In 1983, when only three genetic diseases could be detected effectively by screening tests and scientists knew very little about how genes were controlled, Technology Review argued that anticipated clinical trials of gene therapy would need to follow stringent guidelines, given the technology's previous failures. As ­Horace Freeland Judson explains in this issue (see "The Glimmering Promise of Gene Therapy"), not much has changed. Caught up in the promise of curing debilitating, life-shortening diseases by giving patients good copies of defective genes--and, it seems, eager for the glory of being the first to make gene therapy work in humans--some gene-therapy researchers have conducted sloppy, and even fatal, human trials in the intervening two decades.

Judson suggests that moving gene therapy forward will require well-­regulated scientific "drudgery." In April 1983, Tabitha M. ­Powledge suggested a similar route in her article "Gene Therapy: Will It Work?" Though she wrote two years before it was possible to mass-produce genes through the process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and seven years before the Human Genome Project had officially begun, the challenges she laid out sound familiar--as does the promise of gene therapy.