This is no small issue. Simply put, incest is bad for the gene pool. Sleep with your brothers and sisters and mutations arise. If this pattern of intimate relations with intimate relations continues for more than a few generations, pregnancy becomes impossible. The line dies out. For this reason, in 1910, anthropologist James Frazer demonstrated

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The world’s largest collections of stored genetic materials are found in Sussex, England; Spitsbergen, Norway; and Los Angeles, California. Sussex hosts the Millennium Seed Bank, which houses some 750 million species of plant seed. Spitsbergen, an island less than 600 miles from the North Pole, is the site of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which

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In our view, it’s no longer a question of might. Advances in biotechnology are quickly and radically changing the scientific landscape. We are entering a world where imagination is the only brake on biology, where dedicated individuals can create new life from scratch. Today, when a difficult problem is mentioned, a commonly heard refrain is,

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Pernicious agents could be crafted to do their damage months or even years after exposure, depending on the goals of the designer. Several viruses are already known to spark cancers. New ones could eventually be designed to infect the brain with, say, synthetic schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or early-onset Alzheimer’s. Stranger possibilities

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In May 2010, with the help of these new tools, Venter answered his question, creating the world’s first self-replicating, synthetic chromosome. To pull this off, he used a computer to design a novel bacterial genome (over a million base pairs in total). Once the design was complete, the code was emailed to Blue Heron Biotechnology, a Seattle-based

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Biological knowledge, too, is becoming increasingly democratized. Websites like jove.com (Journal of Visualized Experiments, or JoVE) provide thousands of how-to instructional videos. MIT offers advanced online courses. Many journals are going open-access, making the latest research freely available. Or, if you want a more hands-on approach, just

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More to the point, consider that the Secret Service is already taking extraordinary steps to protect presidential DNA. According to the Daily Mail, in May 2011, when Barack Obama stopped off for a pint of Guinness at Ollie Hayes’s pub in Moneygall, Ireland, his service detail quickly removed the glass from which he’d drunk. According to the Daily

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Or, as Howard Bloom so eloquently puts it: “It’s time to abandon the Greek idea that hubris is bad and face a simple fact — hubris is what the cosmos seems to want from us. We humans are pushing beyond the boundaries of what this cosmos has ever achieved. And that is what the cosmos seems to ache for. She has torn up her old rules over and over

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For starters, while the Bush administration and the evangelical right are waging war against stem cells, neither has said a peep about fertility clinics. Yet, during the normal process of in vitro fertilization, embryos are destroyed by the boatload. Current techniques cull twenty or so embryos for every one that’s implanted. The remainder are

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