Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 12:01 PM by Gene

About another wonder of the age, gene therapy (you must read the whole thing):

One technique had shown promise. A harmless retrovirus was used to transport the repair gene into the body. A virus infects lots of cells on its own. So it embeds the reformed gene that way. But there is this great difficulty: The body's immune system sees the virus as a foreigner and quickly wipes it out. End of treatment. But with a rare genetic defect that cripples the immune system itself, the treatment did seem to work. Some children in a Paris hospital were claimed cured by this method. The New York Times reported it as the "first success of gene therapy."

Two years later, some of the treated children who were thought cured developed leukemia. On the Washington Post's front page the headline read: "Dream Unmet 50 Years After DNA Milestone. Gene Therapy Debacle Casts Pall on Field." The news came on the 50th anniversary of the double helix.

The idea that the instructions needed to build fantastically complex organisms are contained in a simple linear code appealed to scientists for various reasons. The problem could be digitized. "Errors" in the genome could be found by computers; and perhaps also corrected by them. But almost certainly that is not going to work out.

Yes, I think we can leave life to scientists.