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...

By Aaron Carroll (The Incidental Economist), Academy Health Blog | 05.27.2016

For many, many years we’ve been hearing about gene therapy – the chance that we can get into people’s DNA...

By Carl Zimmer, STAT | 05.26.2016
Untitled Document

At the American Museum of Natural History, the venerable Science Talent Search announced Thursday that it was changing...

By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 05.25.2016

The biggest beneficiary of a plan to fabricate a human genome from scratch could be a Massachusetts startup called Gen9...

Image of five people standing.
By Marcy Darnovsky, Dan Sarewitz, Samuel Weiss Evans, Arvis Sulovari, Eric A. Widra, Zócalo Public Square | 05.24.2016

With the ubiquitous ways we apply our knowledge of genetics today—in crop seeds, medicine, space—it’s hard to believe the...

By Charles Pulliam-Moore, Fusion | 05.24.2016

In 2006, author Alon Ziv published the first edition of Breeding Between the Lines, a haphazard exploration of the...

By Greg Roumeliotos & Mike Stone | 05.24.2016

German drugs and chemicals group Bayer has made an unsolicited takeover proposal to U.S. seeds company Monsanto, aiming to create...

parent and child
By BBC News, BBC | 05.23.2016

Surrogacy laws which prevent single people from claiming parental rights are set to change following a ruling by the Family...

By Filipo Lentzos & Nicholas Evans, The Guardian | 05.23.2016

18-months of deliberation on how to regulate research enhancing the transmissibility and virulence of viruses will end when the National...