Word: celling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...greater challenges lay ahead. How could a particular gene be assigned to any of the nonsex chromosomes? Scientists cleverly tackled that problem by fusing human cells with mouse cells, then growing hybrid mouse-human cells in the laboratory. As the hybrid cells divided again and again, they gradually shed their human chromosomes until only one -- or simply a fragment of one -- was left in the nucleus of each cell...
Geneticist Ray White, formerly at M.I.T., has established a major center for genetic-linkage mapping at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. In 1980 he began a study of 50 large families, collecting their blood samples, extracting white blood cells, which he multiplies in cell cultures, then preserving them in freezers...
Working with family pedigrees and DNA extracted from the cell bank, White and his group have identified more than 1,000 markers, each about 10 million base pairs apart, on all the chromosomes. They have also been major contributors to the Center for the Study of Human Polymorphisms, set up in Paris by French Nobel laureate Jean Dausset to coordinate an international effort to map the genes. Of the 40 families whose cell lines reside in CEPH's major data banks, 27 have been provided by White's group...
...effect a cure, doctors would remove bone-marrow cells from a patient and expose them to a retrovirus* engineered to carry correctly functioning versions of the patient's faulty gene. When the retrovirus invaded a marrow cell, it would insert itself into the cellular DNA, as retroviruses are wont to do, carrying the good gene with it. Reimplanted in the marrow, the altered marrow cells would take hold and multiply, churning out the previously lacking protein and curing the thalassemia patient...
...researchers are refining their techniques in experiments with mice, and Mulligan believes that the first human-gene-therapy experiments could occur in the next three years. Looking further ahead, other scientists are experimenting with a kind of genetic microsurgery that bypasses the retrovirus, mechanically inserting genes directly into the cell nucleus...