考研英语阅读理解精读室100篇医药类1.docVIP

PAGE 1 - 考研英语阅读理解精读100篇医药类 Unit 84 At 18, Ashanthi DeSilva of suburban Cleveland is a living symbol of one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century. Born with an extremely rare and usually fatal disorder that left her without a functioning immune system (the bubble-boy disease, named after an earlier victim who was kept alive for years in a sterile plastic tent), she was treated beginning in 1990 with a revolutionary new therapy that sought to correct the defect at its very source, in the genes of her white blood cells. It worked. Although her last gene-therapy treatment was in 1992, she is completely healthy with normal immune function, according to one of the doctors who treated her, W. French Anderson of the University of Southern California. Researchers have long dreamed of treating diseases from hemophilia to cancer by replacing mutant genes with normal ones. And the dreaming may continue for decades more. There will be a gene-based treatment for essentially every disease, Anderson says, within 50 years. Its not entirely clear why medicine has been so slow to build on Andersons early success. The National Institutes of Health budget office estimates it will spend $432 million on gene-therapy research in 2005, and there is no shortage of promising leads. The therapeutic genes are usually delivered through viruses that dont cause human disease. The virus is sort of like a Trojan horse, says Ronald Crystal of New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical College. The cargo is the gene. At the University of Pennsylvanias Abramson Cancer Center, immunologist Carl June recently treated HIV patients with a gene intended to help their cells resist the infection. At Cornell University, researchers are pursuing gene-based therapies for Parkinsons disease and a rare hereditary disorder that destroys childrens brain cells. At Stanford University and the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, researchers are trying to figure out how to help patients with