Germ Line Therapy

Germ Line Therapy

When I was a student in elementary school I was first told about genetics. I was told that traits are passed from parents to offspring and that each parent contributes equally. Someday, I was told, parents will be able to go down to the corner drug store and pick out what kind of baby they want. They could pick things like blue eyes, high intelligence and could even pick out the sex of their child. At the time I was being told this I believed that I would see it in my lifetime. I expected that by the time I was having children I would be able to pick their traits. I was especially excited to think that my children would not inherit my genetic disease. I wasn’t quite sure how all of this would work, but I was curious to find out. As I progressed in my scholastic career I went on to learn more about genetics. I finally decided that genetics was the field of study that I wished to pursue in college. Once in college I learned that determining your child’s traits was not as easy as going down to the corner drug store and taking a pill, as I had imagined when I was a child. In fact determining most traits, such as eye and hair color was probably not even in the foreseeable future. What was involved I couldn’t even begin to understand as a freshman in college. The more I understood about molecular biology, the less feasible trait determination seemed. Then along came Dolly, the cloned sheep.

For some time scientists have been pursuing the idea of germ line therapy. Germ line therapy is essentially alterations made to the germ cells. Germ cells are eggs, sperm and early embryos (Henzig 1998). Any manipulation to the germ line would be transferred to future generations. Any corrections made at this stage would not need to be made again in that person’s descendants. Traditional gene therapy on adult subjects is called somatic cell therapy. This type of gene therapy must be repeated for each affected person in succeeding generations (Svitil 1998). Dolly was an important discovery because she was the first animal to be created from an adult differentiated cell. This cloning technique made germ line research much easier. Adult cells are more abundant than embryonic cells, and there should be no objection to doing research on differentiated cells from an adult donor.