Articles and Commentary

Four million American women are expecting a child this year, and many of them will encounter something entirely new in human pregnancy. Based on a simple blood draw at an initial prenatal visit, they'll be able to learn key genetic...

Most court cases involving patent law are corporate battles, with one company suing another for infringing on its intellectual property rights and, therefore, profits. Big companies fighting over big money can seem painfully irrelevant, especially when so many of us...

There's a buzz now around bringing species back from the dead. There's even a spiffy new name for it: "de-extinction." To some people, it sounds cute and cool and seems to be a sort of compensation for the human complicity...

Since Moore v. Regents of the University of California, there has been a wide-ranging debate regarding the holding of the case and its implications for property law. Moore stands for the notion that individuals do not have a property interest...

Have we gone beyond race? Many argue society has now overcome centuries of strife to become "post-racial" - a moment that law professor Sumi Cho of DePaul University in Chicago refers to as "the end of race history".

Two seemingly...

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently announced a proposal to build a facility in Richmond at which synthetic biology research will be a major focus. This news should give us pause to consider exactly what risks this little-known field poses for...

Thanks to advances in technology, scientists can extract cells from an animal and implant them into a surrogate mother. If all goes well, an animal with the same genes as the original—an identical twin—will be born. In the past 15...

The demand for women’s eggs for research could soar alarmingly following news of a cloning technique that uses human oocytes to reprogram somatic cells to a state of pluripotency (S. Noggle et al. Nature 478, 70–75; 2011).

The mean number...