Biochemist Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering CRISPR, a revolutionary biotech tool that can edit DNA with unprecedented precision and ease. But how exactly does CRISPR work, and what consequences may arise from altering our internal makeup? She talks to Chris about the remarkable effects CRISPR can have on our l...

The founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute, Jennifer Doudna earned the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work developing the groundbreaking genome-engineering technology CRISPR-Cas9.

Veerle Provoost studies genetic and social parenthood in the context of donor conception.

Dr. Nir Eyal is an international authority in population-level bioethics with research in health inequalities, health promotion and research ethics, especially in resource-poor settings.

We tend to think of our corporeal selves as the one thing we hold complete dominion over. "My body belongs to me" has become a statement so banal that French ministers have the phrase tattooed on their arms. Philosopher Gaspard Koenig thinks we should stop taking ownership of our bodies for granted. In this funny, example-driven talk, Koenig del...

Andrés Ruzo investigates the Earth's heat and the mystery of a boiling river in the Peruvian rainforest.

Jonathan Marks works at the intersections of ethics, law and policy -- writing and speaking about torture, obesity, fracking, health care and other pressing issues of our time.

Baroness Onora O'Neill is a philosopher who focuses on international justice and the roles of trust and accountability in public life.

Cheap and fast genome sequencing is about to turn health care (and insurance, and politics) upside down. Richard Resnick shows how, in this accessible talk.

Glowing dogs ... mice that grow human ears ... bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe describes an astonishing series of recent bio-engineering experiments, and asks: Isn't it time to set some ground rules?

To protect against a possible resurgence of smallpox, the US government is funding research to improve treatments and vaccines. And since it's unethical to expose people to a highly lethal virus, labs are using monkeys as research subjects. But is it right to harm these animals to protect humanity from a potential threat? Rebecca L. Walker takes...

Medical ethicist Harvey Fineberg shows us three paths forward for the ever-evolving human species: to stop evolving completely, to evolve naturally -- or to control the next steps of human evolution, using genetic modification, to make ourselves smarter, faster, better. Neo-evolution is within our grasp. What will we do with it?

Alan Russell studies regenerative medicine -- a breakthrough way of thinking about disease and injury, using a process that can signal the body to rebuild itself.

Alice Dreger studies history and anatomy, and acts as a patient advocate.

Global scholar, University of Pennsylvania civil rights sociologist and law professor Dorothy Roberts exposes the myths of race-­based medicine.

How do we define a parent -- or a family? Bioethicist Veerle Provoost explores these questions in the context of non-traditional families, ones brought together by adoption, second marriages, surrogate mothers and sperm donations. In this talk, she shares stories of how parents and children create their own family narratives.

Does humanity have a future as uploaded minds? In his work, Robin Hanson asks this and other extra-large questions.

What makes our bodies age ... our skin wrinkle, our hair turn white, our immune systems weaken? Biologist Elizabeth Blackburn shares a Nobel Prize for her work finding out the answer, with the discovery of telomerase: an enzyme that replenishes the caps at the end of chromosomes, which break down when cells divide. Learn more about Blackburn's g...

Tony Wyss-Coray studies the impact of aging on the human body and brain. In this eye-opening talk, he shares new research from his Stanford lab and other teams which shows that a solution for some of the less great aspects of old age might actually lie within us all.

Imagine the discoveries that could result from a giant pool of freely available health and genomic data. John Wilbanks is working to build it.

Travis Rieder wants to help find a solution to America’s opioid crisis -- and if that sounds a bit too lofty, he’d settle for making clear, incremental progress in a responsible, evidence-based way.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn't happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It's more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics -- and raises some important ethical questions.

Reuters health editor Ivan Oransky warns that we're suffering from an epidemic of preposterous preconditions -- pre-diabetes, pre-cancer, and many more. In this engaging talk from TEDMED he shows how health care can find a solution... by taking an important lesson from baseball.

When Andrés Ruzo was a young boy in Peru, his grandfather told him a story with an odd detail: There is a river, deep in the Amazon, which boils as if a fire burns below it. Twelve years later, after training as a geoscientist, he set out on a journey deep into the jungle of South America in search of this boiling river. At a time when everythin...

Gene-editing tools like CRISPR enable us to program life at its most fundamental level. But this raises some pressing questions: If we can generate new species from scratch, what should we build? Should we redesign humanity as we know it? Juan Enriquez forecasts the possible futures of genetic editing, exploring the immense uncertainty and oppor...

Meet Sharon Terry, a former college chaplain and stay-at-home mom who took the medical research world by storm when her two young children were diagnosed with a rare disease known as pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE). In this knockout talk, Terry explains how she and her husband became citizen scientists, working midnight shifts at the lab to find ...

Sometimes controversial, always practical ethicist Peter Singer stirs public debate about morality, from animal welfare to global poverty.

Every cell that's ever lived has been the result of the four-letter genetic alphabet: A, T, C and G -- the basic units of DNA. But now that's changed. In a visionary talk, synthetic biologist Floyd E. Romesberg introduces us to the first living organisms created with six-letter DNA -- the four natural letters plus two new man-made ones, X and Y ...

In 1970, neurosurgeon Robert White and his team carted two monkeys into an operating room to conduct an ambitious experiment. The objective was to connect the head of Monkey A to the body of Monkey B, in what he considered a whole-body transplant, with the ultimate goal of one day performing this surgery on humans. Is such a feat even medically ...

Brains are ubiquitous in modern marketing: Headlines proclaim cheese sandwiches help with decision-making, while a “neuro” drink claims to reduce stress. There’s just one problem, says neuroscientist Molly Crockett: The benefits of these "neuro-enhancements" are not proven scientifically. In this to-the-point talk, Crockett explains the limits o...