The scientific consensus that food containing genetically modified organisms is safe seems ever stronger, yet the social controversy about GMOs seems only to grow as well. “Unhealthy Fixation,” a long article published this summer in Slate and reporting on what author Will Saletan says was cl...

One of the long-term contributions of Earth Day is that it offers a regular, semi-official reminder that a sense of the sacred is a vital part of environmentalism. The spirit of John Muir lives on in the notion of “Respect for the land” that was emphasized in the famous Keep America Beautiful pu...

For several years, a British company called Oxitec has been proposing a strategy for controlling a species of mosquito, Aedes aegypti, that humans have accidentally carried from Africa to other parts of the globe, thereby also spreading a risk of dengue fever and other diseases for which A. aegypti i...

An article in the October issue of Discover Magazine has a great line from Drew Endy, a bioengineer at Stanford University who has become one of the foremost public figures in the field of synthetic biology. It’s not his comment about how, someday, synthetic biology might allow us to create a m...

A team of scientists announced this week that it had successfully created one of the sixteen chromosomes found in yeast cells, marking a meaningful step forward in that part of genetic engineering dubbed synthetic biology. This is the first time an entire chromosome has been synthesized. Moreover, th...

A statement released on March 13 by a collection of environmental and other organizations is the latest salvo in a global debate about how far the regulation of synthetic biology should go in endorsing the “precautionary principle.” The statement, titled “Principles for the Oversight of Synt...