Bryan Fettig
E. Meek
ENG-111-FA133
22 October 2014
Gene Therapy Gene therapy is a fairly modern medical treatment that is known but not used often. It is potentially a life saving treatment for people who have diseases that are genetically based. Gene Therapy cotuld impact millions of families and millions of lives if it were allowed to be a go to treatment. This is still in clinical phases however should be approved as a treatment for genetic disorders within a couple decades. Gene Therapy can treat people who are born with MD, ALS, ALD and MS as well as many other unfortunate genetic disorders as well as extend the natural life of humans with more research and applications all of these things can and will become possible and that is a huge advancement for man kind and the medical field due to the life saving potential. Gene Therapy is the idea that we can alter the genetic code of human beings in order to make ourselves better or more optimal in a variety of ways. Gene Therapy takes multiple forms because people with the projected technology we will have may try to use to craft the perfect baby and others to extend life expectancy from 80 to 200 or even 300. It could also lead to astounding discoveries when it comes to treating physical and mental disability as well as diseases such as Muscular Dystrophy, ALD, Lou Gehrigs Disease also known as ALS and MS. Gene therapy could provide headway into sustainable treatment plans and maybe cures. The definition of Gene Therapy is the insertion of normal or genetically altered genes into a cell to rid the genetic coding of a defective gene and that is why this could allow us to cure those diseases because they all stem from a defective gene. It could also lead to increased life expectancy due to the altering of our genetic code, we could alter how we develop biological in order to not age so quickly. The other side of the coin to this debate is that who are we to play god because he is our maker and put us here to do his business for his plan is divine and everything has a reason. Throughout this paper I am going to show why Gene Therapy is a great innovative mold not only for the scientific future but for human kind as a whole. Evidence to support gene therapy is undeniable because it could save and heal millions of people from defect genetic disorders that force them into short life of suffering. We can test the genetic probability of someones potential for ALS or other genetically inherited diseases and only imagine if we could act on those test results. Why should someone have to suffer when we are in the clinical phase of a new medical and scientific advancement that can improve the quality of life for millions upon millions of people in this earth. We also know it is proven to work since clinical trials have been done in the early 90s on patients with extremely rare genetic disorders like ADA. They were tried for two reasons because the patient had no chance of survival without it and we needed to know if it could work. The way the process works is a vector and in this case the vector is usually a virus that is transported to the cells with defunct genes and the hope is the virus will repair the defection. Like any form of treatment Gene Therapy is not always the cure to a problem and people do not end up responding like they should. There is another kind of Gene therapy out there and it has to do with increasing life expectancy. This treatment has been experiment with on mouses and it increased the mouses life expectancy by 24 percent with one treatment. If this treatment is successful and approved people could end up living a very long time potentially a few centuries. Imagine if some of our worlds greatest minds were still alive today such as Newton or Einstein, Imagine if Aristotle had a couple more centuries to ponder life’s mysteries and political theory. This new form of genetic therapy could also lead to the prevention of diseases associated with aging such as