Gene Therapy Cures "Bubble Boy"

bofh31337 writes "NewScientist is reporting that Welsh boy Rhys Evans has been cured of the fatal severe combined immunodeficiency ("bubble boy") disease. The medical team, lead by Adrian Thrasher, was able to take the stem cells that give rise to immune cells from his bone marrow and add a normal copy of the gene to the stem cell using a retro virus. Seven months after treatment, Rhys was cured."

Comments

My experiences with Windows XP Professional

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a Computer Information Systems Professional at a major Fortune 500 corporation. Very recently the head of our IT department decided that we were going to switch every one of our networks over to Windows XP Professional. We had previously been running OpenBSD on all our quad processor Xeons. Some of them had had uptimes approaching a year! My personal favourite, Gerbil, had been running without a reboot for three years.

One day one of those Microsoft shills that you often read about on the Register came by for a visit. I grew very suspicious about what was going on when my boss and the Microsoft representative walked by my desk, and entered the server room. I could hear muffled voices through the closed door. The Microsoft representative was asking what we were running on our servers! My worst fears had come true. I sat at my desk for the rest of the day, silently awaiting the bad news. The news did not come until the next day. It was worse than I had feared. We were to be a Microsoft only shop from that day on! I could not believe it. The Microsoft representative had told my boss that the operating and support costs would actually go down. And my boss had fully bought into it, hook, line, and sinker.

Tough times hit our company in the last month, and we were forced to lay off a few of the less experienced IS/IT workers. One of them took this rather hard. As a last minute attempt at corporate sabotage, he decided to change all of the Computer Administrator passwords on a few of the XP Professional boxes sitting around in the server room. This caused absolute havoc, as Dell had failed to send along administrator passwords for the new boxes. Our company could not make use of these computers for three days. It took Dell that long to get us the administrator passwords. It is strictly because of Microsoft's poor implementation of a multi-user computing environment that our company lost three days of productivity.

Needless to say, I had our quad Xeons back running OpenBSD by the end of the week. Gerbil is back on its way to another glorious 3 years of uptime.

What if the child has another genetic anomaly

[gTsiros]

which we didn't see?

ths way, curing the "bubble boy", we allow it to procreate and possibly make offsprings with another genetic anomaly... nature saw this and decided to stop the chain at this unfortunate boy.

we go against nature. that's a serious no-no.

now commence flaiming me with "oh yeah? what if YOU were that child, wouldnt you rather live?".