Jonathan Flint is a professor of human genetics and psychiatry at UCLA.
Most women who undertake IVF will have their embryos screened for genetic abnormalities. Clinics in some parts of the world also offer to select an embryo for implantation based on genetic markers for everything from eye and hair colour to behavioural, emotional and cognitive traits. The next, far more consequential, step is the genome editing of human embryos. As the geneticist Peter...
The day before James Watson arrived to deliver the 2013 Michael Davys Lecture in Oxford, I received an email from his personal physician in New York asking me to arrange for him to be seen by ‘one of your best surgeons’ to remove a skin tumour. Since I had invited Watson to Oxford, it seemed I was also now responsible for his medical treatment.
Ayear ago I joined half a dozen academics at the University of California in Los Angeles, a group of physicians, geneticists and computational biologists, to try to help address the public health challenge of asymptomatic Covid-19 transmission. The need for testing was such that our small team was soon on Zoom calls with Silicon Valley startups, the California Covid-19 Testing Task Force,...
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