Word: eying
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...prove - first in test tubes and then in live animals - that the procedure was safe enough for humans. Finally a young man named Robert Johnson got the first shot. A team of U.K. doctors announced earlier this month, that they put a needle through Johnson's eye, into his retina, to replace the faulty gene that had been blinding him for years...
...That injection made Johnson the first person ever to undergo gene therapy for an eye condition, although it may take months to determine if the procedure worked. A second patient received the same treatment shortly after Johnson, and 10 more will soon follow suit - names and dates all undisclosed - as part of a trial led by Robin Ali, a professor of human molecular genetics at University College London, and conducted at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London...
...taken ingenuity. In patients like Robert Johnson, Ali delivers the functional gene using a virus that's been modified so it won't attack the eye or reproduce. The two trial subjects so far have not had severe immune responses to the new matter in their eyes - always a danger. Scientists are especially hopeful because the procedure worked so well in its animal trials. Scanning the eyes of dogs that underwent the procedure, researchers could see how the photoreceptor cells had changed. More important, the previously blind dogs could see well enough to navigate through a maze...
...going to be a real home run. The people in this trial, they're going to be out playing Frisbee, seeing their girlfriends' and boyfriends' faces for the first time," says Jeffrey Boatright, a self-described "second-generation" gene-therapy researcher at Emory University in Atlanta. The U.S. National Eye Institute issued a statement to say the procedure "opens the door to treatment of a whole repertoire of genetic eye diseases." There's hope that, one day, gene therapy might be developed to tackle more complex sight disorders with a genetic component, like age-related macular degeneration...
...doubt, it looks like we should have it made. So why are we facing accusations of being racists, shuddering under the media’s watchful (and often very judgmental) eye...