Comprehensive Scoring Analysis

Work has begun on a controversial project to create the building blocks of human life from scratch, in what is believed…

The research has been taboo until now because of concerns it could lead to designer babies or unforeseen changes for fu…

But now the World's largest medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, has given an initial £10m to start the project and say…

Dr Julian Sale, of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, who is part of the project, told BBC News the …

"The sky is the limit. We are looking at therapies that will improve people's lives as they age, that will lead to heal…

"We are looking to use this approach to generate disease-resistant cells we can use to repopulate damaged organs, for e…

But critics fear the research opens the way for unscrupulous researchers seeking to create enhanced or modified humans.

Pat Thomas, director of the campaign group Beyond GM, said: "We like to think that all scientists are there to do good,…

DNA is built from just four much smaller blocks referred to as A, G, C and T, which are repeated over and over again in…

The new work that is getting under way, called the Synthetic Human Genome Project, potentially takes this a giant leap …

The scientists' first aim is to develop ways of building ever larger blocks of human DNA, up to the point when they hav…

"Building DNA from scratch allows us to test out how DNA really works and test out new theories, because currently we c…