Imagine a fetus gulping in amniotic fluid and drinking a drug that restores the ability to form teeth, sweat glands and hair that a mutation would otherwise have blocked. Holm Schneider, MD, PhD, at University Hospital Erlangen in Germany and his team have done just that, reporting this week in...

Plant biologist Beth Hood: Scientists are genetically modifying plants to produce ingredients for a variety of important industrial and therapeutic products.

A trio of dogs buried at two ancient human sites in Illinois lived around 10,000 years ago, making them the oldest known domesticated canines in the Americas. Radiocarbon dating of the dogs’ bones shows they were 1,500 years older than thought, zooarchaeologist Angela Perri said April 13 at the annual meeting...

We in the rich societies of the world don’t hear a lot about aflatoxin. It is probably one of the single largest causes of cancer in the developing world – particularly in Africa. Around a half a billion people are at risk from this toxin in their diet. ... [R]ecently, a...

While there have been significant gains against cancer, precision medicine has produced far less progress in the world’s biggest killer—cardiovascular disease. However, there is reason to believe that soon the treatment paradigm of cardiovascular disease will begin to adopt a focus on highly individualized variables. … Precision medicine approaches are...

The regulatory concerns about genetic modification of animals that I wrote about a while ago have moved towards a Congressional spotlight. Pigs have been genetically modified to resist porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus by deleting a gene. Does deleting a gene make them genetically modified - yes and no, depending on...

A typical stroll down the grocery store aisle exposes the shopper to almost 40,000 different products. While most have labels to aid in the shopping process, it can still be hard to separate truth from marketing on food items. “Peel Back the Label” is a new campaign from America’s dairy...

Think cheaters never prosper? Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France seven times. Manny Ramirez won two World Series championships. Ben Johnson won an Olympic gold medal. ... Sure, officials eventually figured out that Armstrong, Ramirez, and Johnson used prohibited performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and penalized them accordingly. However, countless others get away with it....

[O]rganic is mainstream in America in every way except as a significant percentage of total US annual grocery sales. According to USDA and other sources, organic foods account for between 4%-5% of total US grocery sales. But percentage of annual sales - remember the rules are different today - isn't the...

The story that sent shivers up my spine...was about Monni Must, a Michigan portrait photographer who paid to clone Billy Bean, a Labrador retriever that had belonged to her oldest daughter, Miya. Miya had committed suicide 10 years earlier. To Must, cloning the elderly dog was a way to keep...