genetics

The identity of a woman found dead on a logging road in Massachusetts has finally been revealed, almost 45 years later.

Reuters reported on Wednesday that a Chinese company called the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) has been selling prenatal tests developed in collaboration with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and using them to harvest genetic data from millions of pregnant women around the world.

The Moscow Times on Tuesday reported that Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin is organizing funds for President Vladimir Putin’s pet project of building a “national genetic information database.” 

Concerns about China acquiring the DNA of American service members prompted the Pentagon to issue an advisory late last year.

If there is one thing science fiction has taught us, it is that nothing bad can possibly come from making monkeys more like human beings. The controversy surrounding a Chinese laboratory creating human-monkey hybrids with the help of a Spanish biologist based in California is therefore puzzling. What could go wrong?

Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, announced over the weekend it has fired two Chinese-American faculty members, a married couple named Li Xiaojiang and Li Shihua, for failing to “fully disclose foreign sources of research funding and the extent of their work for research institutions and universities in China.”

The Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher company on Wednesday announced it will no longer sell its equipment in the Xinjiang province of China because the Chinese government is using the gear to track Uighur Muslims through their DNA.

China’s Vice-Minister for Science and Technology on Thursday declared the gene-editing work of scientist He Jiankui “shocking and unacceptable” and ordered the suspension of his work.

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.