News

A US startup company is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises questions about the ethics of genetic enhancement.

The company, Heliospect Genomics, has worked with more than a dozen couples undergoing...

A little-noticed change to South Africa’s national health research guidelines, published in May of this year, has put the country on an ethical precipice. The newly added language appears to position the country as the first to explicitly permit...

IN THE FALL OF 2016, I gave a talk at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton titled “Are Robots...

Discovering your genetic history can be as simple as spitting into a test tube, but what happens when your data...

A technician in a Biobank
By Gina Kolata, The New York Times | 01.21.2022

"Biobank" by UiT Norges arktiske universitet 
is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via flickr

Marin Konstadt, visiting family in...

Gloved hand holding a test tube labeled "DNA TEST"
By Kunal Sanghavi, Betty Cohn, Anya E. R. Prince, W. Gregory Feero, Kerry A. Ryan, Kayte Spector-Bagdady, Wendy R. Uhlmann, Charles Lee, J. Scott Roberts & Debra J. H. Mathews, npj Genomic Medicine | 01.20.2022

Consumer interest in genetic and genomic testing is growing rapidly, with more than 26 million Americans having purchased direct-to-consumer (DTC)...

A large, empty FDA conference room
By Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer, Washington Monthly | 01.20.2022

If Robert Califf, the White House nominee for commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, is confirmed by the Senate...

Kidney surgery
By Roni Caryn Rabin, The New York Times | 01.20.2022

Photo courtesy of Sanford Health via flickr

Surgeons at the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported on Thursday that they...

Altos Labs logo
By Michael Eisenstein, Nature Biotechnology | 01.19.2022

On 19 January, co-founders Rick Klausner and Hans Bishop publicly launched an aging research initiative called Altos Labs, with $3...

2 doctors performing surgery
By L. Syd M. Johnson, The Hastings Center Bioethics Forum | 01.19.2022

News of the first  transplant of a pig’s heart into a human was widely reported last week, raising hope that...

By GMWatch, GMWatch | 01.19.2022

A new analysis by A Bigger Conversation suggests that, in its haste to deregulate agricultural gene technologies, the UK government...

Person holding a tuft of their hair
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 01.18.2022

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Biologists at several startups are applying the latest advances in genetic engineering to the...