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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...

Doctor in white coat, with stethoscope and pens in pockets.
By Casey Ross, STAT News | 11.02.2016

We hear a lot about the wonders of genetic testing, how it can revolutionize medicine and find cures for fatal...

Blue-stained molecular photo of DNA strands.
By Sarah Buhr, Tech Crunch | 11.01.2016

The first whole human genome sequencing cost a whopping $2.7 billion. That didn’t bode well for making any breakthroughs on...

Portrait photo of Dorothy Roberts widely smiling with her arms lightly crossed.
By Brett Milano, Harvard Gazette | 11.01.2016

Professor Dorothy E. Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a leading scholar on legal and biosocial theory, will...

Syringe with needle
By Susan Scutti, CNN | 11.01.2016

Both men and women are responsible for pregnancy, yet the burden of preventing it often falls on one gender. Women...

A dart on a dart board largely misses the bull's-eye  target.
By Sharon Begley, STAT | 10.31.2016

Enthusiasm for precision medicinefrom the White House down to everyday physicians, is at an all-time high. But serious...

Mary Mallon, foreground, became known as Typhoid Mary and died after being quarantined for 23 years. (Wikimedia)
By Donald G. McNeil, Jr., The New York Times | 10.29.2016

The alleged “Patient Zero” of the American AIDS epidemic — a French Canadian flight attendant named Gaétan Dugas, who died...

Landscape photo of green field and a blue sky with clouds.
By Danny Hakim, The New York Times | 10.29.2016

LONDON — The controversy over genetically modified crops has long focused on largely unsubstantiated fears that they are unsafe to...

Colin Kaepernick dressed in 49'er uniform, is glancing to his right shoulder.
By Shaun King, New York Daily News | 10.29.2016

"Dad. Does Colin still have a game on Sunday?"

The question was a smart one for any football fan to...