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]

  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]

    Facebook generates about $8 a year in revenue from each of its users. But what if you offered a company not just your photos and updates, but your entire genome? Then you could be worth as much as $20,000. That’s my rough calculation for what Genentech could pay direct-t… [More]

  A laboratory mistake at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may have exposed a technician to the deadly Ebola virus, federal officials said on Wednesday. The technician will be monitored for signs of infection for 21 days, the incubation period of the disease. A small number of … [More]

  A coalition of geneticists and computer programmers calling itself the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health is developing protocols for exchanging DNA information across the Internet. The researchers hope their work could be as important to medical science as HTTP, the protocol created … [More]

  A bill that would support newborn screening nationwide has stalled in Congress because some Republican senators have privacy concerns about genetic research funded by the legislation. The senators won’t comment individually, but the Senate Steering Committee has indicated it wants a… [More]

  Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently discovered that at least 75 workers there had been exposed to possible anthrax infection. We should be glad that it was only anthrax. Anthrax is a dangerous but noncontagious bacterium; the risk to the exposed worke… [More]

  Two scientific papers that initially electrified biologists by describing an easy way to make stem cells were retracted on Wednesday by the journal that published them after they were found to be riddled with “critical errors.” The papers, published in Nature in January, were … [More]

  U.S. scientists working together with oil company Maxus Energy took around 3,500 blood samples from the indigenous Amazonian tribe known as the Huaorani, Ecuador charged on Monday. The Huaorani are known for a unique genetic makeup that makes them immune to certain diseases. René … [More]

  Last month two Nature studies on the Y chromosome were in the news, trumpeted as revealing “differences in men’s and women’s bodies, differences found as deep down as the cellular level.” The coverage of the studies offers an allegory for our age about the way scien… [More]