Tonight French Anderson, 81, was released from state prison in California, after serving nearly a dozen years for “inappropriate touching and medical exams” of a girl, from 1997 to 2001, starting when she was ten.
Dr. Anderson headed the first clinical trial for gene therapy at the NIH in 1990, and he helped me when I was writing my book about the field, The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It, which St. Martin’s Press published in 2012. I’d snail mail chapters to French’s wife Kathy, she’d take them to him, he’d mark them up with a pencil, and she’d mail them back.
French has always maintained his innocence and went to great effort to forensically discount the evidence against him, with several investigators demonstrating that the audiotape used to convict him– he appears to apologize to the victim – was spliced. He claims other evidence was falsified.
It is a complicated story involving the Chinese government’s interest in his discovery that an interleukin given to mice after exposure to high doses of radiation rescued them – a finding with profound military applications that was not the impetus for the study. French had been interested in treating radiation poisoning in cancer patients. A researcher in his lab patented the work in China – and she is the mother of the sexual abuse victim. I’ll leave it to others to assemble the puzzle pieces.
But I am sitting here absolutely stunned that one of the first things that French did when he returned home was to call me! Minutes ago! Read More
Dr. Anderson headed the first clinical trial for gene therapy at the NIH in 1990, and he helped me when I was writing my book about the field, The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It, which St. Martin’s Press published in 2012. I’d snail mail chapters to French’s wife Kathy, she’d take them to him, he’d mark them up with a pencil, and she’d mail them back.
French has always maintained his innocence and went to great effort to forensically discount the evidence against him, with several investigators demonstrating that the audiotape used to convict him– he appears to apologize to the victim – was spliced. He claims other evidence was falsified.
It is a complicated story involving the Chinese government’s interest in his discovery that an interleukin given to mice after exposure to high doses of radiation rescued them – a finding with profound military applications that was not the impetus for the study. French had been interested in treating radiation poisoning in cancer patients. A researcher in his lab patented the work in China – and she is the mother of the sexual abuse victim. I’ll leave it to others to assemble the puzzle pieces.
But I am sitting here absolutely stunned that one of the first things that French did when he returned home was to call me! Minutes ago! Read More