When my editor forwarded me a press release yesterday promoting a linkurl:series of articles;http://www.liebertonline.com/toc/hum/0/0 in January's issue of Human Gene Therapy on informed consent, he mentioned that the authors of those pieces were the key players in the death of an 18-year-old in a 1999 gene therapy trial that had called informed consent into question. The issue's editorial was written by James Wilson, the journal's editor-in-chief, and one of the articles was written by University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan. Both had been defendants in the lawsuit brought by the family of Jesse Gelsinger, the teenager who died in 1999 while participating in a gene therapy trial at UPenn for the metabolic liver disease, ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency. The articles addressed the need to fix informed consent procedures for linkurl:gene therapy;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23064/ trials in the wake of recent serious adverse events, including the death of 36-year-old linkurl:Jolee Mohr;http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/53453/ last summer after receiving...

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