News

Justin Schleede reaches onto a black lab bench to pick up a tray of small plastic tubes.

"These are saliva samples as well as blood," says Schleede, a geneticist who runs Herasight Inc.'s lab in Morrisville, N.C. "We also...

This is the 15th installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. You can read the first part here. The series...

"If proven to be safe, we believe preventive gene editing could be one of the most important health technologies of...

WILLIAM BATESON, a foundational figure in the science of genetics at the turn of the last century, once recounted the...

Image of a man pointing at his ear.
By Rob Stein, NPR | 04.23.2026

The Food and Drug Administration approved the first gene therapy to restore hearing for people who were born deaf.

The...

gene therapy graphic
By Sriparna Roy, Reuters | 04.23.2026

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved Regeneron’s gene therapy ‌for a rare genetic form of deafness, the company...

"superbaby" flies above DNA double helix
By John Donvan, WNYC and Open to Debate [with Marcy Darnovsky] | 04.23.2026

For complete introduction see Substack

Some call it eugenics, an unsettling step toward a world of “designer babies” reserved for...

sperm on blue background
By Emily Mullin, Wired | 04.23.2026

A STARTUP OUT of Utah, Paterna Biosciences, says it has successfully grown functional human sperm in a lab and used the...

Image of CRISPR
By Fyodor D. Urnov and Sadik H. Kassim, Nature | 04.21.2026

In February, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed a radical rethink of how scientists, physicians and manufacturers develop...

eugenics tree image
By Alex Aylward, Daniel J. Fairbanks, Maria Kiladi, and Gregory Radick , Heredity | 04.20.2026

Genetics and eugenics co-evolved at the beginning of the twentieth century and remained associated through the 1940s and beyond. Early...

images of embryo development
By Alfonso Martinez Arias, Nicolas Rivron, and Naomi Moris, BioNews | 04.20.2026

The ability of pluripotent stem cells to differentiate into different cell types has enabled the creation of stem-cell-based embryo models...

an image of sperm moving toward egg
By George Janes, BioNews | 04.20.2026

New regulations in sperm donation are being implemented by Belgium's Federal Agency for Medicines and Health Products (FAMHP), following revelations...