Articles and Commentary

Support for stem cell research is sweeping the country. Legislators in New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Florida, Washington and perhaps a dozen other states are looking to approve several billions of dollars for research on stem cells. The House and Senate...

December 29, 2004 to January 4, 2005 issue

The biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries are no strangers to the revolving door between government and the industries it supposedly regulates. Just this year two prominent Congress members who had authored legislation governing...

You wouldn't know it from the charged partisan debate here in the United States, but throughout the world new policies on human genetic and reproductive technologies reflect a surprising degree of consensus. In Europe, Australia, Canada and elsewhere, national policies...

In the late 1950s, soon after Watson and Crick had discovered DNA's structure, scientists began predicting that someday we'd be able to genetically engineer our children. We'd design them to be healthy, smart and attractive, with life spans of 200...

In the United States and a few other prosperous, technologically advanced countries, methods of sex selection that are less intrusive or more reliable than older practices are now coming into use. Unlike prenatal testing, these procedures are applied either before...

Several times over the past few months, a small but striking ad from a Virginia-based fertility clinic has appeared in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. Alongside a smiling baby, its boldface headline asks, "Do You Want...

The birth of Louise Brown in Oldham, England, on July 25, 1978, was front-page news all over the world. Time magazine put it on the cover. London's Daily Mail paid $570,000 for an exclusive. Truly, as Newsweek put it, her...

Twenty-five years ago, the use of in vitro fertilization to conceive the first "test-tube" baby provoked an important debate -- about cloning, about designer babies and about what limits we need to place on human genetic engineering. Science has moved...