Gene therapy at CHOP allowed a deaf boy to hear. But some deaf people object to the treatment.

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia surgeon John Germiller was among the world's first doctors to successfully treat a deaf child with gene therapy, using the type of needle he is holding here.An 11-year-old deaf boy is now able to hear in one ear after undergoing a gene therapy treatment at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, one of the first such cases in the world. A second boy, aged 3, is scheduled to receive the treatment at CHOP on Friday.

via email. “Is it ethically sound to experiment on a child for a non-life-saving treatment from which the benefit is questionable, and who cannot legally consent?” “The microphone is working. The wire’s working,” he said. “But there’s a break in the electrical connection.”But this particular recipe was too big to load onto gene therapy “vectors” — the inactivated viruses that are used to deliver the genetic instructions inside recipients’ cells.

Next came a third tool, an ultra-thin needle with the end bent at a slight angle. He inserted it past the eardrum and through a tiny membrane on the outer wall of the cochlea, then depressed a small pump to inject two droplets of the therapeutic solution. Sara Blick-Nitko, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, said gene therapy makes sense if it could help an older person who lost hearing as an adult. But for someone who is born deaf, the treatment smacks of eugenics, erasing a genetic trait without regard for its associated rich culture and language.

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