Genetic Engineering

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Agriculture and forestry account for over 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, but what if you could grow only…

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF What happens when AI can design its own humans? And then breed them ex vivo? The future is weirder than…

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Genetic engineering is incredibly powerful, it can help cure thousands of uncuttable diseases and wipe out species, and until now…

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Extinction is no longer for life, and being able to bring back extinct killer viruses or create new ones is…

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF DNA is the software of life, and our ability to code it is getting exponentially better – for better and…

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Putting humans into suspended animation would give surgeons more time to operate on critical patients, and help us colonise far…

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Squid have a huge number of secret skills, and now thanks to genetic engineering humans could one day have those…

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Of course ethically there will never be any substitute for real exercise, but new gene therapies are pushing our thinking…

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As our mastery of synthetic biology improves so too does our ability to create new types of artificial bio-weaponry, and…

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As the technology of the future increasingly looks like it will be biological based we’ll need more “biological debuggers” like…

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Genetic engineering is the ultimate Pandora’s Box, and the lid’s coming off as companies discover new ways to control and…

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF DNA storage holds huge amounts of promise but getting information into DNA and then getting it back out again has…