The Center for Genetics and Society brings social justice and human rights to the center of public and policy discussions about human genetics and assisted reproduction.

Featured

South Africa Does Not Allow Heritable Human Genome Editing 

By Pete Shanks | 11.24.2024
Biopolitical Times

Flag of South Africa; design by Frederick Brownell,
image by WikimediaCommons users.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What is the legal status of heritable human genome editing (HHGE)? In 2020, a comprehensive policy analysis by Baylis, Darnovsky, Hasson, and Krahn documented that more than 70 countries and an international treaty prohibit it, and that no country explicitly permits it. Policies in some countries were non-existent, ambiguous, or subject to possible amendment, but the general rule remained, even after one...

Human Genetic Modification

Neoliberalism’s Love Affair with Innovation

By Emma McDonald Kennedy | 11.24.2024
Biopolitical Times

Gig work in childcare, nursing, and transportation; non-invasive prenatal testing; gene editing; and space expeditions can all be attributed to one mistaken, pervasive assumption: that “we can innovate our way out of the thorniest problems, including reproductive ones” (22). In Reproductive Labor and Innovation: Against the Tech Fix in an Era of Hype, feminist political theorist Jennifer Denbow demonstrates why the U.S. has put so much of its hopes, and its money, on technological “innovations”––and why that hasn’t addressed...

U.S. Federal

US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’

By Hannah Devlin, Tom Burgis, David Pegg, and Jason Wilson, The Guardian [cites CGS’ Katie Hasson] | 10.18.2024

Aggregated News

A US startup company is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises...

Genetic Selection

South Africa amended its research guidelines to allow for heritable human genome editing

By Françoise Baylis and Katie Hasson, The Conversation | 10.24.2024

Aggregated News

A little-noticed change to South Africa’s national health research guidelines, published in May of this year, has put the...

Policies

Biopolitical Times

A Pronatalist Vision of Humanity’s Future

By Shrese | 01.07.2025

Photo by TeggorMindFish via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license

A recent...

Genetic Selection

Some Notable 2024 Blog Posts

By CGS | 01.01.2025

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

Following an annual CGS tradition, we present a selection of our favorite Biopolitical Times posts...

Human Genetic Modification

Serving Two Masters:
Trump Team’s Tensions on Reproductive Politics

By Pete Shanks | 12.16.2024

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future, as Yogi Berra, Niels...

Assisted Reproduction

News

Aspiring Parents Have a New DNA Test to Obsess Over

By Kristen V. Brown, The Atlantic | 01.15.2025

The first time Jamie Cassidy was pregnant, the fetus had a genetic mutation so devastating that she and her husband, Brennan, decided to terminate in the second trimester. The next time they tried for a baby, they weren’t taking chances...

Patents & Other IP

New legal opinion: New GMOs deregulation proposal shifts safety testing, liability to EU food industry

By GMWatch Staff, GMWatch | 01.14.2025

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

The planned deregulation of new GMOs (new genomic techniques, NGTs) in the EU would shift safety testing and liability risks for plants produced with NGTs and the products derived from them, from biotech companies...

Other Countries

Inside the strange limbo facing millions of IVF embryos

By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 01.13.2025

Lisa Holligan already had two children when she decided to try for another baby. Her first two pregnancies had come easily. But for some unknown reason, the third didn’t. Holligan and her husband experienced miscarriage after miscarriage after miscarriage.

Like...

U.S. Federal

“Who Does 11 Rounds of IVF? Me, Apparently.”

By Melissa Dahl, Slate | 01.13.2025

Mia used to say she’d never do in vitro fertilization. It’s a detail that feels significant now, looking back on the three long years that she and her husband, Chris, have spent trying to conceive. “When we first started trying...

Bioethics

Video
Reproduction and Family Formation: The State and the Market
Use Gene Editing to Make Better Babies | Debate | Intelligence Squared U.S.
The 'Perfect' Baby?: The Dangers of Gene Editing in Assisted Reproduction