ORDINARY cells from people with a genetic disease can be “fixed” by gene therapy and then reprogrammed to be stem cells that will produce a limitless supply of defect-free cells.
Izpisúa Belmonte of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, knew that stem cells are more useful for gene therapy than ordinary cells, because they produce multiple daughter cells with the modified genes. However, the body does not have many stem cells for doctors to work with.
So Izpisúa Belmonte and his colleagues harvested fibroblasts, which are far more common than stem cells, from the skin of…
