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Ricki Lewis

Genetic Linkage

Imprisoned Gene Therapy Pioneer, French Anderson, Launches Website

January 28, 2014
Tags: gene therapy, William French Anderson, NIH, Friends of French Anderson
William French Anderson, MD
In September 1990, William French Anderson, MD, posed with 4-year-old Ashi DeSilva at the NIH clinical center. Days earlier, she’d become the first recipient of gene therapy, a biotechnology that Dr. Anderson and others had been thinking about since Watson and Crick published the structure of DNA in 1953.

On July 29, 2004, Dr. Anderson, then 67, was arrested at his home in San Marino, California, and charged with molesting the daughter of a co-worker. The “inappropriate touching and medical exams” allegedly happened from 1997 to 2001, starting when the girl was ten. He has always maintained his innocence.

Dr. Anderson was tried in June 2006, convicted the next month, and sentenced to 14 years in prison on February 3, 2007. More than 200 scientists, many quite prominent, formed "Friends of French Anderson" and sent detailed letters to the court vouching for his character. But despite appeals, he has been in prison all this time.

Out of options, Dr. Anderson has just unveiled a website, www.wfrenchanderson.org that includes forensic evidence in his defense and other documents. He’s asked me to spread the word. I won’t discuss the evidence or legal details, at least not yet, but I wanted to relate how I came to learn about the case.  Read More 
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Gene Therapy and the 10,000-Hour Rule

January 4, 2012
Tags: gene therapy, The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It, Malcolm Gladwell, 10, 000-hour rule, Ashi DeSilva, Biology Digest, William French Anderson, Donald Kohn, ADA deficiency, Leber congenital amaurosis, Kalydeco, ivacaftor, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, cystic fibrosis, severe combined immune deficiency, Ricki Lewis, Corey Haas, Jesse Gelsinger
“Breakthroughs” in biomedicine are rarely that – they typically rest on a decade or more of experiments. Consider gene therapy.

I just unearthed an article from the December 1990 issue of Biology Digest, "Gene Therapy." I wrote it a mere two months after the very first gene therapy experiment, the much-publicized case of 4-year-old Ashi DeSilva,  Read More 
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