Wired
Using synthetic biology to design new kinds of life—and novel drugs to treat diseases
All living things on Earth are built from proteins created from the same 20 chemical units, called amino acids. Now, ...
Brazil plan to breed gene-edited dairy cattle on hold after bacterial DNA found in animal’s genome
Up until a few months ago, Brazil was all set to create the country’s first herd of genetically dehorned dairy ...
‘Humanity’s exploitation’ of land hastens climate change, United Nations’ IPCC says
[August 8] brings yet another devastating report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this time outlining how humanity’s ...
Calling for a halt to gene-edited babies, World Health Organization stops short of ‘all-out moratorium’
The world’s largest public health authority has weighed in with the most authoritative statement yet on the use of Crispr ...
Is ‘Big Ag’ getting into the cannabis business?
When Mowgli Holmes and his childhood friend Nishan Karassik founded Phylos Bioscience in 2014 they had one major goal: to ...
How man’s best friend is helping us battle cancer
[T]he Moonshot initiative is promoting new ways to study cancer, particularly in the promising area of immunotherapy. And it specifically ...
Lone Star tick is notorious for making people allergic to red meat. It may also carry deadly Bourbon virus.
Scientists know almost nothing about how Bourbon virus behaves or how it got here or where it will show up ...
UB-311: Could this vaccine protect against Alzheimer’s?
Most vaccines prepare our body’s immune system to fight off so-called exogenous disease, such as measles or flu, caused by ...
How the rush to decriminalize magic mushrooms could hurt psychedelic drug research
Welcome to a murky new front in the war to bring psychedelics out of the shadows and into both legal ...
Congress considers allowing gene patents to keep pace with Chinese innovations
In 2013, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down patents on two human genes—BRCA1 and BRCA2—associated with breast and ovarian cancers ...
Boutique startups give fertility treatments a ‘luxury’ makeover
[There’s a] growing world of boutique egg-freezing operations Instagrammable enough for their majority-millennial clientele. Take Trellis, a “women’s fertility studio,” ...
Building a better nose: Can a robot sniff as well as a dog?
Olfaction remains a stubborn biological enigma. Scientists are still piecing together the basics of how we sense all those volatile ...
How a genetically modified virus saved this teenager’s life
In October 2017, Graham Hatfull received an urgent email from across the pond. A microbiologist colleague ... was desperately looking ...
Can genetics help explain why some people make more money than others?
The UK Biobank is the single largest public genetic repository in the world... . But when David Hill, a statistical ...
How evolutionary pressure could be harnessed in cancer treatments
Cancer cells develop resistance to the powerful chemicals deployed to destroy them. Even if cancer therapies kill most of the ...
Is there such a thing as too much prenatal genetic information?
[P]renatal whole-genome sequencing is [not] commercially available yet (though it’s definitely coming). But what is available is something called noninvasive ...
Why we should worry about a resurrection of the deadly smallpox virus
The scientist who entered [Room 3C16] saw 12 mysterious cardboard boxes on a crowded shelf in the far left corner ...
Is society ready for the changes CRISPR can bring?
Crispr works in almost every animal that scientists have tried, from silkworms to monkeys, and in just about every cell ...
When birth control fails: Genetic mutation can make the pill less effective
For nearly 60 years, hormonal contraceptives have freed women from their own biology. ... But no form of hormonal birth control—pill, patch, ...
When targeting diseases, how worried should we be about CRISPR’s potential for gene-editing errors?
Of all the big, world-remaking bets on the genome-editing tool known as Crispr, perhaps none is more tantalizing than its ...
CRISPR’s lengthy patent legal battle could finally end—in a tie
Like a couple of heavyweight boxers who just keep slugging it out, the University of California Berkeley (UCB) and the ...
Polio almost eradicated. Here’s why we can’t simply ‘declare victory’
So far this year, there have been six known cases of polio infection, in Afghanistan and Pakistan—two of the three countries left ...
First clinical trials for controversial ‘3-parent’ fertility treatment begin
[A] 32-year-old Greek woman, who’d previously undergone two operations for endometriosis and four unsuccessful cycles of IVF, once again returned ...
CRISPR explained: Everything you need to know
Here’s everything you need to know about the complex and sometimes controversial technology driving the gene-editing revolution. CRISPR evolved as ...
3D bioprinting custom-fit spinal cord implants
The latest step toward 3D-printed replacements of failed human parts comes from a team at UC San Diego. It has ...
Why genealogy tests will ‘send a lot more people to jail’ in 2019
In April [2018], a citizen scientist named Barbara Rae-Venter used a little-known genealogy website called GEDMatch to help investigators find a man ...
Should we treat aging as a disease rather than something that’s inevitable?
In June 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) released the 11th edition of its International Classification of Diseases. It contained an ...
‘Human gene-editing scandal’: Should rogue scientist’s work be published?
How do you handle the data of a scientist who violates all the norms of his field? … On the one hand, you ...