At a recent North Bay Bob Dylan tribute, I met a biochemist who manufactured blood proteins to treat hemophilia,.  As we talked, however, she announced that one day her work would go away.  

She explained that blood coagulant requires twelve distinct proteins.  The genomes of hemophiliacs, it turns out, are unable to manufacture number eight.  But it’s now possible to engineer a virus that contains the missing gene sequence.  And if we introduce the virus to hemophiliac bone marrow, the DNA will repair and gain the ability to manufacture the missing protein.  It all sounded miraculous and strange.  

Musicians took up their instruments and the lilting chime of Mr. Tambourine Man filled the room.  

Fifteen months ago, a young Greta Thunberg left school and held a sign outside the Swedish Parliament. She stood alone. Skolstrejk för Klimatet her sign read.  

A year later, millions of young people around the globe struck for climate change. 

In this long hot summer without precedence in human history, it feels indeed as if our planet is burning with fever.  And yet I feel tremendous hope.   I marvel at the mechanisms by which the genome of the body politic can repair itself.  Change does not come just through governmental edict, but can sometimes begin with a single act.  Any small act taken by any one of us. We need not wait to take those small, but necessary and infectious steps — gene therapy, if you will — that will allow our children to have a future.   

We need a system change, rather than individual change, Thunburg said to the body of the UN.

But we cannot have one without the other.

To do your best is no longer enough.

We must all do the seemingly impossible.

Everything needs to change.

And it has to start today.

With a perspective, this is Andrew Lewis

https://www.kqed.org/perspectives/201601139098/gene-therapy-for-the-planet