There are now a number of clinical trials which researchers around the world are trying to find out if the same things happen in humans who have incurable cancers. Argument of Human Gene Therapy Gene therapy technologies are now making it possible to provide treatments that 20 years ago were hardly dreamed possible. These new technologies will bring about a whole new era in medicine. The answers to many medical problems people thought were incurable are new becoming possible. Like other new forms of therapy, gene therapy raises ethical and social issues.
Most people feel that it is fine to use gene therapy to treat human genetic disease.
Others worry that one step into the arena of gene therapy will lead inexorably to practices that reduce the human species to a technologically designed product. They argue, if we can change somebody's gene in order to cure threaten disease then, we could change their genes to make them taller, or cleaver, or to give them blue eyes. A distinction should be drawn between making genetic changes in somatic cells and in germinal cells. The purpose of somatic gene therapy is to treat an individual patient, e.g., by inserting a properly functioning gene into a patient's bone marrow cells in vitro and then reintroducing the cells into the patient's body. They differ, however, in that gene therapy involves an inherent and probably permanent change in the body rather than requiring repeated applications of an outside force or substance.