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 hand intervenes in a strand of DNA
By Jennifer A. Doudna, The Atlantic | 09.12.2022

Two years ago, I was working on my laptop in an airport lounge in Newark, New Jersey, when I glanced...

a photo of Alice Wong's book Year of the Tiger
By Anna Leahy, The Washington Post | 09.09.2022

Vintage Press, book design by Debbie Glasserman

Alice Wong was born with muscular dystrophy, which hampered her ability to walk...

a neuron
By Claire Robinson, GMWatch | 09.08.2022

A group of 56 international scientists and policy experts have published a statement opposing the use of the term “precision...

Françoise Baylis
By Nahlah Ayed (interviewer), CBC Ideas | 09.06.2022

“Why is it that we think we can just take everything, everything, and modify it for ourselves?” asks Françoise...

a photo of a commemorative monument in Tulsa on Black Wall Street, site of the Tulsa Race Massacre
By Emily Mullin, Wired | 09.06.2022

Wesley Fryer on Flickr

On the night of May 31, 1921, a white mob descended on the affluent Black neighborhood...

a photo of Dorothy Roberts in front of a building with her arms crossed
By Irin Carmon, New York Magazine | 09.06.2022

One day in 2006, Dorothy Roberts went in for a conference with her youngest son’s teacher. The boy, said the...

A poster for transhumanism
By Rohitha Naraharisetty, The Swaddle | 09.05.2022

"transhuman" by new 1lluminati is licensed under CC BY 2.0

“It’s as if they want to build...

ivf
By Alisyn Camerota, CNN | 09.05.2022

Approximately one in every 50 kids born in the United States today is conceived in a fertility clinic or lab, ...