An update on gene medicine: Speaking the words of life to make the blind see

So in the last few years there have been some serious advancements in genetic medicine that I have recently learned about. My first reaction was surprise that I didn’t hear about these earlier while being ceaselessly bombarded by political minutiae. Every darn day it’s Trump and Biden and Congress not doing anything. But while that’s happening or not happening as per Congress, scientists and doctors are boldly healing diseases that have never been healed before. It’s like Star Trek up in the lab.

Over the last four years or so, treatments for visual impairment/blindness using genetic engineering have been on the rise and are producing effective results. Now blindness doesn’t mean a person lives in complete darkness. Most blind people can sense light to some degree and some can even make out shapes. I heard from a blind person that no two blind people are the same in what they can and cannot sense. In addition to blindness there are many other kinds of visual impairments caused by genetic diseases that can also effectively be treated by genetic engineering. So while it is a slight exaggeration to say that we are making the blind see, we are as a species making great progress towards that goal.*

I can’t get into all the specific diseases and treatments for the purpose of brevity but this BBC video gives the basic idea of what many treatments are doing.

Essentially, a benign virus is inserted into a person’s eye that changes the DNA of the cells in the eye. The defective DNA is replaced with better DNA and then those cells function much better. This is a gross oversimplification of course but those are the basics.

For many people on Ricochet this may seem neat but not all that world altering. Researchers have been figuring out new things for Doctors to shoot into sick people to help them for around a century. It happens all the time.

But I can remember that when I was growing up, I learned that genetic diseases could never be cured, only treated because we can’t change people's DNA. This was treated as an unalterable fact of biology and reality. You could change the chemicals in the body and you could do surgery to correct anatomy but you couldn’t change anything with genetic diseases. So this common usage of gene therapy feels like alchemy to me. This isn’t a better version of new technology - this is a radically new technology that is quickly improving.

My point is that we live in an age of medical wonders as well as political blight, and we should focus a little more on the positive. Be more like this guy who saw a sunset for the first time in years.

*Glory to an improved mankind!