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...

an image of an 8-cell-stage embryo
By Nirit Sandman Eriksson, The Times of Israel | 10.14.2022

For generations, the Yu family of Shanghai has suffered from type 2 diabetes. But this summer, as reported in the...

an image of two white rats
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 10.14.2022
Memorial at Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, Israel
By John Kendall Hawkins, CounterPunch | 10.14.2022

Ken Burns’s recently released film, The US and the Holocaust, is, as anticipated, an excellent addition to his growing...

a robot solving math problems
By Adrienne Williams, Milagros Miceli, and Timnit Gebru, Noema | 10.13.2022

The public’s understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) is largely shaped by pop culture — by blockbuster movies like “The Terminator” and...

close up of chess board with white king taking down black king
By Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review | 10.13.2022

GR Stocks on Unsplash

In a workshop in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Philip Nitschke—“Dr. Death” or “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide”...

test tubes in a canister tray
By Roy Furchgott, The New York Times | 10.12.2022

Unsplash

Sometimes the barrier to medical advancement isn’t in the science. It’s the money.

In 2003 the first full sequencing...

Eugenics Marker by North Carolina Highway
By Zari Taylor, The Daily Tar Heel | 10.11.2022

It’s been nearly four months since the United States Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, triggering restrictions in...

a flock of sheep standing in the grass
By Robin McKie, The Guardian | 10.09.2022

Tanner Yould on Unsplash

A flock of gene-edited sheep has been used by scientists to pinpoint a promising treatment for...