molecular image of an egg.
By Deborah Cohen, BBC Panorama | 11.28.2016

Nearly all costly add-on treatments offered by UK fertility clinics to increase the chance of a birth through IVF are...

A flow of money is falling against a plain black background.
By Damian Garde, STAT | 11.28.2016

It was a good day for UniQure, a Dutch biotech company at work on gene therapies for rare diseases. A...

Illustrative image of DNA strands and molecules.
By Emily Mullin, MIT Technology Review | 11.22.2016

When a woman gets her genome sequenced, questions about privacy arise for her identical twin sister.

In August 2015, Samantha...

Silhouette of a pregnant body is shown, with their face pointed down and holding their stomach.
By Prak Chan Thul, Reuters | 11.21.2016

A Cambodian court charged an Australian nurse on Monday for allegedly operating an illegal fertility clinic, police said, weeks after...

A clock's edges are shown spiraling into several other clocks.
By Daniel Oberhaus, VICE Motherboard | 11.21.2016

Last week the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which consists of 18 scientists and policy experts...

Illustrative art that represents faceless human individuals standing in line like dominoes. Some in the back have been knocked over and may potentially fall onto the next person in the line.
By Sara Novic, VICE | 11.18.2016

"'All men are created equal.' Well, it's not true."

That's President-elect Donald Trump, a clip unearthed for a PBS documentary...

A display of a human portrait face, from Heather Dewey-Hagborg's 2012 art project called “Stranger Visions.”
By Jason Koebler, VICE Motherboard | 11.18.2016

Gene editing and new biological engineering techniques have allowed our minds to run wild: In the last few years, we’ve...