September 27, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – Long-distance space travel can wreak havoc on human health. There’s radiation and microgravity to contend with, as well as the psychological toll of isolation and confinement. Research on identical twin astronauts has also revealed a slew … Read More
September 20, 2024
(The Atlantic) – Deb Jenssen never wanted her children to suffer from the disease that killed her brother at 28. The illness, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, initially manifests in childhood as trouble with strength and walking, then worsens until the heart … Read More
September 18, 2024
(Plough) – If only her parents had been spared the terrible freedom of having to choose whether to have a child with a disability. “My husband and I decided that it was a loving decision not to bring her into … Read More
September 17, 2024
(The Times) – In the state’s low-regulation fertility clinics the perfect child may soon be available — for a price. Megan Agnew meets the doctors, mums and surrogates Welcome to California, fertility capital of the world. Thanks to many years … Read More
September 9, 2024
(New York Times) – A generation ago, bioethicists fought over whether assisted reproductive technology would be normalized or made taboo. Now there’s strong public consensus that it should be not only tolerated but also celebrated. But this may be a … Read More
September 6, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – Beijing formally ends a program that was propelled by birth restrictions and that had been largely on hold since the pandemic China said it was formally ending almost all international adoptions, shutting down a process that … Read More
August 22, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – Futurists who write about the destiny of humankind have imagined all sorts of changes. We’ll all be given auxiliary chromosomes loaded with genetic goodies, or maybe we’ll march through life as a member of a pod … Read More
August 16, 2024
(The Conversation) – I’m a medical anthropologist and bioethicist who studies the values and experiences driving prenatal gene therapy developments, including genome editing. Human prenatal genome editing has not happened yet – as far as we know. Prenatal genome editing … Read More
July 26, 2024
(MIT Technology Review) – He Jiankui, the Chinese biophysicist whose controversial 2018 experiment led to the birth of three gene-edited children, says he’s returned to work on the concept of altering the DNA of people at conception, but with a … Read More
July 18, 2024
(Newsweek) – China’s fertility rate, or births expected per woman during her lifetime, amid the rising cost of living in major cities and shifting cultural attitudes toward having children, is 1.0. This puts the country in the company of neighboring … Read More
July 12, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – The policy supercharged the country’s workforce: By caring for fewer children, young people could be more productive and put aside more money. For years, just as China was opening its economy, the share of working-age Chinese … Read More
July 4, 2024
(ABC News) – In a landmark decision, Japan’s Supreme Court ordered the government Wednesday to pay suitable compensation to about a dozen victims who were forcibly sterilized under a now-defunct Eugenics Protection Law that was designed to eliminate offspring of … Read More
June 7, 2024
(STAT News) – Federal officials, medical organizations, and reproductive health advocacy groups have expressed outrage in response to STAT’s recent investigation revealing that women with sickle cell disease have felt pressured into sterilizations as recently as 2017 and 2022. (Read … Read More
June 7, 2024
(Harvard Medical School) – Three out of four adults in the U.S. support the use of emerging technologies that estimate a future child’s likelihood of developing certain health conditions influenced by multiple genes — such as diabetes, heart disease, and depression … Read More
May 14, 2024
(The New Atlantis) – It’s pretty simple. People want children who look like them, who will be healthy and succeed in life,” said Lillian Tara, a master’s student at Harvard University who offers fertility education to young women. More specifically, … Read More
May 9, 2024
(Slate) – Having a baby via IVF first requires creating an embryo in a Petri dish. Embryonic testing can reveal secrets like genetic disorders. That allows it to serve as a screening tool for parents who carry genes for rare … Read More
April 29, 2024
(The Guardian) – Founded in 2005 and lauded by Silicon Valley, the Nick Bostrom’s centre for studying existential risk warned about AI but also gave rise to cultish ideas such as effective altruism. Two weeks ago it was quietly announced … Read More
April 10, 2024
(Wired) – God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or … Read More
April 9, 2024
(New York Times) – A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most esteemed publications for medical research, criticizes the journal for paying only “superficial and idiosyncratic attention” to the atrocities perpetrated in … Read More
March 11, 2024
(New York Times) – For decades, China harshly restricted the number of children couples could have, arguing that everyone would be better off with fewer mouths to feed. The government’s one-child policy was woven into the fabric of everyday life, … Read More
February 12, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – China’s baby bust is happening faster than many expected, raising fears of a demographic collapse. And coping with the fallout may now be complicated by miscalculations made more than 40 years ago. The rapid shift under way … Read More
January 8, 2024
(Atavist) – An ob-gyn in Virginia performed unnecessary surgeries on patients for decades. When his victims learned the truth, they fought back. Of the more than 80 births Perwaiz billed Medicaid and Tricare, another insurer, for in 2019, at least … Read More
January 2, 2024
(Wall Street Journal) – With the number of babies in free fall—fewer than 10 million were born in 2022, compared with around 16 million in 2012—China is headed toward a demographic collapse. China’s population, now around 1.4 billion, is likely … Read More
December 22, 2023
(Businessweek) – A startup called Minicircle wants to reprogram human genes—and is enlisting biohacker Bryan Johnson as a human guinea pig in its unproven approach. (Read More)
November 10, 2023
(Science) – All health care students worldwide should learn the history of medicine during the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, according to a report published Wednesday by The Lancet. The journal formed a commission in 2021 to explore how the … Read More
