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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...

a photograph of Edinburgh, Scotland
By Mark McLaughlin, The Times | 02.17.2025

Scottish authorities collaborated with a Nazi eugenicist to racially profile Gypsies and Travellers as part of a campaign of “cultural...

DNA strand
By Matthew Cobb, Nature | 02.17.2025

On 24 February 1975, some 150 people met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds near Monterey on the Californian coast. They...

superbaby graphic
By Katie Hasson, The New York Times Upfront | 02.17.2025

A young couple wants to have a baby, but they’re worried it’ll carry a disease that runs in the family...

DNA tree graphic
By Ben Johnson, Nature | 02.14.2025

A London-based biotech has amassed the world’s largest ethically sourced foundational biodiversity database for training artificial intelligence (AI) by setting...

lab equipment
By Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic | 02.14.2025

Photo by Hans Reniers on Unsplash

For decades in the united states, scientists and government officials have coexisted in a...

eugenics graphic
By Lily Hu, Los Angeles Review of Books | 02.13.2025

IN MAY 1921, the organizers of the Second International Congress of Eugenics assured the public that its conference, to be...

global egg trade graphic
By Nino Tarkhnishvili, Radio Free Europ | 02.13.2025

When Na, a Thai woman, saw a Facebook advertisement promising work as a surrogate mother in Georgia, it seemed almost...

gene therapy graphic
By Robin Fields, ProPublica | 02.12.2025

Vincent Gaynor remembers, almost to the minute, when he realized his part in birthing the breakthrough gene therapy Zolgensma had...