Word: desilva
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...outward appearances, Ashanthi ("Ashi") DeSilva is a normal, healthy 12-year-old who loves sports and would rather play basketball than do her seventh-grade homework. But Ashi holds a unique place in medical history: she is the first recipient of successful gene therapy...
Andrew Cunanan created his own worlds too. They just didn't work out. For years he had insinuated himself into the lives of well-off, older gay men. An adroit and tireless liar, he told friends in San Diego he was Andrew DeSilva, a man with a factory in Mexico, or wealthy parents in the Philippines, or a wife and daughter--the ones in the photo he would pass around that he got from who knows where. But by last April, when police say he started a cross-country killing spree that climaxed in the fatal shooting of Versace...
...sequence, if officials are correct, began in San Diego's funky, gay-friendly Hillcrest neighborhood, with a 27-year-old who called himself Andrew DeSilva, but whose family knew him as Andrew Phillip Cunanan. Bespectacled and slightly paunchy, "DeSilva" liked to dance with his shirt off, treat large groups to dinner with cash and boast about his family's sugar plantation in the Philippines. He lived high, but no one seemed to know how he managed it. "Everyone knew Andrew," says one scene-maker. "He was a very outgoing, fun guy. There was a kind of patheticness about him, because...
...gene therapy, most of the current "smart bombs," as in the case of Ashanthi DeSilva, are viruses, which by their nature invade cells and deposit their genetic material into the cell nucleus. Researchers have learned how to strip the viruses of their reproductive genes, insert into the viral DNA the beneficial gene they want to deliver, and then let the virus infect a patient's cells. The virus inserts its own now harmless genes, as well as the beneficial one, into the cellular DNA. If all goes well and the gene "expresses" itself, the cell begins producing the needed protein...
...when the rare stem cells are found, inserting genes into them is difficult because they divide infrequently, and the vectors used in gene therapy insert genes only into cells that are dividing. Had Anderson's group been able to use stem cells in the landmark therapy with little Ashanthi DeSilva, for example, follow-up treatments would not have been necessary. Endowed with the normal gene, the marrow stem cells would have produced a continuing supply of new white blood cells carrying that gene, and Ashanthi's cure would have been permanent...