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Accuracy comes before completeness

A missing record is a gap; a wrong record is a harm. Where we do not have a reliable source for a fact, the field says so rather than carrying an estimate presented as a measurement. Where sources disagree, we give the range and name who says what.

Every substantive page carries

• An author.
• A last-updated date, and where a scientific review has been performed, a last-reviewed date and the reviewer.
• Its sources, linked to the primary document wherever one exists.
• An evidence level, where the page makes any claim about what gene editing can do.

Language rules

• We do not call an experimental therapy a "cure", and we do not describe trial participants as having been "cured", because trial follow-up is how that question gets answered and it takes years.
• "Breakthrough" is a regulatory designation, not an adjective. We use it only in that sense.
• We distinguish somatic editing (affects one person) from germline editing (heritable) explicitly, every time, because the ethical and legal treatment of the two is completely different.
• We do not use disease as a metaphor, and we write about conditions in the way that patient communities ask to be written about — people with sickle cell disease, not "sicklers".
• Analogies are welcome, but every analogy is followed by a note on where it breaks down.

Ethics coverage

On genuinely contested ethical questions the Atlas does not take a side. Each ethics page presents the strongest version of the argument on each side, separates what is scientifically settled from what is not, and summarises the law where it exists. Where a claim is factually wrong rather than ethically contested — a scientific misconception used as an argument — we say so and cite the evidence.

Credit and priority disputes

Who invented what in gene editing has been litigated, and remains genuinely contested in parts. Scientist and technology pages state the specific contribution each person made, note where priority is disputed, and do not resolve those disputes.

News

News on this site is collected from named publishers and always links out. We do not rewrite articles, do not publish AI-written text as reporting, and do not generate headlines. Summaries beside a headline are short, descriptive, and clearly ours. In-house "Atlas briefs" written from our own database are labelled as such and kept visually separate from the news feed.

AI use, stated plainly

Portions of this site's content and data compilation are produced with AI-assisted research; figures are indicative and may be out of date — always verify with primary sources. The Ask the Atlas assistant answers only from our own records and links to the pages it used. AI is not used to write news, to invent facts, or to generate images of real people.

Independence

No company, institution or sponsor pays for coverage, placement or wording on this site, and no entry can be bought. If advertising or affiliate arrangements are ever introduced, they will be disclosed in the footer of every page carrying them, in the format the FTC requires, and they will not affect what is written.

Corrections

Report an error through the contact page with the page, the claim, and the source you believe is correct. Substantive corrections are made to the record and update its last-updated date; where a correction changes the meaning of a page materially, we note what changed on the page itself. We do not quietly delete records that turn out to be wrong.