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 DNA helix on a dollar bill
By Kevin Doxzen and Diana M. Bowman, Slate | 09.22.2021

Over the past decade, our ability to alter the human genome has rapidly improved, largely due to advancements in genome...

A neon sign showing the outline of a brain within a head in profile
By Tana Wojczuk, Slate | 09.21.2021

In the final chapter of her 1995 memoir of manic-depression, An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison posed a question...

Office building with 23andMe logo
By Kara Swisher, The New York Times | 09.20.2021

Anne Wojcicki is sitting on a treasure trove of genetic data. Wojcicki, a co-founder and the chief executive of the...

By Marcia L. O’Connell, Zachariah I. Grochau-Wright, and Christopher T. Fisher, The Philadelphia Inquirer | 09.20.2021

The University of Pennsylvania’s medical school apologized last month for unethical experiments on incarcerated, mostly Black men, often without their...

a magnifying glass shows a strand of DNA in front of a background of multicolored squares
By David K. Johnson, The Great Courses Daily [cites CGS' Marcy Darnovsky] | 09.19.2021

The film Gattaca is set in a world in which gene manipulation is common. When parents decide to have children...

By Cynthia Greenlee, Harper's Bazaar | 09.17.2021

In 1994, when I heard my beloved game show Jeopardy! was searching for college contestants, I somehow convinced my parents...

HIV and AIDS spelled in block letters
By Marie McCullough, The Philadelphia Inquirer | 09.17.2021

In 2014, Temple University researchers proved they could use state-of-the-art molecular scissors to cut out dormant HIV hiding in human...

By Carey Goldberg, Bloomberg | 09.17.2021

Rafal Smigrodzki won’t make a big deal of it, but someday, when his toddler daughter Aurea is old enough to...