James Dewey Watson, who helped reveal DNA’s double-helix structure, kicked off the Human Genome Project, and became infamous for his racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive statements, has died. He was 97.
His death was confirmed to The New York Times by his son Duncan, who said Watson died on Thursday in a hospice in East Northport, New York, on Long Island. He had previously been hospitalized with an infection. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory also confirmed his passing.
Watson was born in Chicago in 1928 and attained scientific fame in 1953 at 25 years old for solving the molecular structure of DNA—the genetic blueprints for life—with his colleague Francis Crick at England’s Cavendish laboratory. Their discovery heavily relied on the work of chemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin at King’s College in London, whose X-ray images of DNA provided critical clues to the molecule’s twisted-ladderlike architecture. One image in particular from Franklin’s lab, Photo 51, made Watson and Crick’s discovery possible. But, she was not fully credited for her contribution. The image was given to Watson and Crick without Franklin’s knowledge or consent by Maurice Wilkins, a biophysicist and colleague of Franklin.
Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for the discovery of DNA’s structure. By that time, Franklin had died (she died in 1958 at the age of 37 from ovarian cancer), and Nobels are not given posthumously. But Watson and Crick’s treatment of Franklin and her research has generated lasting scorn within the scientific community. Throughout his career and in his memoir, Watson disparaged Franklin’s intelligence and appearance.
If we ID the DNA for a great antibody, anyone can now make it.
One of the things that emerging diseases, including the COVID and Zika pandemics, have taught us is that it’s tough to keep up with infectious diseases in the modern world. Things like air travel can allow a virus to spread faster than our ability to develop therapies. But that doesn’t mean biotech has stood still; companies have been developing technologies that could allow us to rapidly respond to future threats.
There are a lot of ideas out there. But this week saw some early clinical trial results of one technique that could be useful for a range of infectious diseases. We’ll go over the results as a way to illustrate the sort of thinking that’s going on, along with the technologies we have available to pursue the resulting ideas.
The best antibodies
Any emerging disease leaves a mass of antibodies in its wake—those made by people in response to infections and vaccines, those made by lab animals we use to study the infectious agent, and so on. Some of these only have a weak affinity for the disease-causing agent, but some of them turn out to be what are called “broadly neutralizing.” These stick with high affinity not only to the original pathogen, but most or all of its variants, and possibly some related viruses.
Once an antibody latches on to a pathogen, broadly neutralizing antibodies inactivate it (as their name implies). This is typically because these antibodies bind to a site that’s necessary for a protein’s function. For example, broadly neutralizing antibodies to HIV bind to the proteins that help this virus enter immune cells.
Unfortunately, not everyone develops broadly neutralizing antibodies, and certainly doesn’t do so in time to prevent infections. And we haven’t figured out a way of designing vaccinations that ensure their generation. So we’re often found ourselves stuck with knowing what antibodies we’d like to see people making while having no way of ensuring that they do.
One of the options we’ve developed is to just mass-produce broadly neutralizing antibodies and inject them into people. This has been approved for use against Ebola and provided an early treatment during the COVID pandemic. This approach has some practical limitations, though. For starters, the antibodies have a finite life span in the bloodstream, so injections may need to be repeated. In addition, making and purifying enough antibodies in bulk isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and they generally need to be kept refrigerated during the distribution, limiting the areas where they can be used.
So, a number of companies have been looking at an alternative: getting people to make their own. This could potentially lead to longer-lived protection, even ensuring the antibodies are present to block future infections if the DNA survives long enough.
Genes and volts
Once you identify cells that produce broadly neutralizing antibodies, it’s relatively simple to clone those genes and put them into a chunk of DNA that will ensure that they’ll be produced by any human cell. If we could get that DNA into a person’s cells, broadly neutralizing antibodies are the result. And a number of approaches have been tried to handle that “if.” Most of them have inserted the genes needed to make the antibodies into a harmless, non-infectious virus, and then injected that virus into volunteers. Unfortunately, these viruses have tended to set off a separate immune response, which causes more significant side effects and may limit how often this approach can be used.
This brings us to the technique being used here. In this case, the researchers placed the antibody genes in a circular loop of DNA called a plasmid. This is enough to ensure that the DNA doesn’t get digested immediately and to get the antibody genes made into proteins. But it does nothing to help get the DNA inside of cells.
The research team, a mixture of people from a biotech company and academic labs, used a commercial injection setup that mixes the injection of the DNA with short pulses of electricity. The electricity disrupts the cell membrane, allowing the plasmid DNA to make it inside cells. Based on animal testing, doing this in muscle cells is enough to turn the muscles into factories producing lots of broadly neutralizing antibodies.
The new study was meant to test the safety of doing that in humans. The team recruited 44 participants, testing various doses of two antibody-producing plasmids and injection schedules. All but four of the subjects completed the study; three of those who dropped out had all been testing a routine with the electric pulses happening very quickly, which turned out to be unpleasant. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to make any difference to the production of antibodies.
While there were a lot of adverse reactions, most of these were associated with the injection itself: muscle pain at the site, a scab forming afterward, and a reddening of the skin. The worst problem appeared to be a single case of moderate muscle pain that persisted for a couple of days.
In all but one volunteer, the injection resulted in stable production of the two antibodies for at least 72 weeks following the injection; the single exception only made one of the two. That’s “at least” 72 weeks because that’s when they stopped testing—there was no indication that levels were dropping at this point. Injecting more DNA led to more variability in the amount of antibody produced, but that amount quickly maxed out. More total injections also boosted the level of antibody production. But even the minimal procedure—two injections of the lowest concentration tested—resulted in significant and stable antibodies.
And, as expected, these antibodies blocked the virus they were directed against: SARS-CoV-2.
The caveats
This approach seems to work—we can seemingly get anybody to make broadly neutralizing antibodies for months at a time. What’s the hitch? For starters, this isn’t necessarily great for a rapidly emerging pandemic. It takes a while to identify broadly neutralizing antibodies after a pathogen is identified. And, while it’s simple to ship DNA around the world to where it will be needed, injection setups that also produce the small electric pulses are not exactly standard equipment even in industrialized countries, much less the Global South.
Then there’s the issue of whether this really is a longer-term fix. Widespread use of broadly neutralizing antibodies will create a strong selective pressure for the evolution of variants that the antibody can no longer bind to. That may not always be a problem—broadly neutralizing antibodies generally bind to parts of proteins that are absolutely essential for the proteins’ function, and so it may not be possible to change those while maintaining the function. But that’s unlikely to always be the case.
In the end, however, social acceptance may end up being the biggest problem. People had an utter freakout over unfounded conspiracies that the RNA of COVID vaccines would somehow lead to permanent genetic changes. Presumably, having DNA that’s stable for months would be even harder for some segments of the public to swallow.
John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.
The DNA of nearly 2,000 US citizens has been entered into an FBI crime database.
For years, Customs and Border Protection agents have been quietly harvesting DNA from American citizens, including minors, and funneling the samples into an FBI crime database, government data shows. This expansion of genetic surveillance was never authorized by Congress for citizens, children, or civil detainees.
According to newly released government data analyzed by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, collected the DNA of nearly 2,000 US citizens between 2020 and 2024 and had it sent to CODIS, the FBI’s nationwide system for policing investigations. An estimated 95 were minors, some as young as 14. The entries also include travelers never charged with a crime and dozens of cases where agents left the “charges” field blank. In other files, officers invoked civil penalties as justification for swabs that federal law reserves for criminal arrests.
The findings appear to point to a program running outside the bounds of statute or oversight, experts say, with CBP officers exercising broad discretion to capture genetic material from Americans and have it funneled into a law-enforcement database designed in part for convicted offenders. Critics warn that anyone added to the database could endure heightened scrutiny by US law enforcement for life.
“Those spreadsheets tell a chilling story,” Stevie Glaberson, director of research and advocacy at Georgetown’s Center on Privacy & Technology, tells WIRED. “They show DNA taken from people as young as 4 and as old as 93—and, as our new analysis found, they also show CBP flagrantly violating the law by taking DNA from citizens without justification.”
DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
For more than two decades, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, has been billed as a tool for violent crime investigations. But under both recent policy changes and the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, the system has become a catchall repository for genetic material collected far outside the criminal justice system.
One of the sharpest revelations came from DHS data released earlier this year showing that CBP and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement have been systematically funneling cheek swabs from immigrants—and, in many cases, US citizens—into CODIS. What was once a program aimed at convicted offenders now sweeps in children at the border, families questioned at airports, and people held on civil—not criminal—grounds. WIRED previously reported that DNA from minors as young as 4 had ended up in the FBI’s database, alongside elderly people in their 90s, with little indication of how or why the samples were taken.
The scale is staggering. According to Georgetown researchers, DHS has contributed roughly 2.6 million profiles to CODIS since 2020—far above earlier projections and a surge that has reshaped the database. By December 2024, CODIS’s “detainee” index contained over 2.3 million profiles; by April 2025, the figure had already climbed to more than 2.6 million. Nearly all of these samples—97 percent—were collected under civil, not criminal, authority. At the current pace, according to Georgetown Law’s estimates, which are based on DHS projections, Homeland Security files alone could account for one-third of CODIS by 2034.
The expansion has been driven by specific legal and bureaucratic levers. Foremost was an April 2020 Justice Department rule that revoked a long-standing waiver allowing DHS to skip DNA collection from immigration detainees, effectively green-lighting mass sampling. Later that summer, the FBI signed off on rules that let police booking stations run arrestee cheek swabs through Rapid DNA machines—automated devices that can spit out CODIS-ready profiles in under two hours.
The strain of the changes became apparent in subsequent years. Former FBI director Christopher Wray warned during Senate testimony in 2023 that the flood of DNA samples from DHS threatened to overwhelm the bureau’s systems. The 2020 rule change, he said, had pushed the FBI from a historic average of a few thousand monthly submissions to 92,000 per month—over 10 times its traditional intake. The surge, he cautioned, had created a backlog of roughly 650,000 unprocessed kits, raising the risk that people detained by DHS could be released before DNA checks produced investigative leads.
Under Trump’s renewed executive order on border enforcement, signed in January 2025, DHS agencies were instructed to deploy “any available technologies” to verify family ties and identity, a directive that explicitly covers genetic testing. This month, federal officials announced they were soliciting new bids to install Rapid DNA at local booking facilities around the country, with combined awards of up to $3 million available.
“The Department of Homeland Security has been piloting a secret DNA collection program of American citizens since 2020. Now, the training wheels have come off,” said Anthony Enriquez, vice president of advocacy at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. “In 2025, Congress handed DHS a $178 billion check, making it the nation’s costliest law enforcement agency, even as the president gutted its civil rights watchdogs and the Supreme Court repeatedly signed off on unconstitutional tactics.”
Oversight bodies and lawmakers have raised alarms about the program. As early as 2021, the DHS inspector general found the department lacked central oversight of DNA collection and that years of noncompliance can undermine public safety—echoing an earlier rebuke from the Office of Special Counsel, which called CBP’s failures an “unacceptable dereliction.”
US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Kans.) more recently pressed DHS and DOJ for explanations about why children’s DNA is being captured and whether CODIS has any mechanism to reject improperly obtained samples, saying the program was never intended to collect and permanently retain the DNA of all noncitizens, warning the children are likely to be “treated by law enforcement as suspects for every investigation of every future crime, indefinitely.”
Rights advocates allege that CBP’s DNA collection program has morphed into a sweeping genetic surveillance regime, with samples from migrants and even US citizens fed into criminal databases absent transparency, legal safeguards, or limits on retention. Georgetown’s privacy center points out that once DHS creates and uploads a CODIS profile, the government retains the physical DNA sample indefinitely, with no procedure to revisit or remove profiles when the legality of the detention is in doubt.
In parallel, Georgetown and allied groups have sued DHS over its refusal to fully release records about the program, highlighting how little the public knows about how DNA is being used, stored, or shared once it enters CODIS.
Taken together, these revelations may suggest a quiet repurposing of CODIS. A system long described as a forensic breakthrough is being remade into a surveillance archive—sweeping up immigrants, travelers, and US citizens alike, with few checks on the agents deciding whose DNA ends up in the federal government’s most intimate database.
“There’s much we still don’t know about DHS’s DNA collection activities,” Georgetown’s Glaberson says. “We’ve had to sue the agencies just to get them to do their statutory duty, and even then they’ve flouted court orders. The public has a right to know what its government is up to, and we’ll keep fighting to bring this program into the light.”
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Biotechnology company Regeneron will acquire 23andMe out of bankruptcy for $256 million, with a plan to keep the DNA-testing company running without interruption and uphold its privacy-protection promises.
In its announcement of the acquisition, Regeneron assured 23andMe’s 15 million customers that their data—including genetic and health information, genealogy, and other sensitive personal information—would be safe and in good hands. Regeneron aims to use the large trove of genetic data to further its own work using genetics to develop medical advances—something 23andMe tried and failed to do.
“As a world leader in human genetics, Regeneron Genetics Center is committed to and has a proven track record of safeguarding the genetic data of people across the globe, and, with their consent, using this data to pursue discoveries that benefit science and society,” Aris Baras, senior vice president and head of the Regeneron Genetics Center, said in a statement. “We assure 23andMe customers that we are committed to protecting the 23andMe dataset with our high standards of data privacy, security, and ethical oversight and will advance its full potential to improve human health.”
Baras said that Regeneron’s Genetic Center already has its own genetic dataset from nearly 3 million people.
The safety of 23andMe’s dataset has drawn considerable concern among consumers, lawmakers, and regulators amid the company’s downfall. For instance, in March, California Attorney General Rob Bonta made the unusual move to urge Californians to delete their genetic data amid 23andMe’s financial distress. Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson also weighed in, making clear in a March letter that “any purchaser should expressly agree to be bound by and adhere to the terms of 23andMe’s privacy policies and applicable law.”
Enlarge/ Top row: individual steps in the reaction process. Bottom row: cartoon diagram of the top, showing the position of each DNA and RNA strand.
Hiraizumi, et. al.
While CRISPR is probably the most prominent gene-editing technology, there are a variety of others, some developed before, others since. And people have been developing CRISPR variants to perform more specialized functions, like altering specific bases. In all of these cases, researchers are trying to balance a number of competing factors: convenience; flexibility; specificity and precision for the editing; low error rates; and so on.
So, having additional options for editing can be a good thing, enabling new ways of balancing those different needs. On Wednesday, a pair of papers in Nature describe a DNA-based parasite that moves itself around bacterial genomes through a mechanism that hasn’t been previously described. It’s nowhere near ready for use in humans, but it may have some distinctive features that make it worth further development.
Going mobile
Mobile genetic elements, commonly called transposons, are quite common in many species—they make up nearly half the sequences in the human genome, for example. They are indeed mobile, showing up in new locations throughout the genome, sometimes by cutting themselves out and hopping to new locations, other times by sending a copy out to a new place in the genome. For any of this to work, they need to have an enzyme that cuts DNA and specifically recognizes the right transposon sequence to insert into the cut.
The specificity of that interaction, needed to ensure the system only inserts new copies of itself, and the cutting of DNA, are features we’d like for gene editing, which places a value on better understanding these systems.
Bacterial genomes tend to have very few transposons—the extra DNA isn’t really in keeping with the bacterial reproduction approach of “copy all the DNA as quickly as possible when there’s food around.” Yet bacterial transposons do exist, and a team of scientists based in the US and Japan identified one with a rather unusual feature. As an intermediate step in moving to a new location, the two ends of the transposon (called IS110) are linked together to form a circular piece of DNA.
In its circular form, the DNA sequences at the junction act as a signal that tells the cell to make an RNA copy of nearby DNA (termed a “promoter”). When linear, each of the two bits of DNA on either side of the junction lacks the ability to act as a signal; it only works when the transposon is circular. And the researchers confirmed that there is in fact an RNA produced by the circular form, although the RNA does not encode for any proteins.
So, the research team looked at over 100 different relatives of IS110 and found that they could all produce similar non-protein-coding RNAs, all of which shared some key features. These included stretches where nearby sections of the RNA could base-pair with each other, leaving an unpaired loop of RNA in between. Two of these loops contained sequences that either base-paired with the transposon itself or at the sites in the E. coli genome where it inserted.
That suggests that the RNA produced by the circular form of the transposon helped to act as a guide, ensuring that the transposon’s DNA was specifically used and only inserted into precise locations in the genome.
Editing without precision
To confirm this was right, the researchers developed a system where the transposon would produce a fluorescent protein when it was properly inserted into the genome. They used this to show that mutations in the loop that recognized the transposon would stop it from being inserted into the genome—and that it was possible to direct it to new locations in the genome by changing the recognition sequences in the second loop.
To show this was potentially useful for gene editing, the researchers blocked the production of the transposon’s own RNA and fed it a replacement RNA that worked. So, you could potentially use this system to insert arbitrary DNA sequences into arbitrary locations in a genome. It could also be used with targeting RNAs that caused specific DNA sequences to be deleted. All of this is potentially very useful for gene editing.
Emphasis on “potentially.” The problem is that the targeting sequences in the loops are quite short, with the insertion site targeted by a recognition sequence that’s only four to seven bases long. At the short end of this range, you’d expect that a random string of bases would have an insertion site about once every 250 bases.
That relatively low specificity showed. At the high end, various experiments could see an insertion accuracy ranging from a close-to-being-useful 94 percent down to a positively threatening 50 percent. For deletion experiments, the low end of the range was a catastrophic 32 percent accuracy. So, while this has some features of an interesting gene-editing system, there’s a lot of work to do before it could fulfill that potential. It’s possible that these recognition loops could be made longer to add the sort of specificity that would be needed for editing vertebrate genomes, but we simply don’t know at this point.
Enlarge/ The Manu area of Peru contains a number of ecological zones.
Peru’s Manu Biosphere Reserve is the largest rainforest reserve in the world and one of the most biodiverse spots on the planet. Manu is a UNESCO-protected area the size of Connecticut and Delaware combined, covering an area where the Amazon River Basin meets the Andes Mountain Range. This combination forms a series of unique ecosystems, where species unknown to science are discovered every year. The remoteness of the region has helped preserve its biodiversity but adds to the challenges faced by the scientists who are drawn to study it.
Trapping wildlife for research in the dense jungle is impractical, especially considering the great distances researchers have to travel within Manu, either through the forest or on the waterways. It’s an expensive proposition that inevitably exposes the trapped animals to some amount of risk. Trapping rare and endangered animals is even more difficult and comes with significant risks to the animal.
Trapping beetles, however, does not pose the same challenges. They’re easy to catch, easy to transport, and, most importantly, carry the DNA of many animals in and on them. Any animal a biologist could hope to study leaves tracks and droppings in the forest, and the beetles make a living by cleaning that stuff up.
Beetles as DNA collectors
Beetles are plentiful in the rainforest, and the species that Alejandro Lopera-Toro’s team studies are not endangered. The study does mean that the beetles are killed, but overall, the effect on the ecosystem is minimal.
According to Peruvian biologist and team member Patricia Reyes, “The impact depends on the abundance and reproductive cycle of each species. Reducing the beetle population could have an effect on their predators, such as birds, reptiles, and other insects. The health of the forest depends on the beetles’ function to break down organic matter and disperse seeds. Despite not having found any effect on the ecosystem so far, we still limit how many individual beetles we collect and identify sensitive areas where collecting is prohibited. We promote sustainable methods of collection to mitigate possible impacts in the future.”
Getting beetles to do the work of collecting DNA for researchers took some adjustments. The traps normally used to study beetles cause the beetles to fall into a chemical solution, which kills and preserves them until they are collected. However, those traps contaminate the beetle’s stomach contents, making the DNA unusable. Lopera-Toro’s traps keep them alive, protecting the delicate strands of DNA that the beetles have worked so hard to collect. He and his team also go out into the forest to collect live beetles by hand, carefully recording the time and place each one was collected. Starting in July 2022, the team has been collecting dung beetles across Manu’s diverse ecosystems up and down the altitude gradient, from 500 to 3,500 meters above sea level.
Enlarge/ In addition to obtaining DNA from the beetles, researchers also use them as test subjects for metabolic studies.
Elena Chaboteaux
The Manu Biological Station team is using Nanopore technology to sequence the DNA found in the beetles’ stomachs, with the goal of finding out what animals are represented there. They specifically targeted dung beetles because their feeding habits depend on the feces left by larger animals. The main advantage to the Nanopore minION device is that it can separate long lengths of DNA on-site. “Long nanopore sequencing reads provide enhanced species identification, while real-time data analysis delivers immediate access to results, whether in the field or in the lab,” according to the Nanopore website.
Biologist Juliana Morales acknowledges that Nanopore still has a high rate of error, though as this new technology is refined, that issue is continually decreasing. For the purposes of the Manu Biological Station team, the margin of error is a price they’re willing to pay to have devices they can use in the rainforest. Since they’re not studying one specific species, but rather building a database of the species present in the region, they don’t need to get every nucleotide correct to be able to identify the species. They do, however, need a strand long enough to differentiate between a common woolly monkey and a yellow-tailed woolly monkey.
Though the researchers prefer to sequence DNA on-site with Nanopore minION devices, when they have more than a dozen samples to analyze, they send them to the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. It’s a logistical nightmare to send samples from the Peruvian jungle to Canada, but Lopera-Toro says it’s worth it. “The University of Guelph can process hundreds of DNA samples per day. I’m lucky if we can process 10 samples a day at the [Manu] lab.”
In the most recent batch of 76 samples, they analyzed the stomach contents of 27 species from 11 genera of beetles. From those 76 samples, they identified DNA of howler monkeys, spider monkeys, red brocket deer, night monkeys, peccaries, mouse opossum, Rufous-breasted wood quail, and two species of armadillos. Oddly, the beetles had also eaten about a dozen species of fruit, and one had consumed pollen from a tropical plant called syngonium.
The implications could be vast. “The dung beetle that ate the jaguar’s excrement will tell us not only the DNA of the jaguar but also what the jaguar is eating,” said Lopera-Toro. “If the jaguar kills a peccary and eats 80 percent of the peccary, beetles will eat some of the other 20 percent. If a beetle walks over a jaguar print or saliva, there could be traces of jaguar DNA on the beetle. We analyze the stomach contents and the outside of the beetle. We have an endless number of options, opportunities, and questions we can answer from studying these small insects. We can see the bigger picture of what is happening in the jungle.”
