Four months ago a researcher claimed he had used the tool CRISPR to edit the genomes of twin girls. Now prominent researchers and ethicists are calling for a temporary halt to this sort of work.
A new Science Gallery Melbourne exhibition offers a set of reflections, calculations and speculations that engage with ideas about the perfect body, mathematical precision, quantum physics and a post-human world.
Laboratory-based genetic modification is relatively new when you consider the centuries of selective breeding that precedes it.
IRRI Photos/Flickr
Peter Langridge, Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics
Welcome to GM in Australia, a series looking at the facts, ethics, regulations and research into genetically modified crops. In this first instalment, Peter Langridge describes two GM techniques: selective…
Finding a tasty strawberry can be a bit of a lucky dip at times, but now the tasty gene’s identified it may be easier to consistently get satisfying strawberries.
JD Hancock/Flickr
If you’ve ever bitten into a strawberry and wondered why it doesn’t taste as sweet or as good as others in the punnet, you could blame the fruit’s genetics. Two studies, published today in BMC Genomics…
Imagine your DNA as strands of fairy lights – and if a globe blew, you could remove it and pop in another.
kyz/Flickr
Mistakes in the paper version of the Encyclopædia Britannica took a long time to correct – years often passed between revised editions – but these days editing information is much easier. In electronic…
You may have heard of Australia’s “Frozen Zoo” – the only facility of its kind on the continent – and that it’s facing funding difficulties. Why should you care about this? Let me explain. An increasing…
Leafing through the popular press it’s easy to see that the baby industry is big business: designer labels in size 000; prams that deftly allow running parents to take baby along and pick up a single origin…
Technology offers great possibility of enhancing human capacity.
Ars Electronica
Human brains evolved over the last four million years in response to the interaction between environmental challenges and behaviours that enabled us to overcome these challenges. But the future of the…