|
When Dr. French Anderson, researcher and
physician at the National Institutes of Health, assembled
the team that injected a young girl from the suburbs of
Cleveland with a special solution of white blood cells,
he ushered in a brave new world of science and medicine.
Those cells were genetically altered -- or corrected --
to produce a critical enzyme necessary to create a fully
functioning immune system, which his young patient was born
without. The age of human gene therapy had arrived. Along
with it will come the molecular cures for cancers and heretofore
incurable conditions such as cystic fibrosis, perhaps even
AIDS.
Correcting the Code is the eminently readable
and remarkable story of the handful of doctors and researchers
who deeply believed they could break one of the last barriers
in medicine: repairing human genes that cause illnesses.
Even before Watson and Crick successfully modeled DNA, the
idea of changing the genetic composition of humans had long
been a scientific Holy Grail -- despite the stain of eugenics
and the public phobia of genetic engineering gone amok.
Over the last twenty years, as the pace of research has
accelerated, laboratories have entered a sort of race to
claim the final breakthrough, to be the first to successfully
treat a human patient. The story of that frenzied research
contains the great scientific upheavals in the field of
biology, including a new understanding of how specific molecules
interact to compose living cells that make up the human
body.
This is the riveting account of how a great
scientific puzzle -- finding a way to repair actual human
molecules -- was solved, of the intellectual and political
milieu in which it occurred, and of the remarkable people
who committed their lives to the task -- Anderson, Michael
Blaese, Ken Culver, Richard Mulligan, and others.
Author Larry Thompson makes the seemingly
indecipherable world of genetic science understandable to
the general reader. Furthermore, he unravels a dramatic
story of inspired invention, frustrating dead ends, the
clash of egos, the fits and starts of innovation that reveal
how science is conducted in the real world.
Larry Thompson cofounded The Washington
Post's Health section in 1984 and served as its science
editor until 1992. He also started the Science and Medicine
section of The San Jose Mercury News in 1982. He
holds a master's degree in molecular biology, was a fellow
at the Yale University School of Medicine, and won the 1992
Lewis Thomas Award for Excellence in Writing about the Life
Sciences. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
|
