The Body Becomes Accessible

Once it was difficult to target specific cells, and to insert proteins or genes into these cells. Now scientists are using nanotubes to open the door. From Stanford chemist Dai: "Dai's team also showed that carbon nanotubes could carry proteins and DNA into cells potentially to help deliver drugs or therapeutic genes. Compared with a solid spherical nanoparticle, a hollow nanotube has more surface area with which to carry molecules, explained biomolecular engineer Michael Strano at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. " Further, "Dai and his colleagues in August reported that by tagging carbon nanotubes so that they would specifically latch onto cancer cells and shining near-infrared lasers on them, they could kill just cancer cells without harming normal tissue."

Biosingularity blog is a rich field of information on biological advances. Recent reports of insertion of growth factors into failing heart muscle, and differentiation of heart myocyte stem cells are encouraging.

Using viruses to insert genes into cells caused problems, including the death of a child. Scientists backed off from that avenue of research until they could be assured that it was safe. Other types of forced entry into the cell were explored and found less risky, for the time being.

With the emergence of more accessible biohacking, and safer methods of gene insertion into cells, the scale of unregulated animal (mice, rats etc) experimentation into gene therapies may grow larger than the published and regulated experimentation. If ALF commandoes raid a university lab and "liberate" the animals, will they be making a dent in the overall structure of experimentation? Probably not.

Here is a simple manual to introduce an understanding of genes and gene therapy.