The Gene Hunters

A treatment for Cystic Fibrosis. A cure for AIDS. The end of cancer. That's what the newspapers promised us in the early 1990's. Gene therapy was the answer to what ailed us. Scientists had at last learned how to insert healthy genes into unhealthy people. And those healthy genes would either replace the bad genes causing diseases like CF, sickle-cell anemia and hemophilia or stimulate the body's own immune system to rid itself of HIV and some forms of cancer. A decade later, none of these treatments have come to fruition and research into gene therapy has become politically unpopular, making clinical trials hard to approve and research dollars hard to come by. But some researchers who are taking a different approach to gene therapy could be on the road to more success than ever before. (Source: http://www.pbs.org/saf/1202/features/genetherapy.htm)