Biological Sciences

With the world’s population topping 8 billion last year, it’s clear that humans have achieved a unique status in Earth’s history. We are the only creature that dominate all other organisms on the planet, from animals and fungi to plants and microbes.

It remains to be seen whether humans can retain this dominance as we push the global climate to extremes while driving to extinction the very organisms that we climbed over to get to the top.

In a new book, a group of scientists and philosophers places part of the blame on an attitude prevalent among scientists and the general...

Dr. Urnov is a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a gene editor at its Innovative Genomics Institute.

The parents of a 2-year-old girl write that their daughter “could die within the next year” because a genetic mutation is causing her heart to fail.

“Time is quickly running out for me,” writes a man in his mid-30s whose DNA harbors a genetic mistake certain to destroy his brain within a matter of years.

“Watching my sons disintegrate before my eyes is heartbreaking,” writes a mother with two children...

John Kuriyan’s love of nature is self-evident after a glance at the vivid feathers displayed on his Flickr gallery. He has photographed dozens and dozens of different bird species, each with a unique set of characteristics that allow it to thrive in its natural habitat. This fascination with nature’s diversity led Kuriyan, professor of chemistry and molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, to both study proteins and realize how to share his love of science with students.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly shut down labs and sent scientists home to work, female astronomers on average published about nine papers for every 10 published by men — a rate that has remained stagnant for decades.

The pandemic appears to have worsened that gender imbalance.

In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature Astronomy, two cosmologists — Vanessa Böhm of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jia Liu of the Kavli Institute...