August 19, 2009
Gene therapy: An Interview with an Unfortunate Pioneer
From Scientific American:
Ten years ago this month the promise of using normal genes to cure hereditary defects crashed and burned, as Jesse Gelsinger, an 18-year-old from Tucson, Ariz., succumbed to multiorgan failure during a gene therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania. Today the boardroom of the Translational Research Lab at the university is filled with artifacts reminiscent of the trial. Books such as Building Public Trust and Biosafety in the Laboratory sit on the shelves, and “IL-6” and “TNF-α” are scribbled on the whiteboard—abbreviations representing some of the very immune factors that fatally spiraled out of control in Gelsinger’s body.
These allusions to the past aren’t surprising considering how drastically the clinical trial changed gene therapy and, in particular, the career of James M. Wilson, the medical geneticist who headed Penn’s Institute for Human Gene Therapy, where the test took place. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned it from conducting human trials, and Wilson left his post at the now defunct institute (but he continued doing research at Penn). He disappeared from the public spotlight until 2005, when the agency announced he could begin clinical trials with a designated monitor but could not lead trials for five years and asked him to write an article about the lessons he has learned. He published it in Molecular Genetics and Metabolism this past April. Since then, he has begun giving university lectures about the importance of exercising caution as a clinical scientist, especially when it comes to stem cells, which today have the cachet once held by gene therapy.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:39 AM | Permalink
Comments
Multi billions of public and private dollars have been squandered on the war on cancer for almost a half century. Every approved cancer treatment is life threatening. When one dies while under "treatment", one could have died either from the cancer, the treatment or a combination thereof.
The only way to tell for sure is for a true, objective autopsy to be performed by a totally independent labortory independent of those involved in the treatment who all have conflicts of interest. This almost never happens, so the patients, if they are still alive or their loved ones are easily fooled: "We are sorry we did our best". But none are offered any money back for failure as they would be in any other business. No one will be treated without signing a waiver releasing the medical doctor from any liability. How would you like to take your car to the shop and be required to sign a waiver if they blow up your car while it is in the shop?
Despite the squandering of all this money, most doctors and scientists cannot even tell you what cancer is, let alone how to cure and prevent it when it is clinically observable in the human body. Basically all involved from the NIH, NCI, FDA to every local doctor involved in all this medical quackery, is an accessory to crimes against humanity and scientific misconduct. It is painfully obvious that most of these people simply do not know what they are doing and should be shut down immediately. Americans are the biggest fools in the world, led by a bought and paid for Congress, corrupted by pharmaceutical companies, processed food companies and chemical companies. This is almost the only area of medicine where patent failure is misrepresented as "success" and the American Fools are fooled by it all. Here is a blog documenting this medical failure of our time: http://www.topix.net/forum/city/bethesda-md/TIO9PHV8MJ0HUFBAD
The failed gene therapy is only one part of this failure since most members of the medical orthodoxy seem to still falsely believe that cancer is caused by mutated genes, while negligently failing to read the experiments and facts of the genius in Germany Otto Warburg, M.D., Ph.D. proving it to be caused by the wrong energy supply or oxygen deficiency over a long period of time or respiratory impairment, metabolizing by anerobic glycolysis. By the way, the wrong energy supply can cause gene mutations. One person every minute dies either from cancer, treatment or both; this is over half a million victims a year.
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Aug 20, 2009 3:17:30 AM
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