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.
Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs 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…
