Martin Mwita, 20, is the first patient in St. Louis and among the first across the country to receive a new gene therapy for sickle cell disease.

A gene known as HbS was the center of a medical and evolutionary detective story that began in the middle 1940s in Africa. Doctors noticed that patients who had sickle cell anemia, a serious ...

How do mutations happen, and how do they influence the future of a species? Molecules of sickle-cell hemoglobin stick to one another, forming rigid rods. These rods cause a person's red blood ...