Articles and Commentary

Your Editorial 'New sources of sex cells' (Nature 452, 913; 2008), on the potential use of pluripotent stem-cell-derived gametes (PSCDGs) for germline genetic modification and enhancement, suggests that the prospect of stem-cell-derived gametes could trigger renewed calls for regulating human...

Numerous articles and commentaries in the health literature recently have questioned the emergence of race as an increasingly powerful organizing principle in clinical medicine and pharmaceutical development [1,2]. Yet proposals for regulatory reform remain thin. Debate over racebased medicine crystallized...

What prompted the recent headlines about genetically-modified human embryos? Why did a brief account of an experiment at Cornell University, presented last fall at an American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference and then published without fanfare in its journal Fertility...

In an essay in Sunday's Outlook section, Dartmouth ethics professor Ronald Green asks us to consider a neo-eugenic future of "designer babies," with parents assembling their children quite literally from genes selected from a catalogue. Distancing himself from the compulsory...

The embryonic stem cell research controversy may finally be moving to a new stage, and perhaps closer to a good outcome. For years, those afflicted with chronic disease have seemingly been pitted against those who consider stem cell research immoral...

For Boomers and the World War II generation, Aldous Huxley's 1932 Brave New World is the touchstone tale of a techno-utopian nightmare created by reproductive and biological engineering. Those in Gen X and Gen Y who ponder the prospect of...

While gay families and their supporters await the California Supreme Court's ruling on the constitutionality of a voter-approved law banning same-sex marriage, a few researchers and pundits are proposing that same-sex procreation with bio-engineered gametes will undermine one of the...

Bold books that offer grand theses to explain the course of human history are risky endeavors. Few such attempts rightfully linger in the collective conscious: from the 18th century's The Wealth of Nations to the following century's Das Capital and...