Word: anderson
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There he audited a chemistry course taught by John Edsall, an expert in proteins. Edsall soon took Anderson under his wing, as author Larry Thompson recounts in Correcting the Code, a forthcoming book about the pioneers of gene therapy. At one of Edsall's seminars, Anderson became intrigued by a visiting British scientist's talk about the hemoglobin molecule, which transports oxygen in the bloodstream. A thought occurred to Anderson, and he blurted it out. "If you could determine its structure," he reasoned out loud, "then you could do the same with sickle hemoglobin and determine what the defect...
That obsession is gene therapy, and W. French Anderson, 57, more than anyone else, has brought it from the realm of science fiction to reality. It was Anderson who campaigned single-mindedly for the first approved test of the technology in 1990, who organized and supervised the trial, and who last year was able to announce that the subjects of the experiment, two young girls with a debilitating disorder called ADA deficiency, had been relieved of virtually all symptoms of the disease...
Having given gene therapy a jump start, Anderson, if anything, has become even more obsessed with the subject. After 27 years with the National Institutes of Health, where he advanced the art of using genes to treat disease, he departed in 1992 to join the University of Southern California. There, while serving as a professor of biochemistry and pediatrics, and director of the Gene Therapy Laboratories, he hopes to produce a new generation of delivery systems, or vectors, that will enable doctors to give patients therapeutic genes much as they administer drugs today...
...Anderson himself seems to have inherited a remarkable collection of genes. "I was rather a weird little boy," he admits. A child prodigy in Tulsa, he could read, write, add and subtract before kindergarten, and was devouring college science books when he was eight -- skills, he says, that "did not endear me to the other schoolchildren of Oklahoma." He was also a stutterer, which made him a target of taunts. But that didn't bother him, he says, "because I considered everybody else in the world stupid...
...British scientist cut him off. "What a stupid thing to say," he chided. "This is a serious scientific session." Anderson was humiliated, but as he slunk out after the session, John Edsall came by. "Interesting idea," he said, and walked away...