This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

From Fantasy to Foreseeable Reality

Donald J. Zack, MD, PhD

Arch Ophthalmol. 1993;111(11):1477-1479.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

THIS ISSUE of the ARCHIVES commemorates the 40th anniversary of the publication of Watson and Crick's¹ classic paper on the structure of DNA. In 1953, gene therapy was mentioned only in the realm of science fiction. Now, a mere 40 years later, gene therapy has become a reality.² A number of clinical trials are already in progress, and the number of proposed trials is increasing almost daily.^2-5 Current trials involve diseases as diverse as severe combined immunodeficiency, cancer, and cystic fibrosis. Although to date none of these trials involves the eye, this situation is sure to change in the near future. (In one sense, ocular gene therapy is already a reality. The murine retinal degeneration [rd] and retinal degeneration slow [rds] mutations have been "rescued" using transgenic mouse technology.^6,7 However, transgenesis involves germ line transformation and is not directly applicable to human gene therapy.)

Genetic disease . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
Baltimore, Md

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?