I WRITE in regard to your Dazzling Diamonds article published on February 17, titled, ‘Just a single gene could be capable of changing world’.

It starts to explain the benefits of gene therapy, but as a fourth year molecular genetics student I would like to expand on the ethical implications of gene therapy.

Gene therapy does have immense possibilities to potentially cure and/or prevent many genetic diseases but there are limits and ethical issues to consider.

First, most genetic diseases in humans are multi-factorial, meaning they have both a genetic and environmental component; therefore, the genetic disease cannot be ‘fixed’ by changing a single gene.

This limits the scope of gene therapy greatly to genetic diseases that are caused by a single mutation or several mutations, but all the mutations causing the disease must be known.

Lastly, even if you can pinpoint the mutation(s) causing said disease, the same may not be true for another person.

For example, the underlying cause of two people diagnosed with the same disease may not be caused by the same mutation, which leads to a treatment only working for one of the two individuals.

This raises the question: how do we fund a therapy that has to be personally customised?

Another issue that this article mentions is the use of gene therapy on the germ line (eggs/sperm) of an individual.

The obvious benefit is sparing future generations from a particular genetic disease but there may be unexpected side effects to the future fetus, such as developmental or long-term problems.

Since the unborn individual isn’t able to decide if they want the therapy or not, the ethics of gene therapy has been continually called into question.

Therefore, we need to tread carefully with gene therapy. It has tremendous capabilities but it comes with the corresponding responsibilities.

With all due consideration, is a single gene capable of changing the world or complicating it?

MCKENZIE MITCHELL
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada