Why is progress on gene therapy—the treatment of genetic disorders by giving sick people doses of the healthy genes they lack—so slow? In part, it’s because an 18-year-old named Jesse Gelsinger died in 1999 after he received an experimental therapy. In a recent feature, Wired talked with the man who ran the experiment that killed Gelsinger: James Wilson, a gene therapy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.
Fourteen years later, it’s easy to have forgotten some of the details, which are an important case study in the difficulty of ensuring certain clinical trials are ethically clear and fair to the people who volunteer for them.
Read the full, original story here: The Science And Troubling Ethics Of Gene Therapy
