Articles and Commentary

"In a country nervous about genetically modified crops, we are making the foolhardy move to genetically modified babies." So said MP Jacob Rees-Mogg in a UK Parliamentary debate on draft regulations to allow trials of controversial techniques that might allow...

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held a public meeting in late February to consider experimental new techniques that would modify human eggs or embryos in an attempt to allow women with severely mutated mitochondrial DNA to have a child...

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing gained notoriety in the autumn of 2008. That was when two prestigious publications, The New Yorker and The New York Times, featured largely positive accounts of a celebrity “spit party”—at which notables dressed in cocktail...

An advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration is set to begin two days of meetings tomorrow to consider radical biological procedures that, if successful, would produce genetically modified human beings. This is a dangerous step. These techniques would...

Dominic Cummings, a senior adviser to the UK Secretary of State for Education, recently provoked a flurry of complaints by allegedly claiming that "a child's performance has more to do with genetic makeup than the standard of his or her...

I have my parents, and biotechnology, to thank for bringing me into this world; I was an IVF baby. Given this intimate connection with technology and test tubes, you might think I'd be a cheerleader for all developments in...

Robert G. Edwards might not be a household name, but the innovation he pioneered along with Patrick Steptoe certainly is. In vitro fertilization (IVF), the process whereby human eggs are fertilized outside of the body and the resulting embryos implanted...