# Gene Therapy

Explore how gene therapy intersects with Mormon Transhumanist thought—bridging faith, science, and the pursuit of human flourishing through genetic innovation.

[Image: Gene therapy can deliver a functional gene or edit a faulty one *in situ* so the body can produce what its inheritance omitted.]

Gene therapy approaches the treatment of disease either by delivering a functional gene into a patient’s cells or by directly editing a faulty gene *in situ*. In doing so, the body is enabled to produce what its biological inheritance omitted. Zolgensma, approved in 2019 for spinal muscular atrophy—a leading genetic cause of infant mortality—utilizes an attenuated viral vector to transport a functional gene into motor neurons. More recently, Casgevy, approved in 2023 for sickle cell disease, employs CRISPR to edit a patient’s autologous blood stem cells, returning them only after high-dose chemotherapy has evacuated the marrow.

For some believers, such profound interventions evoke hesitation, as if the human genome were a completed, inviolable text. Yet the psalmist’s imagery suggests otherwise: “Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned” (Psalm 139:16). The Hebrew term *golem*, rendered here as “unformed substance” or “embryo,” appears exclusively in this verse. It implies that the members inscribed in God’s book are subject to an ongoing process of fashioning, even while the heavenly record is kept.

## The Serpent on the Pole

[Image: Numbers 21:8 promises that those who look on Moses’s bronze serpent on a pole will live.]

When the Israelites were afflicted by fiery serpents, the Lord commanded Moses to “make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole,” with the promise that “every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live” (Numbers 21:8). Moses accordingly crafted a *nechash nechoshet*, a serpent of bronze. Beyond their separate etymological histories, the phonetic resonance of these words audibly bound the remedy to the danger. The Book of Mormon explicitly identifies this pole as “a type… raised up in the wilderness, that whosoever would look upon it might live” (Alma 33:19).

[Image: Zolgensma uses an attenuated viral vector to deliver a functional gene into motor neurons.]

Gene therapists operate on a remarkably similar principle of typological reversal. The viral vector carrying Zolgensma has been stripped of its pathogenic genome, leaving a shell adapted to penetrate human cells to deliver a vital, missing instruction. This methodology was not learned without cost; the field recognized early that such carriers can be lethal. In 1999, eighteen-year-old Jesse Gelsinger died merely four days after researchers at the University of Pennsylvania infused a corrective gene housed in a weakened adenovirus, triggering a catastrophic immune cascade from the carrier. The vector of death must be carefully mastered to become the vehicle of life.

## Naaman’s Silver

Naaman the Syrian came to Israel with “ten talents of silver, and six thousand pieces of gold,” washed in the Jordan, and “his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child” (2 Kings 5:5, 14). Elisha answered his offered gift, “I will receive none,” and when Gehazi chased the general to collect part of it, the prophet asked, “Is it a time to receive money?” (2 Kings 5:16, 26). The story keeps the cure and the payment apart.

Gene therapy has joined them. Zolgensma launched at $2.125 million, and when Novartis offered 100 free doses in 2020, assigned by blinded draw, SMA Europe objected that the plan would “make thousands of SMA babies compete with each other for a life-saving treatment.” Pfizer withdrew its hemophilia B therapy, Beqvez, in 2025 within a year of approval, citing limited interest. By the spring of 2026 more than 500 patients had begun treatment with Casgevy, priced near $2.2 million. In this connection, a federal Medicaid model in 34 states now ties payment for the sickle cell therapies to outcomes.

## Every One as They Were Brought

During His ministry among the Nephites, the resurrected Christ beckoned the sick, the lame, and the blind, “and he did heal them every one as they were brought forth unto him” (3 Nephi 17:9). Modern revelation through Joseph Smith clarifies that “the spirit and the body are the soul of man” (D&C 88:15); thus, a repair enacted at the genetic level profoundly touches the whole soul.

In 2025, physicians in Philadelphia treated an infant, KJ Muldoon, for a rare ammonia-processing disorder using a bespoke gene editor engineered in mere months for his specific mutation. Kiran Musunuru, a co-designer of the therapy, compared its RNA guide to a GPS: “Switch the address in that GPS, and that therapy will go to another gene.” Recognizing this paradigm shift, the FDA proposed in February 2026 to approve such variants based on a validated mechanism and a single controlled study, a move that accelerates bespoke therapeutics while inherently thinning the traditional evidence base for each.

The members in Psalm 139 were fashioned “in continuance,” and gene therapy lets human hands share that fashioning at the fundamental level of biological instructions. Mormon transhumanists recognize this genetic stewardship as the very healing their Affirmation pledges to advance. Yet the pressing question, as Caleb Jones observes, is how such powers will ever reach “the marginalized and forgotten.” His question asks specific things of researchers, manufacturers, and payers now: carriers tested with the caution Gelsinger’s death taught, pre-treatment gentler than chemotherapy so that treatment can reach beyond specialized transplant centers, platforms on which a new address costs far less than a new drug, and access that no family has to win in a draw.

*See also*: [Bioengineering](/topical-guide/bioengineering), [Disease](/topical-guide/disease), [Heal](/topical-guide/heal), [Healing](/topical-guide/healing), [Health](/topical-guide/health), [Longevity](/topical-guide/longevity)