I realize something crazy like this is going to happen sooner or later, but I am completely unprepared for this news reported by Wired (Giving Genetic Disease the Finger):
Scientists are closing in on techniques that could let them safely repair almost any defective gene in a patient, opening the door for the first time to treatments for a range of genetic disorders that are now considered incurable.
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“This doesn’t just deliver a foreign gene into the cell,” said Nobel Prize winner and CalTech President David Baltimore, who with a Sangamo paper co-author Mathew Porteus proposed this method to cure genetic diseases. “It actually deletes the miscoded portion and fixes the problem.”
Modern science has prolonged life, now it’s going to extend life beyond the scope of human’s natural normality to live. But then, it’s not all happy news. Scientists caught some side-affects early on:
One trial that did succeed, but then ended in tragedy, was a 2002 French X-linked SCID trial that used retroviruses to deliver a new gene into the patients. The new gene cured the disease in 12 patients, but went on to cause leukemia in three of them. It turned out the foreign gene, in addition to producing the protein that vanquishes X-linked SCID, had the unexpected side effect of sometimes turning on a cancer-causing gene.
But the latest technique from CalTech supposedly fixed that problem. Long term effects are never easy to assess: Who knows what this new method will cause over a person’s life time, or worst, passing the problematic gene in question to the future generations. Talk about home-made genetic mutations!