A breakthrough method that makes editing the genes of living beings relatively easy, called CRISPR, is much in the news these days. So are the many implications—both terrifying and promising—associated with it. The seemingly endless...
In response to growing concerns about the potential application of CRISPR-Cas9 technology, the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine are convening an international summit this fall to “explore the scientific, ethical, and...
We often hear that scientists hoard data, refusing to share information even when doing so might speed advances to patients in dire need. It’s not just about sharing results on the fly—once a project has...
You might not think that a guy who says he spends his day getting lost "in a microworld of flowers or corals that you made yourself" is making a major contribution to science. But Wim...
The economics of innovation and its impact on society was the theme of the annual economists' pow-wow in Toronto last weekend, the Institute for New Economic Thinking conference. And there was no presumption that it...
There’s been a lot of attention paid to the tremendous progress in making DNA sequencing so cheap that scanning a person’s genome could cost just $1,000. This pricing free-fall has occurred markedly faster than with...
The X Prize Foundation has canceled its Archon genomics challenge, which would have awarded $10 million next month to the first team to generate medical grade sequences of 100 whole genomes for $1,000 or less...
Social networking for scientists has been tried before, but not until recently have we seen investors placing big bets in this area. Earlier this year, the academic networking site Mendeley was acquired by scientific publisher...
Medicine is among many sectors waiting to be transformed by big data, we often hear. Conducting global studies of disease progression, integrating health records electronically, or analyzing petabyte-size banks of DNA sequence data should hasten...
