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

Looking at a book with and without glasses

A New Vision

By Ruth Reader, Fast Company | 09.27.2021

On the eighth night of Hanukkah last year, Barry Honig saw light. He could see the shape of the menorah...

Patents & Other IP

The great sperm heist: ‘They were playing with people’s lives’

By Jenny Kleeman, The Guardian | 09.25.2021

For 40 years, Catherine Simpson thought she knew who she was: a nurse, a mother of three, a daughter and...

Genomics

Regulating forensic genetic genealogy

By Natalie Ram, Erin E. Murphy, and Sonia M. Suter, Science | 09.24.2021

In May 2021, Maryland enacted the first law in the United States—and in the world—that comprehensively regulates law enforcement’s use...

U.S. Federal

A cautionary history of eugenics

By Adam Rutherford, Science | 09.24.2021

A century ago this week, 300 scientists, policy-makers, and campaigners gathered at the American Museum of Natural History in New...

Society

Cover of "The Genetic Lottery" by Kathryn Page Harden

Biology Meets Public Policy

By Aaron Panofsky, Science | 09.24.2021

Behavior genetics, its forbear eugenics, and its cousins sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have always been political sciences. When not being...

Genomics