September 26, 2025
(Longreads) – As the last Holocaust survivors approach the end of their lives, an AI scholar grapples with technology that promises to freeze them in time. Last May, I found myself in the basement of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and … Read More
September 23, 2025
(New York Times) – A young Greenlandic woman living in Denmark will regain custody of the infant girl taken from her shortly after birth. The case has become the latest flashpoint between Denmark and Greenland. Where the authorities misstepped, according … Read More
August 26, 2025
(Unherd) – As the historian Nadya Williams has shown, Greece and Rome offer proof that the parental quest for quality control over offspring is anything but new. Indeed, the popular stories of the era vigorously affirmed such practices. From Thetis … Read More
August 25, 2025
(New York Times) – If cherishing the suffering can make a nation kind, then discarding the suffering makes it cruel. It can breed a sense of contempt — why should we care for this hopeless cause? — and when our … Read More
August 13, 2025
(Wall Street Journal) – Tech execs are paying tens of thousands to find brilliant dates or select high-IQ embryos. ‘They want to raise high-performing children.’ Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, a mathematician, spent seven years researching how to keep an advanced form of … Read More
August 11, 2025
(The Free Press) – I’ve spent hours talking to the ‘Chinese Frankenstein’ who says he’s opening a lab in Austin. His competition, in his quest to pioneer gene editing in the United States? It’s his ex. I’m speaking to him … Read More
August 7, 2025
(New York Times) – For as little as $2,500, you can choose your future baby. Should you? Would you use an algorithm to select your embryos? Enter Orchid, a company that promises parents the ability to protect their future children … Read More
August 6, 2025
(NPR) – China imprisoned the scientist, He Jiankui, for three years for violating medical regulations. Fast forward to today: Mainstream scientific organizations are encouraging very careful basic research to explore gene-editing and human reproduction. But they still warn any attempts … Read More
July 18, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – A UK team announced the births of eight babies born with DNA from three people. But around the world, others have already been born. This week we heard that eight babies have been born in the … Read More
July 17, 2025
(Washington Post) – Investors say genetic prediction services for embryos, used by Elon Musk and others, are a trust fund for future children. Many scientists are skeptical. Siddiqui is a rising starin the realm of fertility start-ups backed by tech … Read More
July 16, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – Eight babies have been born in the UK thanks to a technology that uses DNA from three people: the two biological parents plus a third person who supplies healthy mitochondrial DNA. The babies were born to … Read More
June 25, 2025
(Newsweek) – Genetic disease is believed to be linked to 41 percent of U.S. infants’ deaths, and more than 2 million children in the country have a genetic condition. U.S.-based Nucleus is offering people having IVF the chance to select … Read More
June 24, 2025
(Gizmodo) – In late May, several scientific organizations, including the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy (ISCT), banded together to call for a 10-year moratorium on using CRISPR and related technologies to pursue human heritable germline editing. The declaration … Read More
May 28, 2025
(NPR) – A newly available kind of genetic testing, called polygenic embryo screening, promises to screen for conditions that can include cancer, obesity, autism, bipolar disorder, even celiac disease. These conditions are informed by many genetic variants and environmental factors … Read More
May 23, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – You may not be familiar with Tie, but she’s no stranger to the public spotlight. A former Thiel fellow, she is a partner in the attention-grabbing Los Angeles Project, which promised to create glow-in-the-dark pets. Over … Read More
May 1, 2025
(The Atlantic) – At a time when birth rates are declining across the world, techno-polygamy might sound like a good model for those who can afford it. But research on family structure has found that wealth and good genes aren’t … Read More
April 4, 2025
(BBC) – The US couple, aged 37 and 38, ardently believe that the world needs to have more babies or risk civilisational collapse. They have become the poster children for pronatalism, a movement that believes falling birth rates are a … Read More
April 3, 2025
(New York Times) – Orchid screens embryos’ DNA for hundreds of conditions, such as retinitis pigmentosa, which can be traced to a single genetic variant. But the company also goes further, offering what is known as polygenic screening, which gives … Read More
March 27, 2025
(Wall Street Journal) – He Jiankui stands by a controversial research approach that landed him in prison as he aims to tackle Alzheimer’s disease Chinese scientist He Jiankui set off global outrage and landed in prison after he skirted ethical … Read More
March 26, 2025
(BBC) – Many fertility patients in the UK are being offered unnecessary add-on treatments that have little or no proof of improving the likelihood of pregnancy, a report suggests.Add-ons are optional, non-essential treatments some private clinics offer in addition to … Read More
February 4, 2025
(BBC) – Auschwitz was established in 1940 when Nazi Germany opened a new camp complex in Oświęcim in southern Poland to hold prisoners. What began as a political prison of Polish nationals evolved into a death factory of Europe’s Jews, … Read More
January 21, 2025
(Associated Press) – Vermont’s child welfare agency relied on baseless allegations about a pregnant woman’s mental health to secretly investigate her and win custody of her daughter before the baby was born, according to a lawsuit that alleges the state … Read More
January 15, 2025
(The Atlantic) – Thanks to more sophisticated genetic-testing techniques, IVF—an expensive, invasive treatment originally developed to help people with fertility troubles—is becoming a tool for optimizing health. A handful of companies offer screening for diseases and disorders that range from … Read More
December 11, 2024
(Wired) – “People don’t always realize they are creating a human being and not a piece of furniture.” For years now, aspiring parents have been designing their children. Screening embryos for disease-causing genes during IVF, selecting their future baby’s sex, … Read More
November 12, 2024
(The Atlantic) – Gaps in the United States’ genetic-nondiscrimination law mean that life, long-term-care, and disability insurers can obligate their customers to disclose genetic risk factors for disease and deny them coverage (or hike prices) based on the resulting information. … Read More
