Articles and Commentary

You wouldn't know it from the charged partisan debate here in the United States, but throughout the world new policies on human genetic and reproductive technologies reflect a surprising degree of consensus. In Europe, Australia, Canada and elsewhere, national policies...

In the late 1950s, soon after Watson and Crick had discovered DNA's structure, scientists began predicting that someday we'd be able to genetically engineer our children. We'd design them to be healthy, smart and attractive, with life spans of 200...

In the United States and a few other prosperous, technologically advanced countries, methods of sex selection that are less intrusive or more reliable than older practices are now coming into use. Unlike prenatal testing, these procedures are applied either before...

Several times over the past few months, a small but striking ad from a Virginia-based fertility clinic has appeared in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. Alongside a smiling baby, its boldface headline asks, "Do You Want...

The birth of Louise Brown in Oldham, England, on July 25, 1978, was front-page news all over the world. Time magazine put it on the cover. London's Daily Mail paid $570,000 for an exclusive. Truly, as Newsweek put it, her...

Twenty-five years ago, the use of in vitro fertilization to conceive the first "test-tube" baby provoked an important debate -- about cloning, about designer babies and about what limits we need to place on human genetic engineering. Science has moved...

If you've opened a newspaper or magazine recently, you've probably seen splashy ads for Botox, as part of a new $50 million direct-to-consumer marketing campaign to promote cosmetic injections of botulism toxin.

The Botox campaign follows other recent news reports...

As 2003 began, the mainstream press was grappling with a cloning hoax. This January, it launched extended coverage of the 50th anniversary of the identification of DNA's structure. Both events provided golden opportunities to deepen public understanding of the social...