Some deaf children in China can hear after gene treatment::She can hear her mother and dance to the music. But why is it so noisy at night?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
During the procedure, doctors used a virus to add replacement DNA to the cells in Yiyi’s inner ear that pick up vibrations, allowing them to transmit sound to her brain.
Yiyi is one of several deaf children who scientists in China say are the first people ever to have their natural hearing pathway restored in a dramatic new demonstration of the possibilities of gene therapy.
His team began the treatments last December, and before that he spent years developing the techniques involved, testing gene injections in countless mice and guinea pigs.
Now Shu’s study, in which as many as 10 kids have been enrolled, may be remembered as China’s first domestic gene-therapy breakthrough, as well the most dramatic restoration of a lost sense yet achieved.
“Before the treatment, if you put them in a movie theater with the loudest sound, they wouldn’t hear it,” says Zheng-Yi Chen, an associate professor at Mass Eye and Ear, a Harvard-affiliated hospital in Boston, who helped design and plan the study.
Today, Shu is scheduled to present data on the first five children he treated at a meeting of the European Society for Gene and Cell Therapy in Brussels, Belgium.
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Awesome news. Terrible comments.
Plot twist. The gene treatment was performed on European adults.
This is one of those things that history books later on may say “It started with the best of intentions. Restore hearing and sight, improve quality of life. It ended with the near destruction of mankind”.
Edit. For the haters out there, I’m not against it. I am just cautious about such a powerfull new medical field.
