Genetic engineering pioneer Kevin Esvelt’s work highlights biotechnology’s immense potential for good—but also for catastrophe.

In Chapter 8, author Debora MacKenzie recounts an unfortunate history of baselessly blaming disease outbreaks on groups perceived as outsiders.

The COVID-19 pandemic is still with us. Biomedical innovation has rallied to address that pressing concern while continuing to tackle broader research challenges.

Dozens of researchers, including myself, worked for years to uncover that swine flu had leapt to humans from a pig in Mexico in 2009. We learned a lot about influenza evolution, pig farming, and outbreak risk along the way.

Metagenomic sequencing can help detect unknown pathogens, but its widespread use faces challenges.

Dozens of researchers, including myself, worked for years to uncover that swine flu had leapt to humans from a pig in Mexico in 2009. We learned a lot about influenza evolution, pig farming, and outbreak risk along the way.

The Genealogy of a Gene, On the Move, The Chimp and the River, and Domesticated

In the planet’s warming and acidifying oceans, species from corals to lobsters and fish are succumbing to pathogenic infection.

Researchers are borrowing designs from the natural world to advance biomedicine.

In the 1940s, the mass production of penicillin led to a sensational reduction in illness and death from bacterial disease. A resulting golden era of bacterial research emerged with new classes of antibiotics, and by 1969, US Surgeon General William H. Stewart told Congress: "The time has come to close the book on infectious disease." As a result, fewer new students specialized in bacterial physiology, and federal funders shifted their focus to more immediately pressing diseases, as did many pha