Have you ever heard of gene therapy? Aside from being the most incredible form of medicine since penicillin put bacteria on its back, gene therapy is a sort of prescription drug treatment for having bad genes. While it is not anybody’s conscious fault when a person is born with something being wrong or missing, until very recently we barely even understood the problem, much less how we could ever solve it. But with gene therapy, the ability to fix genetic problems has become more than just “a shot in the dark.” Every day, some new tidbit is pieced together by some of the most brilliant minds on Earth.
And every day, we move just a little bit closer to a time when people can just hit the hospital and get anything that is wrong with them made right, perhaps even on an outpatient basis. While these programs are only reasonably funded, they are still able to produce some exceptional results. In cases such as with a rare skin disease which inhibits collagen production, the use of stem cells has been shown to undo the damage that naturally bad genes can cause. Instead of a short, miserable life of trying desperately to avoid any kind of skin damage (such as brushing up against something) followed by horrifying cancers, these people can live long, full lives.
While not every experiment ends with the potential to essentially eradicate an existing disease, the promise goes even deeper than that. Can you imagine a time when the doctor can point to your unborn baby’s image on a monitor and say, “Yep, there was a genetic defect in there, but we took care of it. No problem.” Obviously, you would want to provide informed consent before anything of that nature took place… but the idea alone is pretty unbelievable. We stand on the cusp of an age where nobody hurts anymore.
