‘Every mother in Israel wants a perfect baby, no less than that,” said Dr. Avraham Steinberg, the chief medical ethicist at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, at a conference on Jewish genomics in Israel in July. For the past 12 years, Shaare Zedek has been in the business of making a more perfect baby. The…
Carl Zimmer, bestselling writer about on parasites and evolution as well as a prolific columnist for the Science section of the New York Times, recently embarked on a journey into the secrets, the history and the intricate biology of his own genome. While some popular companies, such as 23AndMe, offer genotyping services (an abbreviated alternative…
When the Forward first wrote about Harvey Singer two years ago, he shared his trials of being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008. The Rochester, New York, resident opted for a full mastectomy, only to be diagnosed with prostate cancer 18 months later. Recently, we learned that Singer faced yet another monumental health scare after…
They thought he might just need glasses. Lorelei Sandoval and her husband had noticed that their four-month-old son, Isaac, had a small wiggle in his eye, so they brought him in to the pediatrician. It wasn’t until the doctor wouldn’t stop asking them questions — including if they were of Jewish descent — that Sandoval…
Cancer kept Angel Moses busy. Before even completing the five-year treatment for breast cancer after she was diagnosed in 2003, the disease recurred in the original breast and a new cancer developed in the other. The Chicago resident first found she had the disease when she was just 38. Her age and the occurrence of…
Every morning, while her college roommate is still asleep, Hayley Snider gets up and puts on a vest that vibrates and inflates to clear out the thick mucus in her lungs. Later, after evening marching band practice, the 19-year-old student forgoes hanging out with friends to return to her dorm at the University of Houston…
In 1944 Harvard installed Mark I, a computerized calculator, to aid physics professor John von Neumann’s work on the Manhattan Project. The one-of-a-kind machine took up most of a room. Today, for $500, you can keep an exponentially more rapid and versatile smartphone in your pocket. Imagine what similarly rapid technological growth might look like…
A group of blogs and Internet forums, led by blogger Steve Sailer, have come together to embrace a successor to the pseudoscientific racist movements of the 20th century. “Human biodiversity” (HBD) is the term they have used to give their particular theories a policy-wonk zing. (Read an in-depth explanation of the human biodiversity phenomenon here.)…
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