Several years ago in the news-paper I read that soon it would be possible to re-activate the genes in human organism for some special purpose.
Are you specifically talking about “activating” or “reactivating” existing genes? Or are you talking about genetically engineering a human (ie. inserting, deleting or modifying genes)?
If you’re talking about modulating existing genes, traditional drug therapy can do that. So we’re been “activating” or “reactivating” genes for a long time now. If I recall correctly, ~10% of existing pharmaceutical drugs directly interact with transcription factors (or the nuclear transcriptional machinery) that regulate gene activity. A much larger percentage of drugs indirectly modulate gene activity through interaction with biochemical pathways that feed back to genes. Whether a drug company will pursue development of a drug to modulate a given gene(s) for a particular physiological outcome will depend on the economics of the potential product.
If you’re talking about genetically engineering a human, then that’s a different kettle of fish. You need to be careful about extrapolating experiments using animal models into humans. Most of the wondrous genetic manipulations in animals that we read about in the press are unlikely to be performed in humans for a very long time for two reasons:
(i) The genetic engineering requires access and manipulation of embryos.
(ii) The organisms in question have relatively short lifetimes.
You need to introduce new/modified genes into an embryo in order to ensure that all the cells of the resulting organism inherit the added gene. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all cells will express the added gene, but you need to do this in order to ensure that all the cells you
want to express the added gene actually receive a copy. Furthermore, breeding through a few generations is sometimes required in order to achieve that uniform distribution of the added gene. So maybe you can see the impracticalities when it comes to humans.
If you’re already a fully grown organism you have to rely on gene therapy to get an added gene into the target cells. But gene therapy is very difficult and has never lived up to its hype from 20 years ago due to the technical difficulties. At the moment the technique really only applies to bone marrow-related therapies.
For example, if you are bald and strongly wish to have the hair then the corresponding genes (responsible for hair growth) would be re-activated and you would have hair again.
Possibly. I recall that Elaine Fuchs (famous for her work on stem cells using the mouse hair follicle as a model system) gained a lot of media attention several years ago when her lab engineered mice such that their hair follicles expressed a gene that stimulated hair stem cell activity. The result was very hairy mice! The downside was that the hair follicles became cancerous as a result. The takehome message: you need to be very careful when you mess around with gene activity.
And the same thing could happen with teeth-you lost any of them? Don’t worry-“their” genes will be re-activated and you will have teeth again.
Hair is one thing. But organs and structures like teeth, digits, bones etc are produced by very specific and complex developmental processes that have not been active since you were a fetus. There isn’t much chance of reactivating those processes in an adult.
So, is it true and possible?
Like all things in science, the answer depends on the specific question being asked.
Do the scientists work on it?
A great many scientists all over the world work on aspects of gene regulation and its relevance to disease and injury.
When this will be possible to accomplish in practice?
Don’t hold your breath.
