Work has begun on a controversial project to create the building blocks of human life from scratch, in what is believed to be a world first. The research has been taboo until now because of concerns ...

Anthropologist Carla Handley is sitting cross-legged in a mud-walled house in a Kenyan village called Merti. She's meeting with a man dressed in a flowing blue robe and a woven cap of red and white.

In human cells, there are about 20,000 genes on a two-meter DNA strand—finely coiled up in a nucleus about 10 micrometers in ...