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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...

Image is the multi-colored sign of Google's logo at the top of a building, in which each letter alternates in color in the order of blue for G, red for o, yellow for o, blue for g, green for l, and red for e.
By Kylie Robison, The Verge | 05.23.2024

Image by Pawel Czerwinski from Unsplash

Imagine this: you’ve carved out an evening to unwind and decide to make a...

stop forced sterilization
By Ma’ayan Anafi, National Women's Law Center | 05.22.2024

Just under a century ago this May, the Supreme Court handed down an infamous ruling upholding a Virginia law that...

Image is a graphic of a vial with a red cap filled with blood, and a circle containing a zoom-in view of the blood inside the vial, which shows crescent-shaped blood cells indicative of sickle cell disease.
By Shobita Parthasarathy, Scientific American | 05.22.2024

Last fall, to great fanfare, US regulators approved two gene therapies for sickle cell disease, and the European Union...

sickle cell fertility graphic
By Eric Boodman, STAT | 05.21.2024

BATON ROUGE, La. — The surgery was supposed to alleviate worry, but now, years later, Whitney Carter’s mind kept flicking...

Image is a graphic of an individual holding a vial that is depicted to contain sperm, with a graphic right next to it showing this being recorded on a piece of paper.
By Bek Shackelford-Nwanganga, NPR | 05.14.2024

JOHNSON COUNTY, Kansas — Ever since she was little, Sharla knew she wanted to be a mom. Sharla has...

Image shows a pipet inserting some sort of liquid into petri dish under a microscope.
By Stephanie Dutchen, Harvard Medical School | 05.14.2024

At a glance: 

Survey reveals nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults support using emerging technology to screen embryos during IVF for...

Image of many bubbles that appear to be multicolored against a dark background.
By Hannah Devlin, The Guardian | 05.14.2024

Photo by Kind and Curious from Unsplash

When Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) published the results of its gene therapy...

a multicolor DNA strand dissolving onto a yellow background
By Kristen V. Brown, Bloomberg | 05.14.2024

Answers to our greatest questions, we were told about a decade ago, could be ours if we just spat in...