Slate
Including vasectomies in court sentencing new eugenics
Put this in the "can they even do that?" files. Jesse Lee Herald of Edinburg, Virginia, received an unusual sentence ...
Human fetal biology is much more complex than the personhood movement is equipped to handle
What if at the very beginning stages of development you absorbed your twin’s cells? You’d be twins—a phenomenon called a ...
Are GMO food labels and a ‘right to know’ worth the price?
Whether the labeling debate continues to play out on a state-by-state basis, or the federal government eventually intervenes, chances are ...
Cultural timing hurts and benefits Wade’s new book on genetics of race
The paradox of racism is that at any given moment, the racism of the day seems reasonable and very possibly ...
To Mom: Thanks for the genes
Mother’s Day is a day of appreciation, of gratitude, and of guilt. Guilt for all the things I put my ...
Slate slashes New York Times and Center for Genetics and Society for faux ‘designer baby’ scare tactics
The Center for Genetics and Society created a splash in the NYT this week with its all-too-familiar attack on mitochondrial ...
How far do you go to weed out lesser genetic defects
Two days ago in the New York Times, Gina Kolata told the story of Amanda Kalinsky, a 30-year-old woman who ...
“Organic Shmorganic” says Slate: Organic produce no healthier than conventional
Does feeding your child organic food really makes a difference to his health, considering that he’s been known to lick ...
Insurance coverage for genetic counseling varies from state to state
The affordable care act should improve insurance coverage for some genetic tests. But what about the counseling that helps you ...
Banana apocalypse? GM one of few options to save threatened cavendish
Scientists are experimenting with genetic modifications to protect Cavendish bananas from a variant of the banana wilt fungus. If the fungus jumps ...
Best to tell donor-conceived kids about their origins
Secrecy has long been intimately intertwined with donor conception. Once upon a time, non-disclosure was standard. Almost no one talked ...
Female promiscuity a pragmatic approach to survival
New research suggests that female primates seek out multiple sexual partners as an evolutionary strategy and opportunistically shift that strategy ...
Female promiscuity just makes sense, evolutionarily
Ever since Darwin there had been an assumption among evolutionary biologists that females were coy and choosy in their sexual ...
Genetics of the human gut microbiome might be the next big thing
Even genetically similar individuals play host to vastly different communities of gut bacteria, a study says--a reminder of how little ...
Who deserves the Nobel for sequencing the human genome?
There's a political angle to having the 10th anniversary celebration for the human genome in 2013: it implies the NIH ...
How personal genomics is like Michelangelo’s David
Personal genomics is awash in stories of genetic discoveries that turned out to be weak or wrong, yet the field ...
Study uses herpes virus to track human migration across the globe
The genomic analysis of different strains of the herpes virus reveals migration patterns of early humans ...
Project BabySeq to test how knowing your genome from birth changes your life
Brigham and Women’s Hospital's Robert Green wants to know how having your complete genome sequenced at birth changes the course ...
How do traits trickle down from grandparents to grandchildren? Partially by chance.
Personal genome sequencing allows us to take a closer look at inheritance and highlights the situations in which genetic and ...
Does finding cancer mutations lead to cures?
We don't have drugs to treat most cancer mutations. So how does hunting for mutations help? ...
Using the Human Genome Project as a model for scientific success
Obama should take a lesson from the Human Genome Project if he wants his ambitious brain-mapping project to succeed ...
The delicious, religious debate over junk DNA
What exactly do "non-coding" regions of DNA do? As scientists sequence more genomes, we get closer to the answer to ...
The human genome’s mapped. Where are all the miracle drugs?
Sequencing the human genome seemed like a discovery so important that it couldn’t be overhyped—we had, after all, transcribed the ...
Mark Lynas on Philippines travesty: True story about who destroyed Golden Rice GM rice crop
Did you hear that a group of 400 angry farmers attacked and destroyed a field trial of genetically modified rice in the ...
A hippie’s defense of GE foods
I’m a vegetarian yoga instructor, and even I can tell the case against genetically modified food is overblown. Let me ...
James Watson weighs in against Myriad in gene patent debate
Last month, co-discoverer of DNA, James Watson, took a break making controversial remarks to file an amicus brief in the ...
Open-source GM: Separating Monsanto from modification
Open-source GMOs will "help fight climate change and stick one in Monsanto’s eye." ...
Shaky science of the gene patent ruling
The following is an edited excerpt. In a unanimous ruling yesterday, the Supreme Court held that patenting a gene violates Section ...
