Persuasive Essay On Gene Therapy

Gene therapy is considered to be a relatively new form of treatment that could eventually benefit people who have one of the thousands of diseases caused by a genetic disorder. Using gene therapy can treat, prevent or cure these types of diseases1. This “medicine of the future” has been worked on for decades but there is not a huge amount of success for human patients because gene therapy isn’t completely practical yet. Human clinical trials are still in the research phase because gene therapy can be unpredictable. Very few patients have received gene therapy. Researchers are working extremely hard to break through the challenges they are facing and make sure that gene therapy is safe and effective for humans.

Gene therapy works in a variety of ways. It can be used to solve the problem of having missing genes by adding a gene to fight off a disease3. The main purpose of gene therapy is to help fix mutations in the body by replacing the genes that are functioning incorrectly with ones that are functioning correctly. Some mutations are harmless but others can cause a patient to develop a disease. The DNA in genes are responsible for carrying the information that makes proteins. Proteins can be considered “the building blocks of our body”1 so if a gene is mutated and becomes harmful it can stir up many problems. Using gene therapy cannot only stop a protein from causing harm by returning its normal function; it can also give new functions to a protein to benefit a patient2. By going through this process we can treat diseases at the source instead of using medication to hide symptoms4.

There are multiple methods that are used to deliver the correct genetic material to the defective genes. One of the methods is to use a vector. Vec...

... middle of paper ...

...positive sides of this is that in some cases patients only need to complete the process once so there won’t need to be multiple payments. On the negative side, many patients need to undergo several treatments which means several payments. There are a lot of people who disagree but many agree with gene therapy. In fact, a survey taken more than three years ago showed that more than half of the people in the United States thought genetic engineering was acceptable. The opinions differ world wide because in Japan the survey revealed that more than seventy percent thought genetic engineering was unacceptable4. Although many people disagree with gene therapy, they forget that for some people this is a matter of life or death. As long as people keep this in mind and don’t get greedy we should be able to peacefully proceed with gene therapy without any problems.