Megan Molteni
Heart from a genetically engineered pig transplanted into a human, for the second time
In a new test of xenotransplantation, a medical team at the University of Maryland Medical Center announced [September 22] that, for ...
What makes an embryo an embryo? Synthetic fertilized eggs scramble conventional science
The mainstreaming of IVF, or in vitro fertilization, has familiarized new generations of people with what the earliest stages of ...
Making human eggs from scratch: Scientists are trying to replicate this complex chemical recipe
Gameto, a biotech startup, has developed a product called Fertilo that it hopes can improve the odds of success in ...
CRISPR gene editing has shown it can cure sickle cell anemia — raising questions about who can access this life-changing treatment
At age 37, free of symptoms, able to be a mom and work a full-time job, sickle cell patient and ...
He Jiankui — CRISPR babies mastermind — is out of prison. What’s next for his career?
He Jiankui, the Chinese biophysicist who created the first gene-edited children, had been quiet since completing a three-year prison sentence in April, ...
There’s still a lot of confusion about how monkeypox spreads. Here is what we know so far
Monkeypox has spent most of its evolutionary history living inside Central and Western Africa’s small mammals — squirrels, rats, mice, ...
‘It has to happen’: Tech titans pour billions into anti-aging research — yet overlook promising metformin trial
Beating back the diseases of aging has become something of a pet project for many of Silicon Valley’s tech titans ...
When CRISPR gene editing debuted ten years ago, almost nobody noticed
CRISPR/Cas9 is a transformative breakthrough for which two of its authors, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, were awarded the Nobel Prize ...
Who owns the rights to CRISPR? In startling blow to Nobel Prize winners Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, Boston’s Broad Institute awarded patent
Ending the latest chapter in a years-long legal battle over who invented CRISPR, the US Patent and Trademark Office ruled ...
Genetic gold rush: Next generation CRISPR gene editing techniques poised to develop new wave of targeted drugs
In the 10 years leading up to 2012, 200 papers mentioned CRISPR. In 2020 alone, there were more than 6,000 ...
Transplant of genetic modified pig heart into a human sparks ethical debate
Amedical team at the University of Maryland Medical Center announced [January 10] that it had accomplished a world-first: Its surgeons had ...
Why the FDA hasn’t reined in experimental stem cell therapy cottage industry
In 2016, the Food and Drug Administration put the emerging stem cell cottage industry on notice. At the time, a ...
Pregnant women carrying male fetuses more susceptible to getting COVID, research finds
In two studies published [October 19] in Science Translational Medicine, the Boston-based research teams found that pregnant and lactating women ...
WHO restates opposition to gene-editing live human embryos but endorses other forms of genome modification
[July 12,] a World Health Organization advisory committee called on the world’s largest public health authority to stand by the ...
5 ways CRISPR has begun changing the world
[W]hile thousands of life scientists pivoted to trying to understand how the novel coronavirus wreaks havoc on the human body, and others transformed their ...
The human protein that might explain who’s most at risk from Covid-19
The earliest clinical data out of China showed that some [COVID-19 patients] consistently fared worse than others, notably men, the ...
On the front lines fighting the coronavirus: I took a COVID-19 contact tracing course
In the Before Times, there were only about 2,200 contact tracers for the whole US, according to the Association of ...
‘Microbe maps’: Swabbing subways, ATMs and park benches to find coronavirus hot spots
Nearly a decade ago, after watching his young daughter lick a pole in a subway car, computational biologist Christopher Mason ...
Predicting the next coronavirus outbreak by mining genetic databases
Search “coronavirus” on GenBank, a public repository for genomes, and today you’ll find more than 35,000 sequences. Alpaca coronaviruses. Hedgehog coronaviruses ...
3D-printed plastic bunny contains its own blueprint coded in synthetic DNA
The kumquat-sized bunny, cute as it may be, isn’t a toy or a good luck charm. But if you cut ...
How well-intentioned research into ‘gay genes’ spawned controversial DNA screening app
A giant collection of carefully cataloged genomes, called the UK Biobank, was about to become available to researchers. … To [researcher ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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,” ...
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 ...