Pro Gene Therapy Essay

Outcome

Intro: in today’s society Gene therapy is not widely known. By those who do, there is a large debate as to whether or not it is an acceptable practice. With gene therapy there are many things that could go wrong when undergoing this treatment but then if they do not undergo it they could die, and that is one of many reasons this debate as to whether or not gene therapy should be used.

Process of Gene Therapy:

Gene therapy was first used in 1990 by the creator of Gene therapy, W. French Anderson, but Anderson first thought up idea and possibility of gene therapy nearly 40 years before it became a, somewhat, reality. He was in the middle of a lecture and the university where he studied, where he asked his lectured the following

The issue with using a virus to implant new genes in the body is a dangerous task. If the virus, which is harmless, just so happens to combine with existing viruses in the body of the subject going under a gene therapy test, the possibility of the harmful virus recovering its ability to multiply and cause cancer is high. Alternatively the virus may injects if genetic cargo into a suppressor gene, destroying it, or more disastrously next to an oncogene, waking it up. Oncogenes are particular types of genes that can have the probability to cause cancers, whilst suppressor genes are a specific type of gene that protects cells from changing into a cancer (Yount, L 1997). During the 1990’s gene therapy was starting to grow due to its success with its first trial, yet in 1999 the medical community was stunned when the first death occurred during a gene therapy trial. The 18 year old male volunteer died while undergoing treatment for Partial Ornithine Transcarbamylase Deficiency which is caused by a missing or defective X-linked gene for the liver enzyme Ornithine Transcarbamylase (OTC). The condition is characterized by the inability to break down nitrogenous compounds, resulting in toxic build ups of ammonia in the blood stream. After the volunteer received the treatment through his hepatic arteries, he soon passed four days later. He died after transfection from a systematic immune response to the adenovirus, in other terms it was the gene therapy itself to blame for the death, making the volunteer the first person killed by gene therapy. (Simon, Eric J,