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

No, scientists are not any closer to pig-to-human transplants than they were last week

By Jason Mast, Endpoints News | 10.22.2021

Steve Holtzman was awoken by a 1 a.m. call from a doctor at Duke University asking if he could put...

Biotech & Pharma

States Are Toughening Up Privacy Laws for At-Home DNA Tests

By Emily Mullin, Wired | 10.21.2021

IF YOU’VE EVER spit into a plastic tube or swabbed your cheek and mailed your saliva away to learn about your...

Policies

Campus professor Osagie K. Obasogie elected as member to the National Academy of Medicine

By Lydia Sidhom, The Daily Californian [cites CGS' Marcy Darnovsky] | 10.20.2021

UC Berkeley professor of law and bioethics Osagie K. Obasogie was elected for membership to the National Academy of Medicine...

Civil Society

Ancient-DNA Researchers Set Ethics Guidelines for Their Work

By Sabrina Imbler, The New York Times | 10.20.2021

^{Photo by pedrik on Flickr}

In 2017, a team of scientists successfully extracted the DNA of members of a Pueblo...

Policies

Before making a mammoth, ask the public

By Victoria Herridge, Nature | 10.20.2021

^{Image by Russ Seidel on Flickr}

Every few years for the past 20 or so, the story resurfaces, frozen in...

Synthetic Biology

“Science and Technology Now Sit in the Center of Every Policy and Social Issue”

By Alondra Nelson and William Kearney, Issues in Science and Technology | 10.19.2021

^{Photo of Alondra Nelson by Dan Komoda}

In January 2021, President Biden appointed sociologist Alondra Nelson, a leading scholar...

U.S. Federal

In a First, Surgeons Attached a Pig Kidney to a Human, and It Worked

By Roni Caryn Rabin, The New York Times | 10.19.2021

Surgeons in New York have successfully attached a kidney grown in a genetically altered pig to a human patient and...

Animal Biotechnologies

a picture of the now removed Robert E Lee statue

Ghosting the Confederacy

By Erin Thompson, Harper's Bazaar | 10.18.2021

^{"Robert E. Lee IMG_2662" by OZinOH

is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0}

What should happen to Confederate monuments after...

Society