Question: Do you think in years to come there will be a way to alter peoples genes and DNA as is done in the film: The Nutty Professor???????

Andy MacLeod answered on 19 Jun 2011:

Did the nutty professor involve genetic engineering? I’ve never seen either version.

Hi megan. There’s research being done at the moment into “gene therapy”, which is aimed at replacing specific genes that have gone wrong. Some of my colleagues work on gene therapy for Cystic Fibrosis (CF), a genetic disease that affects the lungs, and makes it hard for people to breath. We know the gene that goes wrong when someone gets CF, so we can try and introduce a “good” version into the lung cells. This is possible because the lung cells are exposed to the atmosphere when someone breathes in, so we can try and get people to inhale versions of the good gene. Even then, it’s still difficult to get the gene into the nucleus of the lung cells, and have it replace the CF gene in ONLY those cells. My colleagues have come up with lots of clever ways to do this – they’ve tested these on sheep, and are now starting on human patients, which should hopefully help with some of the worse symptoms of the disease.

There are people looking at ways of doing gene therapy for other genetic diseases, but I don’t know if anyone’s looking at replacing the kinds of genes that would make such a dramatic difference in people’s appearance. I don’t think it’s impossible, just very hard. You’d need to know exactly what genes you wanted to change, and somehow gene the new gene you wanted to introduce into that type of cell and ONLY that type of cell. CF therapy is hard enough when we know exactly what gene we want to change, and the tissue that’s affected (the lungs) is relatively easily accessible.

But just as plastic surgery is now pretty common, we may one day see cosmetic gene therapy. Such treatments are likely to be very expensive, and only available to the wealthy at first. Do you think that would be a good application of the technology megan?