He Jiankui seemed nervous. At the time, he was an obscure researcher working at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. But he had been working on a top-secret project for the last two years – and he was about to take to the podium at the International Summit on Human Genome Editing to […]

The same algorithms that personalize movie recommendations and extract topics from oceans of text could bring doctors closer to diagnosing, treating and preventing disease on the basis of an individual’s unique genetic profile. In a study to be published Monday, Nov. 7 in Nature Genetics, researchers at Columbia and Princeton universities describe a new ...

Some biological processes are so central to life as we know it that it’s tempting to assume all the key innovations in biochemistry have already happened. Processes like photosynthesis and glycolysis have existed for millennia and are essential to the survival of countless species. But the Earth is only just over halfway through its habitable […]