Scientists say they have reached an important milestone in a quest to build a life-form from scratch. They have synthesized a bacterium's entire chromosome from its chemical building blocks. Soon, ...

At Jef Boeke's lab, you can whiff an odor that seems out of place, as if they were baking bread here. But he and his colleagues are cooking up something else altogether: yeast that works with chunks ...

Work has begun on something once-unthinkable: creating human DNA from scratch. Artificial DNA has long been an ethical minefield, with fears of a generation of ‘designer babies’ with pick ‘n’ mix ...