GENE THERAPY

Lab mice, perk up your fuzzy little ears. You are not the only species that struggles through mazes in the name of science. Here, it's an eight-year-old boy who can't see too well. But don't feel bad, in the second video he aces the test when he's allowed to use his eye that's been treated with gene therapy. This procedure is one of the few successful applications of gene therapy, a technique that people once thought would cure nearly all ills, but problems getting the genes into the body's cells has plagued the field every step of the way.

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A few colorblind squirrel monkeys in ophthalmology professor Jay Neitz's lab at the University of Washington, Seattle have received an early Christmas gift: gene therapy has restored their ability to see red and green. Neitz and his colleagues say that the achievement provides hope for treating vision disorders in human adults as well.

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After three years of piecing together hundreds of individual x-ray images, researchers were able to produce the first high-resolution picture of the five million atoms that make up a virus's protective shell. The yellow- and red-colored ribbons were highlighted to illustrate how four identical proteins join to form the building block of the blue-hued shell, or capsid, of the Ps V-F penicillin fungus-attacking virus.

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The point of medicine is to make sick people “well,” which is really just

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