Articles and Commentary

UC Berkeley is proposing to launch an unprecedented, risky experiment on its incoming class. Under the plan, the university will send cotton swabs to thousands of 17- and 18-year-old freshmen and transfer students, and ask them to rub the inside...

President Obama may have given credence to a relatively new but questionable law enforcement practice that the rest of the developed world is starting to shun: taking and retaining DNA samples from individuals arrested for a crime but not convicted...

Since the times of Galileo and as recently as climate change researchers’ battles with the Bush administration, scientists have defended themselves against what they perceive to be undue intrusion into their research by government and other authorities. But rarely have...

Synthetic biology is the rapidly developing field devoted to engineering life from the ground up. It has recently generated headlines about startling applications such as the effort to artificially construct a living bacterium, molecule by molecule. But one of its...

From The MIT Press announcement:

Progress in Bioethics: Science, Policy, and Politics
Edited by Jonathan D. Moreno and Sam Berger
Foreword by Harold Shapiro

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

Bioethics has become increasingly politicized over the past decade...

Much appreciation is due to Andrew for his courage in soliciting "alternative perspectives" on technology innovation and life in the 21st century. I can't help but observe that his nervousness about doing so is one small sign that something is...

Pet cloning is a terrible idea -  and, we now know, an extremely unpopular one. Cloning endangered species is equally foolish. Re-creating extinct species is an absurd concept, whose worst extreme is the proposal to re-make a Neanderthal. Taken together...

Last month marked the tenth anniversary of Jesse Gelsinger's death. While perhaps not quite a household name, Gelsinger is vividly remembered among many medical researchers. His death during a gene therapy clinical trial in September 1999 rocked the field like...