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...

worker in a lab pipettes
By Eric Schmidt, TIME | 04.16.2024

Imagine a world where everything from plastics to concrete is produced from biomass. Personalized cell and gene therapies prevent pandemics...

AI
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024

The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI)...

orchid graphic
By Jason Kehe, Wired | 04.11.2024

God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have...

stethoscope
By Neel Shah, The Preprint | 04.11.2024

Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian...

stem cells
By Tomoko Otake, The Japan Times | 04.09.2024

A decade ago, researcher Haruko Obokata caused a sensation when she published two papers in the journal Nature, in which...

person in white lab coat holds swab
By Jorge Barrera and Rachel Houlihan, CBC | 04.09.2024

A Canadian DNA laboratory knowingly delivered prenatal paternity test results that routinely identified the wrong biological fathers — ruling out...

Gene Editing
By Harold Brubaker, The Philadelphia Inquirer | 04.04.2024

Acompany started by University of Pennsylvania scientist Jim Wilson has received FDA approval to test a form of gene editing...

Protest
By Judith Levine, The Intercept | 04.04.2024

WHEN THE ALABAMA Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of...