Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> There are hundreds of folks alive today because of
> gene therapy, 

Hundreds?   There are hundreds of people alive to day because, so they say, 
they bought a swatch of prayer cloth from this or that televanelist.  
Hundreds 
isn't going to hack it.


>and last I heard over 70 diseases were under in vitro

You can be sure.  Remeber I spent 11 years working in the research department 
of a major drug company.  The great breakthrough is always just around the 
bend, just over the horizon and all the while grant and subsidy money keeps 
pouring in.


>   That doesn't even count medications that turn
> genes off and on. 

Antisense Therapy, you mean.  And you are right, that doesn't count because 
that isn't gene therapy per se.  There have been a good number of clinical 
trials to date and the results have been marginal.  The therapy is most often 
unsuccessful at any rate.

And the gene therapy per se is wildly misunderstood.  The breakthrough case 
came when a young girl, used to know her name, was born with defective white 
blood cells and so was dangerously subject to infections.  The researchers 
successfull extracted some of her white blood cells, injected the missing 
genetic 
matrial, cultured her blood cells in the lab, reinjected the blood cells into 
her blood.  "Successs" was that she had fewer colds and  was generally sick 
less.  The thing is, the therapy, and not gene therapy to date, permanently 
cures 
a condition.  (DeSilva was the girl's name, just looked it up).  In the case 
of DeSilva, the effects of the boodcell injection wore off in four months and 
has to be repeated several times a year.  Researchers also admitted that they 
could have achieved exactly the same effect with blood transfusions and in 
their own way said, "Yeah, but isn't this a neat trick!"




 Astrology and Genetics are like apples and oranges

> and your knowledge of modern genetics is antiquated if you think that
> today's genetics is like yesterday's astrology.
> 

Do you remember Laetrile?  When Steve McQueen was dying of cancer it was news 
when he went to Mexico where treatments were legal and the drug was being 
widely tauted as THE breakthrough in cancer treatment.  He died.  Most people 
who 
underwent laetrile treatment died.  But a few didn't.  There are probably, I 
dunno, hundreds walking around who attribute their remission to having had 
laetrile treatment.  Cancer is still with us and for the most part laetrile 
isn't.

Gene therapy is much the same.  It's still mostly theory and promise, and the 
actual clinical application of it has a very, very sparce track record not 
much better than chance.

If you think that gene therapy has actually accomplished much more than that, 
your knowledge of genetics is fanciful.