Human Heredity 11th Edition by Michael Cummings

Exercise 22

The prospect of using gene therapy to alleviate genetic conditions is still a vision of the future. Gene therapy for adenosine deaminase deficiency has proved to be quite promising, but many obstacles remain to be overcome. Currently, the correction of human genetic defects is done using retroviruses as vectors. For this purpose, viral genes are removed from the retroviral genome, creating a vector capable of transferring human structural genes into sites on human chromosomes within target-tissue cells. Do you see any potential problems with inserting pieces of a retroviral genome into humans? If so, are there ways to combat or prevent these problems?