Why Gene Therapy is Not Making Progress and a Solution
Sam Ghandchi
http://www.ghandchi.com/995-gene-therapy-english.htm

چرا "جین تراپی" پیشرفت نمی کند و یک راه حل
http://www.ghandchi.com/995-gene-therapy.htm

Beside purely genetic diseases like Huntington's, there is a good chance that gene therapy can be used to cure cancer, AIDS and even curtail aging, but its progress in the last five years has continuously slowed down and the reason is the fear of side-effects.

Not only gene therapy for humans and animals is challenged by this dilemma, gene modification of plants that used to see a rapid progress twenty years ago is facing the same kind of barrier when the fear of side-effects of GMO for human health are causing fear (1).

These challenges of gene modification cannot be dealt with by medical schools or agricultural schools where the former look for cures that can clinically prove not to have detrimental side effects and in this case it would mean decades of testing because such clinical tests are very slow because basically biological processes are slow. And for the latter, i.e. the agricultural schools, shy away from products that can scare the public and again testing GMO products for side-effects in agricultural labs takes years because biological processes are very slow and it is impossible to expedite such tests.

Nonetheless, the potential of gene modifications of humans, animals, and plants is so much that neglecting the work by where it is expected to happen is hurting humanity. A possible solution is to create an institute fully dedicated to simulation and emulation of modified genes and create software tests for that purpose, to be run quickly to check for side-effects of gene editing. (Simulation is creating computer software that mimics gene modifications and emulation would be making computer hardware like FPGA to mimic gene modifications.) Such a project can drastically reduce the time needed for clinical tests of gene therapy solutions, and agricultural lab tests of GMO products, and by doing so, to help the progress of gene modifications that are so central to the future of humanity.

 

Hoping for a democratic and secular futurist republic in Iran,

Sam Ghandchi
IRANSCOPE

http://www.ghandchi.com/index2.html 
September 5, 2015

Footnotes:

1. Evolution of Plants Solves CO2 not Anti-GMO
http://www.ghandchi.com/948-evolution-plants-english.htm
 

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