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Who Shall and Shall Not Have a Place in the World?
Lily Hu, Los Angeles Review of Books | 02.13.2025
The seventh essay in the CGS-supported Legacies of Eugenics series explains how statistical research on race in the early eugenics movement and today is not “purely scientific curiosity” but is instead motivated by racial ideologies.
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Our Bodies, Our Selves Starts a New Chapter
Bringing together its educational mission with its longstanding feminist activism, OBOS is now making Suffolk University Center for Women’s Health and Human Rights its global hub for its work on reproductive, health, and sexual justice.
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Welcome, Lavanya!
A fantastic undergraduate intern from the Health Sciences Internship program at UC Berkeley has joined CGS for spring semester. Lavanya Girish is a sophomore pursuing a degree in Microbial Biology and minoring in Data Science. Through CGS, she hopes to explore emerging data-driven technologies and their ethical implications in human biology and medicine. Learn more about Lavanya on the CGS website.
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Donald Trump, IVF and Billionaires’ Babies
Pete Shanks, Biopolitical Times | 02.27.2025
Trump's recent executive order doesn't actually expand IVF access. Trump-linked pronatalist techno-elites who are advancing eugenics under the guise of technological betterment are more likely to exacerbate inequalities in assisted reproduction.
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Gene therapy ups and downs
Katie Hasson, Biopolitical Times | 02.26.2025
Recent media coverage of gene therapies reveals the disconnects between the promise of revolutionary treatments, the real difference gene therapies have made in the lives of some patients, and the lack of a clear path to profitability in investors’ eyes.
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Should We Use Gene Editing to Create Super Babies?
Katie Hasson, The New York Times Upfront | 02.17.2025
Responding “No,” is CGS’ Katie Hasson, who argues, “Heritable genome editing, which would change the traits of future children and generations, is unsafe and unnecessary, and it could vastly increase already dire levels of inequality.”
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The couple who want to make America procreate again
Anna Branigin, The Washington Post | 02.04.2025
Pronatalists may present genetic testing and embryo selection for the “best baby” as a “personal choice,” but as CGS’ Marcy Darnovsky points out, what they're doing is "a form of high-tech, market-based eugenics.”
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GENE EDITING | ASILOMAR AT 50 | EUGENICS
ASSISTED REPRODUCTION | SURROGACY360 | VARIOUS
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Designing Babies
The Economist | 02.24.2025
The return of He Jiankui to the lab suggests that the scientific establishment’s condemnation of heritable genome editing was not as powerful as it first appeared. Despite its dangers, the technique still attracts interest, especially among the super wealthy.
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Rare genetic disorder treated in womb for the first time
Smriti Mallapaty, Nature | 02.20.2025
A two-and-a-half-year-old girl shows no signs of spinal muscular atrophy, a rare genetic disorder, after becoming the first person to be treated for the motor-neuron condition while in the womb.
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Will CRISPR matter?
Ryan Cross, Endpoints | 02.19.2025
The hype around CRISPR attracted billions of dollars of investment and resulted in dozens of startup launches. A decade in, initial investor excitement has faded, leaving CRISPR companies struggling. Some are pivoting away from developing therapies for rare disease to treat more common liver and cardiovascular conditions.
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What a $2 Million Per Dose Gene Therapy Reveals About Drug Pricing
Robin Fields, ProPublica | 02.12.2025
Taxpayers and private charities subsidized much of the science that yielded Zolgensma, but once the therapy had potential, biotech startups rushed in to capitalize. The $2M cost per dose has priced out many families who supported its early development.
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Asilomar Déjà Vu?
Tina A. Stevens and Stuart Newman, A Bigger Conversation | 02.06.2025
The Spirit of Asilomar meetings mark the 50th anniversary of the 1975 conference. Will they take on the broader ethical issues the original conference failed to consider? Or will they continue to promote the conclusion that scientists can regulate their own research?
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Taking responsibility: Asilomar and its legacy
J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Science | 01.30.2025
50 years later, the legacy of the Asilomar meeting is a “science-first, ethics-later paradigm” that substitutes scientific self-regulation for democratic governance.
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Donald Trump’s Next Diversity Target: People With Disabilities
Sam Gustin, The Nation | 02.18.2025
Trump’s contempt for people with disabilities and repeated claims about genetics echo the biases of the early 20th-century eugenics movement. Several of his policy proposals, including his threats to slash Medicaid, harm people with disabilities and advance eugenic goals.
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America’s Darkest Comeback Tour: From Racehorse Theory to Resistance
Emese Ilyés, Common Dreams | 01.23.2025
The alliance between Trump and Elon Musk has only intensified the resurgence of eugenics. The same pseudo-scientific racism that once justified sterilization programs and immigration quotas now powers algorithms and influences policy.
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Trump’s IVF order: a PR move that gives pronatalists cause for cheer
Carter Sherman, The Guardian | 02.19.2025
Although the White House promoted Trump’s executive order on IVF as a way to expand access to the technique, it was widely critiqued as a “PR move” because the order only solicits recommendations––it does not change any policies on IVF.
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Trapped in the Surrogacy Boom: Thai Women Rescued from Human Egg Farms in Georgia
Blene Woldeselasse, Human Rights Research Center | 02.18.2025
Transnational surrogacy carries significant ethical and human rights concerns, as the recent case of human trafficking of Thai women in Georgia shows. Power imbalances between wealthy prospective parents in the global North and surrogates in developing nations increase risks of exploitation.
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Egg Donation: A Victory for Reproductive Justice or Another Handmaid’s Tale?
Chantal Bittner, Bill of Health | 02.04.2025
Egg donation operates in an unregulated market in the United States, which departs from the EU’s regulatory approach. Despite these differences, donors in both contexts appear motivated by financial compensation and face health risks that are often underemphasized.
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Accusations Of Egg-Harvesting Rock Georgian Surrogacy Industry
Nino Tarkhnishvili, Radio Free Europe | 02.13.2025
Thai authorities are investigating claims from three Thai women, who say they traveled to Georgia under the pretense of surrogacy only to be forced into a Chinese crime syndicate’s “egg harvesting” operation. The Chinese company says they facilitate surrogacy arrangements with contracts and are not holding surrogates in Georgia against their will.
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CA scientists could lose big with Trump medical research cuts
David Jensen, Capitol Weekly | 02.19.2025
Drastic cuts by the Trump administration have hit California’s research universities. With NIH funding uncertain as lawsuits responding to the cuts traverse the court system, state-funded CIRM may step in to support biomedical research in the state.
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The Erasing of American Science
Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic | 02.14.2025
Trump’s cutting of NIH and NSF funding, dismantling of USAID and the clinical trials it conducts abroad, and firing of HHS workers has begun what will likely be a prolonged battle between government and science over how research can and will be done in the US.
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