Vox
‘Just because we can do it, should we?’ How CRISPR co-creator Jennifer Doudna is furthering the discussion over the ethics of human genome editing
In 2012, Jennifer Doudna, then a relatively unknown biochemist at the University of California Berkeley, published a paper with Emmanuelle Charpentier ...
CRISPR cryptography: Making the world safer from gene-editing research gone awry
Evolution is Kevin Esvelt’s passion: how it works in nature, how we can direct it, and how it can go ...
What future dangers might Artificial Intelligence introduce? Experts clash
There are teams of researchers in academia and at major AI labs these days working on the problem of AI ...
Vegan gold rush: When will billions of dollars poured into plant-based meat ventures result in more than bland-tasting imitations?
The new foods I’ve tried are just a smattering of what’s on offer from the dozens and dozens (and dozens) of ...
Beef from genetically edited cattle are two years away from being available to consumers. Here’s what we can expect
Earlier this month, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that beef from two gene-edited cattle and their offspring ...
We might be living with COVID risks for years to come
There’s a growing consensus among health experts: Covid-19 may never go away. We’ll likely always have some coronavirus out there, ...
Transitioning to a meatless, plant-based future is a win for the environment — but means major upheaval for farm and meatpacking workers
A largely plant-based future would be a win for livestock, 99 percent of which is raised in factory farms, and ...
Video: Why are there so many COVID variants showing up now and what does it portend for the future?
On November 5, 2020, the United Kingdom went into lockdown in an attempt to control a spike in COVID-19 cases ...
‘Holy sh–, it works’: How an out-of-the-box UK COVID recovery trial evaluating a common drug has saved a million lives
[Epidemiologist Peter Horby’s] summary was pithy. “Holy shit, it works.” On June 16 [2020], after verifying the data, the Recovery ...
Viewpoint: ‘Trading one moral catastrophe for another’ — Why swapping beef for chicken won’t fix animal agriculture’s ‘devastating’ environmental impact
[O]ften, the messaging is that we can save the world by switching out our beef consumption for chicken. The problem ...
Viewpoint: ‘It’s time to invest in meatless meat’ — Why Biden’s climate plan should address the environmental impact of animal agriculture
For decades, the US government has been pouring money into the meat industry. That funding effectively built the industry into ...
‘Their lungs are full of bees’: Largely hidden from the public, the last days of a dying COVID patient are excruciating
“Most of what I’m seeing is behind closed curtains, and the general public isn’t seeing this side of it,” says ...
Long haulers face debilitating months of recovery — but chronic symptoms are not unique to COVID
The dominant narrative about long Covid has been that it’s a uniquely perplexing feature of Covid-19. Reports of “Covid brain ...
Reports of COVID reinfection are becoming more common. How does that impact immunity?
[A 25-year-old Nevada man] joins a handful of other confirmed cases of [COVID] reinfection in people without immune disorders. … ...
Getting a flu shot this fall as the pandemic rages could literally save your life
Uncertainty looms over flu season every year, but this time there are even more unknowns than usual — from precisely what ...
Is expecting herd immunity just wishful thinking? Some people are getting COVID-19 twice
[One of my patients has] tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, for a second time — three ...
From lung scarring to heart damage, COVID-19 affects the body long after the virus is gone
Because Covid-19 is a new disease, there are no studies about its long-term trajectory for those with more severe symptoms; ...
Is hydroxychloroquine useless and dangerous, or not? Major study released last week dissing therapy now under scrutiny
Does President Trump’s favored coronavirus treatment, the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, make you more likely to die of Covid-19? That was ...
Does ‘factory farming’ increase our risk of experiencing pandemics?
Some experts have hypothesized that the novel coronavirus made the jump from animals to humans in China’s wet markets, just ...
CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna on why we need human gene-editing regulations
In this episode of Reset, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks with Jennifer Doudna about the promise and peril in CRISPR’s future, what’s ...
Conspiracy theorists suggest the coronavirus was engineered in a Chinese lab. The scientific consensus disagrees.
[O]n Fox News and social media, a dangerous conspiracy theory about the origin of the health crisis won’t die. There ...
Consumers are losing interest in DNA tests. Is it ‘market saturation, privacy concerns, limited usefulness’?
This past year, Ancestry and 23andMe DNA kit sales on their websites saw major declines, according to new data from Second ...
Can you buy a synthetic version of the deadly 1918 influenza? There’s no law against it—and that has security experts worried
In the past few years, something new has become possible in biology: cheaply “printing” DNA for insertion into a cell ...
Is China’s mysterious virus a ‘global health emergency’? 6 things to know about the outbreak
Just three weeks ago, China announced the outbreak of a mysterious new virus in the city of Wuhan involving a ...
Rise of perfectionism and its toll on our mental health
Once an issue that affected a select few, perfectionism is now a growing cultural phenomenon, fueled by modern parenting and ...
Biohacker Josiah Zayner explains how to be ethical without being ‘responsible’
Josiah Zayner is a biophysicist who made headlines in 2017 when he tried to edit his genome live onstage at a ...
‘Unnatural Selection’: Netflix series tackles tough CRISPR issues, including biohacking and editing children’s DNA
Is it ethical to edit your child’s DNA — or your own? Does the answer depend on whether you’re perfectly ...
Trump administration wants to collect DNA from detained immigrants
The Trump administration plans to vastly expand a program to collect DNA information from migrants in detention and enter it ...
