Soon after a series of incredible discoveries almost five decades ago launched the era recombinant DNA (later renamed genetically modified organisms, or GMOs), some of the world’s leading scientists and…
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For years, I have been saying the genetics revolution is not just coming but already here. As we unlock the secrets of our genomes and systems biology more broadly, we…
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I am inviting you to a dinner party – where you are the host. You can invite whomever you’d like: your family, friends, co-workers, book club members, etc. The preparation…
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Forty years ago today, Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube baby,” was born in Manchester, England. The idea that a human could be conceived outside the mother’s body is now commonplace but it shook the world back in 1978.
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In my article in TechCrunch, released today, I call for a species-wide conversation on the future of human genetic enhancement. Such a dialogue has never before been carried out. We…
read moreWhen someone at a Los Angeles book event asked me a personal question, I was already disarmed, exposed, and predisposed to a more personal answer.
“Would you genetically enhance your own children?”
read moreMarcy Darnovsky’s call to arms against “radical biological procedures,” namely mitochondrial transfer from the eggs of a woman with healthy mitochondria to replace the diseased mitochondria of an aspiring mother, in her New York Times editorial today [linked here] goes too far.
read moreGina Kolata’s important article in today’s New York Times (linked here) on the ethical questions surrounding preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and embryo selection only touches the very tip of the genetic iceberg.
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