genetics

A shift from mouse models to stem cell research may have unlocked a new way to help prevent one of the world’s most tragic incurable diseases — Alzheimer’s disease.

San Jose State Biology Professor Rachael French argued in a tweet this week that “chromosomes don’t determine sex.”

LONDON (AP) — Britain’s Newcastle University says its scientists have received a license to create babies using DNA from three people to prevent women from passing on potentially fatal genetic diseases to their children — the first time such approval has been granted.

A Chinese company called Boyalife Genomics is planning to open a factory the size of three football fields in Tianjin this year, and what they’ll be manufacturing is… cows. Clone cows. 100,000 of them per year to start, but company founder Xiao-Chun Xu dreams of cranking that production level up to a million per year.

A group of Israeli scientists conducted the world’s largest nutrition study of its kind, finding once and for all that there is no such thing as a universal diet, since the same food can trigger wildly different responses from one person to the next.

In her book The Big Ratchet, Ruth DeFries explains how humanity went from hunger to plenty by making more efficient use of Earth’s resources. Even with more people than ever before, “Our current problems are more about abundance than about lack of food. Our species has never had to grapple with such surplus,” she writes.

In what is being dubbed “the most important new genetic engineering technique since the beginning of the biotechnology age in the 1970s,” scientists have made an enormous breakthrough in editing human genetic material. The possibilities of the technology are so vast that scientists themselves are already calling for ethical discussion and restraint.