Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After three to five years, one of the adults died of AIDS and levels of the virus rose for four others. Six of the infants developed AIDS, while the other two showed damages to their immune systems...
There are still some kinks to work out. For one thing, the body's own immune system often attacks the anti-sense DNA, mistaking it as a potentially harmful virus. For another, many cells in the body don't allow the anti-sense molecules to cross their membranes. "Nine years ago, everyone thought, wow, this is dynamite," says Dr. Art Krieg, editor of the journal Anti-Sense and Nucleic Acid Drug Development. "Then they ran into technical hurdles, and the pendulum swung the other way." Now, says Krieg, a few anti-sense compounds are starting to show promise. Among them...
...would you make a gene chip? Let's say you want to identify which genes get turned on, or "expressed," by the immune system in the first few weeks after the AIDS virus begins its attack on the body. First you download the sequences of perhaps 10,000 genes--every A, C, G and T of the hereditary alphabet--into a computer. Then, still using the computer, you figure out what the mirror image of each sequence would be. (DNA can mirror itself as well as RNA.) The aim is to transform the mirror-sequence data into actual strands...
...where on the chip you have a match. Then you look up the sequence of each matched spot on the chip and read out a precise catalog of which genes are being expressed. By comparing the results from several patients--some of whom are more successful at fighting the virus than others--you may be able to identify targets that could lead to powerful new anti-AIDS drugs...
...unwanted. Such creations will remain denizens of science fiction, not the real world, far into the future. When they are finally attempted, germ-line genetic manipulations will probably be done to change a death sentence into a life verdict--by creating children who are resistant to a deadly virus, for example, much the way we can already protect plants from viruses by inserting antiviral DNA segments into their genomes...