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Does One Size Fit All?
Jay S. Kaufman, Los Angeles Review of Books | 09.27.2025
The 10th essay in the CGS-supported Legacies of Eugenics series explores how early eugenicists' preoccupation with "optimal" body size measurements influences current racialized growth charts, which often mask legacies of oppression in their framing of what counts as “normal.”
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CGS Welcomes HSI Interns Jennifer and Sean!
Jennifer Silva and Sean Wang, both UC Berkeley undergraduate students, have joined CGS as interns this semester! Jennifer is majoring in Molecular Cell Biology with a minor in Chicanx Latinx Studies, and Sean is majoring in Nutrition and Metabolic Biology. Learn more about their interests, background, and goals for working with CGS on our website.
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Experimental Human Cell Division Does Not a Baby Make
Pete Shanks, Biopolitical Times | 10.22.2025
Recent headlines claimed that researchers "created" human eggs from skin cells, promising a future solution to infertility, despite the study finding that the created eggs would not be usable. Scientists and biotech startups remain optimistic about IVG, while consistently sidestepping safety risks and ethical concerns.
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GENE EDITING | GENOMICS | GENE THERAPY | EUGENICS
SURROGACY 360 | IVF POLICY AND REGULATION | ASSISTED REPRODUCTION | VARIOUS
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Will it be the Wild West for designer babies?
Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
Heritable genome editing, the creation of human embryos, and “making superhumans” are on the horizon, unless public pressure helps create political momentum to strengthen regulation of new biotechnologies.
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Beyond dire wolves: Could Colossal’s de-extinction work transform human health?
Meagan Parrish, PharmaVoice | 10.10.2025
Colossal Biosciences is not just attempting to “de-extinct” animals like the dire wolf, it’s also working on biotech for people, including artificial wombs and gene editing techniques that would deliver multiple edits at once. Its human-oriented efforts are likely to receive ethical scrutiny, just as its de-extinction efforts have.
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He Was Expected to Get Alzheimer’s 25 Years Ago. Why Hasn’t He?
Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.07.2025
Researchers are closely studying what has protected Doug Whitney from developing Alzheimer’s, despite the rare genetic mutation that “essentially guaranteed” he would develop the disease in his late 40s or early 50s and die within a decade. His brain appears to be resistant to developing tau, a protein that accumulates in Alzheimer’s and is associated with cognitive decline.
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In China, a low-cost push to rival a life-saving, $2M medicine
Jared Whitlock, Endpoints News | 10.09.2025
The one-time gene therapy Zolgensma can stop the progression of spinal muscular atrophy, but its $2.1M price tag makes it difficult to access. Four Chinese companies are working on competing low-cost gene therapies.
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Who Gets to Procreate and Parent? A Black Feminist Critique of the Pronatalist Agenda
Jallicia A. Jolly, Sydney Curtis, and Nicole Sessions, Ms. Magazine | 10.17.2025
Pronatalism is not neutral: “It is a calculated political project to consolidate power by using narrative, reproductive technologies and coercive laws/legislation in ways that are rooted in racism.” Reproductive justice offers a framework to counter 21st century eugenics and pronatalism.
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Under a Mask of AI Doomerism, the Familiar Face of Eugenics
Emile P. Torres, Truthdig | 10.17.2025
Beneath AI doomers’ dire warnings about the threats that superintelligent AI could pose to humanity is a curiously anti-human combination of transhumanism, techno-futurism, and eugenics. While they are right to see AI ventures as risky, their underlying ideals are equally problematic.
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The race to create the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess
Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Parents opting to receive polygenic risk scores for their embryos may not get what they pay for given the lack of evidence showing the tests are effective. The tests’ growing popularity shows the continuing influence of genetic determinism, a specious theory that took root in the early 20th century eugenics movement.
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The Trump administration’s approach to autism is tangled up with ableism, eugenics, and pronatalism
Shoumita Dasgupta, Stat | 10.03.2025
Trump and RFK’s framing of autism as an epidemic dehumanizes autistic people in ways that echo 20th-century eugenic judgments. Although some Silicon Valley pronatalists seem to support neurodiversity by opting not to screen embryos for autism, their interest in enhancing intelligence via polygenic risk scores and embryo selection still reinforces eugenic biases and specious IQ “science.”
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Surrogacy reform bill gets big boost in Upper House as Greens pledge support
Oliver Lane, The West Australian | 10.13.2025
Surrogacy reforms that passed Western Australia’s lower house of Parliament in September now have a better chance of passing the Upper House due to pledged support from the Greens. The reforms would expand access to surrogacy to LGBTQIA+ individuals and couples.
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Trump moves to push employers on IVF coverage and lower fertility drug costs
Carter Sherman, The Guardian | 10.16.2025
The Trump administration’s long-awaited IVF policy updates were finally announced, and so far, they seem to fall flat. The administration is urging employers to cover IVF via new fertility benefit options and will lower some fertility drug prices, but the recommendations don't deliver the detailed updates promised earlier this year.
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Time to end self-regulation of the Australian fertility industry
Karin Hammarberg and Catherine Mills, BioNews | 10.13.2025
Recent embryo and sperm mix-ups in the Australian fertility industry underscore that self-regulation of fertility clinics doesn’t work. Instead, independent accreditation of clinics to ensure they comply with national standards is needed.
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Push for Military Coverage of I.V.F. Faces Challenge in Congress
Megan Mineiro and Caroline Kitchener, The New York Times | 10.05.2025
Advocates hoped that Trump’s IVF promises would encourage bipartisan support of a proposal to expand military health coverage to include IVF, but divisions among Republicans have stalled the proposal’s progress.
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A Surrogacy Silk Road: Chinese Parents Head West for Babies
Emma Belmonte, ChinaFile | 10.03.2025
The country of Georgia has become a popular destination for Chinese couples seeking to have a child via surrogacy, which is outlawed in China. Agencies in China facilitate surrogacy arrangements in Georgia, but loopholes and legal grey areas have allowed fraudulent practices that harm surrogates and intended parents.
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A mysterious surrogacy mansion. A drug-plagued property. And a criminal known as ‘Dragon’
Matthew Ormseth and Summer Lin, Los Angeles Times | 10.02.2025
Los Angeles authorities investigating a couple for alleged child abuse discovered that they have over 20 children via surrogacy. Further investigation has linked the husband to several criminal enterprises, including illegal gambling and drug activity.
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Robots are learning to make human babies. Twenty have already been born.
Elizabeth Dwoskin and Zoeann Murphy, The Washington Post | 10.01.2025
Clinical trials are testing the use of AI software and robotic automation in IVF to select and collect sperm and fertilize an egg. Some see automated IVF as a promising way to expand access, increase success rates, and reduce costs, but others predict that it will introduce more problems than it resolves.
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Scientists create human eggs in the lab, using skin cells
Rob Stein, NPR | 09.30.2025
Researchers used a modified cloning technique to replace DNA from a donor egg with DNA from another person’s adult skin cells to create reconstituted eggs. While they were able to fertilize some of the eggs, the embryos did not develop normally, demonstrating that the technique introduces significant safety risks as well as serious ethical concerns.
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