The plan, which is backed by British Prime Minister David Cameron, involves sequencing the DNA of everyone in England and adding this information as an attachment to each person's medical file – warns campaigner In April, the Caldicott Committee, including British government chief scien... [More]

Electric fans growl like airplanes taking off and banks of green lights wink in a basement at Mount Sinai’s medical school, where a new $3 million supercomputer makes quick work of huge amounts of genetic and other biological information. Just a couple of miles away, a competitor, Weill C... [More]

James Watson, who earned the Nobel Prize for helping figure out the structure of DNA, said Thursday that sequencing genes isn't proving to be particularly useful in fighting such diseases as cancer and that much of the research being done on the subject is irrelevant. Watson made the remarks during... [More]

LAST week, scientists sequenced the genome of cells taken without consent from a woman named Henrietta Lacks. She was a black tobacco farmer and mother of five, and though she died in 1951, her cells, code-named HeLa, live on. They were used to help develop our most important vaccines and cancer med... [More]

Doctors who sequence a patient’s full set of genes for any medical reason should look for two dozen unrelated genetic conditions and tell the individual if they find any of them lurking in the DNA, according to a long-awaited report led by a medical geneticist from Boston. Released Th... [More]

Debra Sukin and her husband were determined to take no chances with her second pregnancy. Their first child, Jacob, who had a serious genetic disorder, did not babble when he was a year old and had severe developmental delays. So the second time around, Ms. Sukin had what was then the most advan... [More]

A new research project is aiming to determine ways that newborn DNA sequencing can be done most responsibly and effectively for the benefit of babies and their families. The project is led by Robert C. Green, a physician-scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Director ... [More]

They're called discreet DNA samples, and the Elk Grove, California, genetic-testing company easyDNA says it can handle many kinds, from toothpicks to tampons.   Blood stains from bandages and tampons? Ship them in a paper envelope for paternity, ancestry or health testing. EasyDNA also ... [More]

Who's your daddy? Clinicians seeking to pinpoint genetic diseases in developing fetuses may no longer need to know the identity of the father, thanks to a method for sequencing a fetus's genome using just a blood sample drawn from a pregnant woman.   Researchers have known for some time... [More]

The social media wave is being followed by a big data tsunami.   Ok, the imagery is getting a little outlandish, but the flood of information that must be stored and analyzed is generating excitement, especially in Boston, where many in the tech world worry that they were at the beach w... [More]