News

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

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...

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

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...

Policies

The New Artificial Intelligentsia

By Ruha Benjamin, Los Angeles Review of Books | 10.18.2024

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

A "Post-Human" Future?

What Do You Risk With At-Home DNA Test Kits?

By Ashleigh Wyss [cites CGS' Katie Hasson], Listnr | 10.09.2024

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

Society

Becoming Without: Making Transgenic Mosquitoes and Disease Control in Brazil

By Luísa Reis-Castro, Duke University Press | 11.01.2021

The First Bite

At the end of a day of fieldwork in Juazeiro, a city in Northeast Brazil, I sat...

Animal Biotechnologies

Blue Instagram advertisement for Modern Fertility, reading "Want kids one day?"

Hounded by fertility ads on Instagram? Don't let them stress you out.

By Rachel Kraus, Mashable | 10.31.2021

Photo: screenshot from Instagram

On Instagram, I scroll past a blonde toddler's second birthday, a senior dog that's up for...

Society

test tubes of blood with purple and red stoppers in a yellow grid

How Silicon Valley hatched a plan to turn blood into human eggs

By Antonio Regalado, MIT Tech Review | 10.28.2021

^{_{image "Blood Samples" by Daniel Sone from the website of the National Cancer Institute}}

A few years ago, a young man...

Animal Biotechnologies

Imagine CRISPR cures

By Fyodor D. Urnov, Molecular Therapy | 10.27.2021

A decade of progress in sequencing and in CRISPR/Cas technologies has created a situation without precedent in the history of...

Stem Cells

Inside the lawsuit that ended US gene patenting

By Heidi Ledford, Nature | 10.25.2021

Not so long ago, if you asked someone about the US Patent and Trademark Office’s practice of granting patents on...

Policies

California’s shameful history of forced sterilization

By Editorial Board, The Press Democrat | 10.24.2021

^{Photo of Sonoma Developmental Center

licensed for use under CC BY-SA 4.0 on WikiCommons}

Staff Writer Phil Barber’s startling account...

Bioethics

image of coronavirus - a red sphere with green spikes

COVID-19 and the rebiologisation of racial difference

By Wingel Xue, Alexandre White, The Lancet | 10.23.2021

In the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, early dashboards set up by the US Centers for Disease Control and...

Public Opinion

What Dune Reveals about Reproductive Control and Eugenics

By Andrew J. Mongue and Caitlin E. McDonough-Goldstein, Scientific American | 10.22.2021

Few fictional creatures are as iconic or as synonymous with their franchise as the giant apex predators of the desert...

Society