News

A Chinese scientist horrified the world in 2018 when he revealed he had secretly engineered the birth of the world's first gene-edited babies.

His work was reviled as reckless and unethical because, among other reasons, gene-editing was so new...

INTRODUCTION

Baby bonuses. Motherhood medals. Fertility tracking. You may have heard of these policy proposals as solutions from the Trump administration to help encourage women to have more children.

Besides falling short of ensuring that people have what they need...

Adapted from Mitochondrial DNA at
National Human Genome Research Institute

Recently, media outlets around the world have been reporting on...

A newly available kind of genetic testing, called polygenic embryo screening, promises to screen for conditions that can include cancer...

drawing of three human figures on pedestals with the one in the middle elevated above the others with a star above its head
By Paris Marx, Disconnect | 04.21.2023

Elon Musk has been warning about population decline and smaller families for years. In his 2015 biography, he’s quoted as...

A strand of double helix DNA
By Crystal Grant, ACLU | 04.19.2023

Newborn screening programs are a vital public health measure implemented in the U.S. and across the world, with about one...

sperm swimming under a fluorescent light
By Emma Bubola, The New York Times | 04.18.2023

The couple had dreams of a big family. They would have five children, who would have their father’s mop of...

a blond a pale skin sits in a diaper on the bed in a doctors office. A doctor with only his arm in frame puts a stethoscope to their back.
By Anna Merlan, Vice | 04.17.2023

For several years, parents of autistic children have paid between $10,000 and $15,000 to have their children undergo unproven stem...

A magnifying glass revealing the human genome from a DNA sequence
By Jane Clinton, Camden New Journal | 04.13.2023

The Cut + Paste exhibition is at The Crick

IF you had the chance to choose elements of yourself to...

stack of books
By Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ELSIhub | 04.12.2023

Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

Introduction

The development and use of an expanding range of medical technologies that yield...

macaque monkey
By Françoise Baylis, The Conversation | 04.12.2023

In January 2017, I met Jiankui He, the now-infamous Chinese scientist who would go on to create the world’s first...

drawing of a strand of DNA with tweezers removing a section
By Colin Baker, Al Jazeera | 04.11.2023

Two clinics sit adjacent to one another in a new hospital in a medium-sized city in the developed world.

In...