Next time you’re about to toss a cigarette butt on the ground, consider this freaky fact: It takes less than a nanogram (or less than one billionth of the mass of a penny) of your dried saliva for scientists to construct a digital portrait that bears an uncanny resemblance to your... [More]

  The wrinkled heel of nearly every baby in the United States is pricked at birth, and a few drops of blood are dabbed on filter paper and shipped off for analysis. Started in the 1960s, this newborn screening program tests for more than 30 rare and serious diseases that are treatable if cau... [More]

    In late January, President Barack Obama announced what some have called a moonshot. The $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative seeks to transform the health care system to target therapies to patients according to their unique genetics and environment. The most a... [More]

  With the UK launch of 23andMe’s home DNA testing kit, the legalisation of mitochondrial DNA transfer, and the 100,000 Genome Project underway, optimism abounds about the science of genetics delivering on its early promise. But there is also cause for greater caution and oversight tha... [More]

  Before they are more than a couple of days old, 98 percent of the roughly 4 million babies born in the U.S. each year have a small sample of blood taken and screened for a variety of inherited conditions. Caught early, many of these conditions can be successfully treated, preventing dea... [More]

  In 2015, genes have many uses. Soon after every baby in California is born, a hospital worker extracts and logs its genetic information. It will be tested for diseases and then stashed permanently in a warehouse containing a generation of Californians’ DNA. For those charged with a... [More]

  The Supreme Court on Monday let stand the conviction of a rapist whose prosecution rested on DNA swiped from the armrests of an interrogation-room chair. Without comment, the justices refused to review a 4-3 decision from Maryland's top court that upheld the life sentence and conviction o... [More]

  We risk harming the huge potential of mass medical data in health research unless public concerns are properly addressed Digital data are being amassed at an astonishing rate. This vast store presents great opportunities for science. Health data – for example, from biomarkers, med... [More]

  Privacy advocates are calling for more safeguards related to a state collection of DNA samples from 16 million Californians in a nondescript government warehouse in the Bay Area. The biobank holds blood taken with the prick of a heel from almost every baby born in California for the last ... [More]

  The United States has proposed analyzing genetic information from more than 1 million American volunteers as part of a new initiative to understand human disease and develop medicines targeted to an individual's genetic make-up. At the heart of the "precision medicine" initiative, announc... [More]