Correcting the Code: Inventing the Genetic Cure for the Human Body

by Larry Thompson

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

378 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1994

Reviews

[Carol Palmer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've had this book for a while, so I was a bit concerned that it was going to be about the current (early 1990's) technology in genetic manipulation. Luckily, it was a book about the history of genetic manipulation up until the first human genome transfer studies in the early 1990's. So many arrogant white men. No mention of Rosalind Franklin in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Grrrrrr!