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...

Image of the EU flags
By Oscar Williams, The New Statesman | 06.14.2022

Photo by Guillaume Périgois on Unsplash

On 11 June, Blake Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, published transcripts of interviews...

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By Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review | 06.14.2022

Photo by John-Mark Strange on Unsplash

Plants are the original carbon capture factories—and a new research program aims to make...

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By Kudrat Wadhwa , The Verge | 06.14.2022

When Arianna Huhn experienced complications with her first pregnancy, she signed up for a clinical trial, one that required her...

Embryos under a microscope
By Antony Starza-Allen, Progress Educational Trust | 06.13.2022

The question of what is a 'permitted embryo' under the legislation governing assisted reproduction in the UK has received...

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By Dan Samorodnitsky, The Daily Beast | 06.12.2022

On May 14, a gunman walked into a Tops grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York...

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By Jay Reeves, The Associated Press | 06.11.2022

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

For almost 40 years starting in the 1930s, as government researchers purposely let hundreds...

Image of a Scale
By Kit Wilson, The Critic | 06.10.2022

We’re entering an era of almost unfathomable, radical technological change. Elon Musk is getting monkeys to play Pong with just...

Image of a sperm bank
By Fiorella Valdesolo, WSJ Magazine | 06.08.2022

“Where is the we?” It’s the question that was the driving force for Vida Delrahim and Ronit Menashe when...