Scientists are devising human-animal hybrids for harvesting human organs, but lab-derived mini-organs are a less ethically fraught solution to meeting the need for transplantation.

Scientists are devising human-animal hybrids for harvesting human organs, but lab-derived mini-organs are a less ethically fraught solution to meeting the need for transplantation.

As artificial life forms become more sophisticated, we propose a simple list of criteria to determine whether synthetic biological organisms and robots are living beings.

A newly expanded genetic alphabet that includes four synthetic nucleotides highlights the need for strict boundaries on their use.

American scientists seem to have forfeited their chance to convince the government to support research into therapeutic cloning as the source of a new generation of rational therapies. It was not always this way. As a young scientist working at Cold Spring Harbor in the early 1970s, my telephoning Paul Berg at Stanford University concerning his work on recombinant DNA and tumor viruses led to the Asilomar conferences, from which the voluntary moratorium on recombinant DNA work emerged, leading t