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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...

Genomics Education
By Brian M. Donovan, Monica Weindling, Jamie Amemiya, Brae Salazar, Dennis Lee, Awais Syed, Molly Stuhlsatz, and Jeffrey Snowden, Science | 02.22.2024

For as long as the concept of race has existed, racial prejudice has been justified on hereditary grounds (1...

ivf graphic on a blue background
By Katherine L. Kraschel, Bill of Health | 02.21.2024

Last week, the Alabama Supreme Court called frozen embryos created via in vitro fertilization (IVF) “extrauterine children” and referred to...

gene editing
By Megan Molteni , STAT | 02.21.2024

SAN FRANCISCO — Outside, the August sun wasn’t yet visible through the thick folds of fog blanketing the San Francisco...

DNA test
By Alaina Demopoulos, The Guardian | 02.17.2024

What’s next for 23andMe? Most people know the biotech company as a genetic testing service. Stories of people sending their...

rendering of the brain
By Nancy S. Jecker and Andrew Ko, The Conversation | 02.14.2024

How does a brain chip work?

Neuralink’s coin-size device, called N1, is designed to enable patients to carry out actions...

Scientists studying genes
By Philip Ball, Quanta Magazine | 02.14.2024

The discovery during the Human Genome Project in the early 2000s that we humans have only about 20,000 protein-coding genes...

Sickle Cells graphic
By Victoria Gray, Uduak Thomas, and Kevin Davies, The CRISPR Journal | 02.14.2024

In July 2019, medical staff in Nashville dosed the first U.S. patient in the exa-cel therapy trial, sponsored by Vertex...

23andme tests
By Thomas Germain, Gizmodo | 02.13.2024

With the business in a tailspin, 23andMe’s CEO assures investors there’s still plenty of money it can make on your...