ROLLER COASTER is the only phrase for it. Soon after “patient X” was born he was diagnosed as lacking vital immune defences due to a life-threatening genetic mutation. Six months later a pioneering treatment corrected the genetic defect and doctors pronounced him cured. Now, in a cruel reversal of fortune, the boy has leukaemia and is at the centre of the latest international row about the safety of gene therapy.
Scientists and doctors are scrambling to digest the implications of last week’s shock announcement that implanting the child with cells containing a healthy form of a defective gene may have…
