HONG KONG (AP) — A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world's first genetically edited babies — twin girls born this month whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life.

If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics.

NEW YORK (AP) — Did you hear what happened when Bill Gates walked into a bar? Everybody there immediately became millionaires — on average.

Scientists think they have achieved the first gene editing inside the body, altering DNA in adults to try to treat a disease, although it's too soon to know if this will help.

Preliminary results suggest that two men with a rare disorder now have a corrective gene at very low levels, which may not be enough to make the therapy a success.

Still, it's a scientific milestone toward one day doctoring DNA to treat many diseases caused by faulty genes.

HONG KONG (AP) — Early last year, a little-known Chinese researcher turned up at an elite meeting in Berkeley, California, where scientists and ethicists were discussing a technology that had shaken the field to its core — an emerging tool for "editing" genes, the strings of DNA that form the blueprint of life.

The young scientist, He Jiankui, saw the power of this tool, called CRISPR, to transform not only genes, but also his own career.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists working on the frontiers of medicine fear the uproar over the reported births of gene-edited babies in China could jeopardize promising research into how to alter heredity to fend off a variety of disorders.

HONG KONG (AP) — China's government ordered a halt Thursday to work by a medical team that claimed to have helped make the world's first gene-edited babies, as a group of leading scientists declared that it's still too soon to try to make permanent changes to DNA that can be inherited by future generations.

HONG KONG (AP) — A Chinese researcher who claims to have helped make the world's first genetically edited babies says a second pregnancy may be underway.

The researcher, He Jiankui of Shenzhen, revealed the pregnancy Wednesday while making his first public comments about his controversial work at an international conference in Hong Kong.

SHENZHEN, China (AP) — The Chinese scientist who says he helped make the world's first gene-edited babies veered off a traditional career path, keeping much of his research secret in pursuit of a larger goal — making history.

Designer babies might be here sooner than anyone reckoned. A Chinese researcher who says he created gene-edited babies crossed what most scientists consider a forbidden line.

It's not clear if the claim is true and if so, how the twin girls whose DNA reportedly was altered will fare as they grow.

HONG KONG (AP) — Scientists and bioethics experts reacted with shock, anger and alarm Monday to a Chinese researcher's claim that he helped make the world's first genetically edited babies.

NEW YORK (AP) — So you want to have a baby.

Would you like a dark-haired girl with a high risk of someday getting colon cancer, but a good chance of above-average music ability?

Or would you prefer a girl with a good prospect for high SAT scores and a good shot at being athletic, but who also is likely to run an above-average risk of bipolar disorder and lupus as an adult?

For more than a decade, the strongest AIDS drugs could not fully control Matt Chappell's HIV infection. Now his body controls it by itself, and researchers are trying to perfect the gene editing that made this possible.

Scientists removed some of his blood cells, disabled a gene to help them resist HIV, and returned these "edited" cells to him in 2014. So far, it has given the San Francisco man the next best thing to a cure.

A second patient has been treated in a historic gene editing study in California, and no major side effects or safety issues have emerged from the first man's treatment nearly three months ago, doctors revealed Tuesday.

Gene editing is a more precise way to do gene therapy, and aims to permanently change someone's DNA to try to cure a disease.

Scientists are reporting progress on a blood test to detect many types of cancer at an early stage, including some of the most deadly ones that lack screening tools now.

Many groups are working on liquid biopsy tests, which look for DNA and other things that tumors shed into blood, to try to find cancer before it spreads, when chances of cure are best.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A first-of-its kind genetic treatment for blindness will cost $850,000 per patient, making it one of the most expensive medicines in the world and raising questions about the affordability of a coming wave of similar gene-targeting therapies.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. health officials on Tuesday approved the nation's first gene therapy for an inherited disease, a treatment that improves the sight of patients with a rare form of blindness. It marks another major advance for the emerging field of genetic medicine.

A blood test five years after breast cancer treatment helped identify some women who were more likely to relapse, long before a lump or other signs appeared, a preliminary study found.

LONDON (AP) — Doctors treating a critically ill boy with a devastating skin disease used experimental gene therapy to create an entirely new skin for most of his body in a desperate attempt to save his life.

Two years later, the doctors report the boy is doing so well that he doesn't need any medication, is back in school and even playing soccer.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A first attempt at gene therapy for a disease that leaves babies unable to move, swallow and, eventually, breathe has extended the tots' lives, and some began to roll over, sit and stand on their own, researchers reported Wednesday.

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Doctors were just guessing a decade ago when they gave Alison Cairnes' husband a new drug they hoped would shrink his lung tumors. Now she takes it, but the choice was no guesswork. Sophisticated gene tests suggested it would fight her gastric cancer, and they were right.

The fledgling field of gene therapy has scored another win: An experimental treatment seemed to help boys with the inherited nerve disease featured in the movie "Lorenzo's Oil."

Fifteen of the 17 boys treated in a study had no major disability two years later — remarkable for a disease that often causes swift decline and kills within a decade.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a quest to end cookie-cutter health care, U.S. researchers are getting ready to recruit more than 1 million people for an unprecedented study to learn how our genes, environments and lifestyles interact — and to finally customize ways to prevent and treat disease.

Why does one sibling get sick but not another? Why does a drug cure one patient but only cause nasty side effects in the next?

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Dennis Lyon was a genetic train wreck. Cancer was ravaging his liver, lungs, bones and brain, and tests showed so many tumor mutations that drugs targeting one or two wouldn't do much good. It seemed like very bad news, yet his doctors were encouraged.

The reason: People with the most messed-up genes often are the ones who do best on treatments that enlist the immune system.

UTRECHT, Netherlands (AP) — Els van der Heijden, who has cystic fibrosis, was finding it ever harder to breathe as her lungs filled with thick, sticky mucus. Despite taking more than a dozen pills and inhalers a day, the 53-year-old had to stop working and scale back doing the thing she loved best, horseback riding.

Doctors saw no sense in trying an expensive new drug because it hasn't been proven to work in people with the rare type of cystic fibrosis that van der Heijden had.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Altering human heredity? In a first, researchers safely repaired a disease-causing gene in human embryos, targeting a heart defect best known for killing young athletes — a big step toward one day preventing a list of inherited diseases.

In a surprising discovery, a research team led by Oregon Health and & Science University reported Wednesday that embryos can help fix themselves if scientists jump-start the process early enough.

NEW YORK (AP) — 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 of man-made DNA.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Colon cancer. Uterine cancer. Pancreatic cancer. Whatever the tumor, the more gene mutations lurking inside, the better chance your immune system has to fight back.

WASHINGTON (AP) — An experimental drug is showing promise against an untreatable eye disease that blinds older adults — and intriguingly, it seems to work in patients who carry a particular gene flaw that fuels the damage to their vision.

SEATTLE (AP) — Ken Shefveland's body was swollen with cancer, treatment after treatment failing until doctors gambled on a radical approach: They removed some of his immune cells, engineered them into cancer assassins and unleashed them into his bloodstream.

Immune therapy is the hottest trend in cancer care and this is its next frontier — creating "living drugs" that grow inside the body into an army that seeks and destroys tumors.