Ricki Lewis

On a bright September day in 2008, 8-year-old Corey Haas went to the Philadelphia zoo with his parents, and screamed. Four days earlier he had gene therapy to cure his hereditary blindness, and now the sun was hurting his eyes. Corey’s suddenly restored vision marked a renaissance in gene therapy, a biotechnology sidelined nine years earlier when an 18-year-old died in a similar experiment in the very same Philadelphia hospital.

The Forever Fix tells Corey’s inspiring story against the backdrop of other children treated since the field was born in 1990, and those looking ahead to future gene therapy. The treatments pioneered on rare diseases will reverberate to many more common ones. The Forever Fix is the tale of a biotechnology reborn. To be published in early 2012 by St. Martin's Press.