Articles and Commentary

There's a buzz now around bringing species back from the dead. There's even a spiffy new name for it: "de-extinction." To some people, it sounds cute and cool and seems to be a sort of compensation for the human complicity...

Since Moore v. Regents of the University of California, there has been a wide-ranging debate regarding the holding of the case and its implications for property law. Moore stands for the notion that individuals do not have a property interest...

Have we gone beyond race? Many argue society has now overcome centuries of strife to become "post-racial" - a moment that law professor Sumi Cho of DePaul University in Chicago refers to as "the end of race history".

Two seemingly...

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recently announced a proposal to build a facility in Richmond at which synthetic biology research will be a major focus. This news should give us pause to consider exactly what risks this little-known field poses for...

Thanks to advances in technology, scientists can extract cells from an animal and implant them into a surrogate mother. If all goes well, an animal with the same genes as the original—an identical twin—will be born. In the past 15...

The demand for women’s eggs for research could soar alarmingly following news of a cloning technique that uses human oocytes to reprogram somatic cells to a state of pluripotency (S. Noggle et al. Nature 478, 70–75; 2011).

The mean number...

In 2010, Rebecca Skloot published The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a New York Times bestseller about a poor black woman in the late stages of cancer in 1950s Baltimore whose doctor removed cervical tissue from her without her...

The increasing use of DNA evidence has revolutionized criminal investigations. Over the past several years, DNA forensics—once thought to be a less reliable identifier than other forensic techniques, such as latent fingerprinting—have now become the evidentiary gold standard in criminal...