For thousands of years, people have been harvesting the bounty of the natural world. Plants and animals have, of course, provided people with food, but they have also supplied therapeutic remedies for ...

“What is life?” asked Austrian physicist and Nobel Laureate Erwin Schrödinger in a series of lectures at Trinity College Dublin, in 1943. Although countless others have asked the same question since ...

Scientists have been successfully reading the genome for the last 15 to 20 years, but two new papers provide the first hints that it may someday be possible to write genetic code as cheaply, ...

Proposals for a large public-private initiative to synthesize an entire human genome from scratch – an effort that could take a decade and require billions of dollars for technological development – ...

In this video segment, adapted from NOVA, reenactment footage portrays how chemist Percy Julian used careful observation, insight, and determination to search for a process for synthesizing the ...