Answers to our greatest questions, we were told about a decade ago, could be ours if we just spat in a tube. Celebrities were using DNA tests to trace their ancestry on the hit TV show Finding Your Roots. A “Who’s Your Daddy” truck rumbled through the streets of New York City, offering paternity tests on the go. Angelina Jolie sent droves of women scrambling to get their DNA tested when she wrote a 2013 op-ed in the New York Times. Jolie, whose mother was diagnosed with breast and ovarian cancer and died at 56, credited a DNA screening with identifying a mutation in her BRCA1 gene that meant she had an elevated risk for cancer, too. In detailing her choice to get a double mastectomy, she helped cement the popular understanding that a single gene could mean the difference between life and death.
A few months after the op-ed ran, during an appearance on CBS This Morning, 23andMe Chief Executive Officer Anne Wojcicki said she was bringing the power of these sorts of DNA tests to everyone. Her startup would make testing...
By Anumita Kaur [cites CGS’ Katie Hasson], The Washington Post | 03.25.2025
Aggregated News
Genetic information company 23andMe has said that it is headed to bankruptcy court, raising questions for what happens to the DNA shared by millions of people with the company via saliva test kits.
By Peter Wehling, Tino Plümecke, and Isabelle Bartram | 03.26.2025
Biopolitical Times
This article was originally published as “Soziogenomik und polygene Scores” in issue 272 (February 2025) of the German-language journal Gen-ethischer Informationsdienst (GID); translated by the authors.
In mid-November 2024, the British organization Hope not Hate published its investigative research ‘Inside the Eugenics Revival’. In addition to documentating an active international “race research” network, the investigation also brought to light the existence of a US start-up that offers eugenic embryo selection. Heliospect Genomics aims to enable wealthy couples to...
By Anna Louie Sussman, The New York Times | 03.25.2025
Aggregated News
On June 24, 2022, the same day the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I received a call from the fertility clinic where I’d been undergoing in vitro fertilization, informing me that seven of...
Since Francis Galton coined the phrase “nature versus nurture” 150 years ago, the debate about what makes us who we are has dominated the human sciences.
Do genes determine our destiny, as the hereditarians would say? Or do we enter...
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