News

The National Health Research Ethics Council (NHREC) has confirmed that heritable human genome editing (HHGE) remains illegal in South Africa, after changes in the latest version of the South African Ethics in Health Research Guidelines sparked concern among researchers that...

A little-noticed change to South Africa’s national health research guidelines, published in May of this year, has put the country on an ethical precipice. The newly added language appears to position the country as the first to explicitly permit...

IN THE FALL OF 2016, I gave a talk at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton titled “Are Robots...

A US startup company is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises...

graphic depicting genetic selection
By Julia Brown and Daphne Martschenko, The San Francisco Standard | 11.23.2024

“Pronatalist” parents like Simone and Malcolm Collins want it all: optimized babies – lots of them. 

To achieve this goal...

uterus
By Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review | 11.22.2024

Earlier this year, a boy in Sweden celebrated his 10th birthday. Reproductive scientists and doctors marked the occasion too. This...

willow brook
By Carl Elliott, The New York Review of Books | 11.21.2024

Photo "Traces of Willowbrook" by Matt Green on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In academic medicine, as with Confederate statuary...

dna graphic
By World Health Organization, World Health Organization | 11.20.2024

The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued a set of principles for the ethical collection, access, use and sharing of...

Elon Musk
By Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian | 11.19.2024

Photo "Elon Musk Presenting Tesla's Fully Autonomous Future" by  on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Is Elon Musk...

AI graphic
By Jim Thomas, Scan the Horizon | 11.19.2024

It’s the wee hours of 2nd November 2024 in Cali, Colombia. In a large UN negotiating hall   Colombian Environment Minister...

reproduction graphics
By Carter Sherman, The Guardian | 11.17.2024

The anti-abortion movement is ready for its comeback in 2025.

With the return of Donald Trump to the White...

gene editing graphic
By Jantina de Vries, EthicsLab | 11.15.2024

The conversation around human heritable genome editing (HHGE) in South Africa is marked by controversy and conflicting interpretations of the...