When you're good at something, you want to leverage that. Monsanto's specialty is killing stuff.   In the early years, the St. Louis biotech giant helped pioneer such leading chemicals as DDT, PCBs, and Agent Orange. Unfortunately, these breakthroughs had a tendency to kill stuff. And t... [More]

  Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough... [More]

Over the last week, there have been several articles celebrating the passage of 60 years since James Watson and Francis Crick published their paper in Nature describing the double helical structure of the DNA molecule. It unleashed a genomic worldview and led to the central dogma of genetics and... [More]

On 4 April, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC will review a case that calls into question patents on human genes. Much of the debate has focused on how the case might reshape the future of biotechnology research and genomic medicine. But what is at least as impo... [More]

The surge in food prices could spur greater acceptance of genetically modified seeds in emerging markets, leading companies have told the Financial Times. Global food prices rose to a record last month, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The International Monetary Fund warned last... [More]

A federal appeals court in Manhattan overturned a six-and-a-half-year sentence in a child pornography case on Friday, saying the judge who imposed it improperly found that the defendant would return to viewing child pornography “because of an as-of-yet undiscovered gene.” The jud... [More]

If reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis give you the heebie-jeebies, Booster Shots is sorry to inform you that things are about to get a lot more complicated. In just the past month, researchers have made great strides in their ability t... [More]

Genetically engineered pork may one day become a part of your local grocer's food list. But who's to decide whether or not this product should be on the shelves? It's a question before officials in both Canada and the U.S., thanks to Canadian researchers who have developed a genetically modif... [More]

The Pentagon is scaling back one of its largest efforts to develop treatments for troops and civilians infected in a germ warfare attack after a $1 billion, five-year program fell short of its primary goal. Even the heavy infusion of research cash and a unified effort by university labs and b... [More]

Born soldiers may say they have "combat in our genes" — but a new report suggests the Pentagon may want to give the phrase whole new meaning by turning DNA into the next military battleground. The report, prepared by a defense science advisory panel known as JASON and reported by Secrec... [More]