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Gene therapy is a big treatment of disease. With this new technological
medical cure, good genes are put into cells to correct deadly diseases.
So far, there are three options for treating diseases. The first
one is public health works, which includes cleaning water and air.
The second one is anesthetic surgery, which consists of a large
range of operations. Vaccines and antibiotics is the third step,
which are medicine that treat diseases made by microbes. Gene therapy
is the fourth step...
Many illnesses result of genes not functioning properly. It causes
cells to do wrong things. For example, they can produce incorrect
amounts of protein. This makes the body open to lots of sicknesses.
The general idea of gene therapy is to insert a good gene into a
patient's cells to stop a disease. A patient of early gene therapy
was Ashanti DeSilva, who was a young girl. She got a defective gene
from both her parents. This condition made the body open to many
infections. She was four years old when gene therapy was tried out.
On September 14, 1990, a medical team took out some of Ashanti's
white blood cells. Then, they inserted some normal genes into the
cells and returned them to the body. A few months later, Ashanti's
health started to get better.
Gene therapy proved a great success. Within the late 1990's, other
patients have tried it out for diseases and illnesses. Scientists
are convinced that this treatment will be a normal medical procedure
in the future. |
