2006-11-23 12:22:39 · 10 answers · asked by osunumberonefan 5 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Medicine
Well, that is the Holy Grail of biochemistry and we've been dreaming of that ever since Dr. Pauling had me researching metabolic diseases, Lesch-Nyhan syndrome in particular. The problem has been 1) finding the precise genetic coding of the fouled up part of the DNA and 2) devising a mechanism to clip out that nucleic base and replace it with the correct one (or series of bases). Precision is, of course, vital or you'll kill the experimental animal (or, ultimately, human patient).
2006-11-23 12:27:09 · answer #1 · answered by bonhommecretienne 2 · 1⤊ 1⤋
There have been some attempts to do just that, using viruses to put DNA into cells. There has been at least one death in the testing (using DNA thought to be harmless, just testing the delivery system) and the tests were put on hold.
If you consider what it takes to have a real therapy, it can be daunting. You can't correct errors in every cell, so if the problem requires every cell to be fixed (say, a gene that causes cancer) DNA therapy probably can't fix the problem. Aging is another thing: you could make one cell out of a thousand youthful again, and the other 999 die and take the patient with them. But if it's something where a very few cells can make signalling molecules for the rest, it has a shot at working.
2006-11-23 20:53:25 · answer #2 · answered by Engineer-Poet 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
DNA exists in every cell in the body. DNA is millions of building blocks in length, in 48 different chromosomal pairs.
Perhaps you can start to see the difficulty in repairing all that DNA, even assuming there was some simple machine that could manipulate a DNA strain mechanically.
New methods, using retroviruses, is a possible way to an engineered retrovirus to 'fix' a person's DNA, but that is many years away from being practical to fix most DNA problems.
2006-11-23 20:31:10 · answer #3 · answered by Radagast97 6 · 1⤊ 1⤋
only Mother Nature can fix DNA
2006-11-23 20:38:53 · answer #4 · answered by ? 7 · 0⤊ 1⤋
Uh, because the right wing religious sects think it is unholy to do stem cell research, so they've made it illegal? And of course what they believe has to go for everybody. F**k them!
2006-11-24 01:49:35 · answer #5 · answered by Lorenzo Steed 7 · 0⤊ 1⤋
We only just about finished mapping the human genome.... give us a chance to figure out what all this (data) we collected do when we play god and see what we get when we change some of that code.... (sarcastic) lol
2006-11-23 20:31:29 · answer #6 · answered by Dragonlord Warlock 4 · 0⤊ 2⤋
Because we don't understand half as much about life and the human body as we'd like to think we do.
2006-11-23 20:32:52 · answer #7 · answered by chemicalimbalance000 4 · 0⤊ 1⤋
They can! One of the best was a Dr. Frankenstein. A Jewish fellow who lived in Translvania I belive.
2006-11-23 20:32:47 · answer #8 · answered by ec1177 5 · 0⤊ 2⤋
because it is impossible
2006-11-23 20:25:15 · answer #9 · answered by `Avenging~ghetto~bird` 3 · 0⤊ 1⤋
they can
2006-11-23 21:48:52 · answer #10 · answered by QWERTY 2 · 0⤊ 1⤋