
Gene Therapy's Second Act
A decade and a half after a series of tragic setbacks led to critical reevaluations, scientists say gene therapy is ready to enter the clinic
Ricki Lewis received her PhD in genetics from Indiana University. Her ninth book, The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It, narrative nonfiction, was just published by St. Martin's Press. Most of her other books are college life science textbooks, including "Human Genetics: Concepts and Applications," (10th edition, 2012) from McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Routledge Press published "Human Genetics: The Basics" in 2010. Ricki has published thousands of magazine articles, from Discover to Playgirl, but mostly in The Scientist. She is a genetic counselor at CareNet Medical Group in Schenectady, NY and teaches "Genethics" online for the Alden March Bioethics Institute of Albany Medical College. Ricki is a hospice volunteer and a frequent public speaker (Macmillan Speaker's Bureau). Ricki's blog Genetic Linkage is at www.rickilewis.com and she tweets at @rickilewis. Follow Ricki Lewis on Twitter @rickilewis
A decade and a half after a series of tragic setbacks led to critical reevaluations, scientists say gene therapy is ready to enter the clinic
You have your genome or exome (the protein-encoding part) sequenced to help diagnose a puzzling set of symptoms, and something totally unrelated, and unexpected, turns up – a so-called “incidental finding.”Surprises, of course, aren’t new in medicine...
Gene therapy, once off to a rocky start, transforms medicine by getting at the root cause of many diseases
The young couple looked at me expectantly as I re-read the amnio report and tried to decide what to tell them.“The ultrasound from 15 weeks looks fine,” I stalled, trying to present the good news first.“What about the amnio?”“Well, there is something unusual...
Was it Colonel Mustard in the library with a lead pipe? Or Mrs. Peacock in the ballroom with a candlestick? No, it was deadly, drug-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae from a 43-year-old woman spreading to 17 other patients, killing 6 of them and sickening 5 others, at the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Clinical Center in June 2011.In a biotech version of the classic board game "Clue," researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) used genome sequencing to solve the medical mystery of how the infection spread...
I’ve written about human stem cells from all sorts of sources, from human embryos circa 1997 (“Embryonic Stem Cells Debut Amid Little Media Attention,” The Scientist, too ancient for a link), to old people’s teeth...
Sequencing of the exome – the protein-encoding parts of all the genes – is beginning to dominate the genetics journals as well as headlines, thanks to its ability to diagnose the formerly undiagnosable.The 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting honored the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel’s coverage of a 4-year-old whose intestinal disorder was finally diagnosed after sequencing his exome...
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