This is excellent news:
There may be a new potential sickle cell breakthrough for those who suffer with the disease.
According to the National Institutes of Health, a Mobile man is the first Alabamian to become sickle cell free through a new gene therapy clinical trial they conducted.
Via Facebook.
Apparently, what they’re doing here is using a modified version of HIV — as in, one that won’t kill you — to deploy repaired bone marrow stem cells. …Yes, that there is hardcore bleeding edge science fiction, folks. Only, you know, it’s actually happening. Sometimes the future’s pretty cool.
Moe Lane
PS: Amusingly, Bruce Sterling predicted that precisely this would happen in his short story “Our Neural Chernobyl.” At more or less this point in time, too. Which is actually… a bit worrying, because that was a throwaway line in a story about a biotech catastrophe.