In September 2007, I wrote a feature for Nature Medicine about the uncertain future of gene therapy. The article came out a couple of months after the death of Jolee Mohr, a 36-year-old woman who had been a participant in a clinical trial of gene therapy for rheumatoid arthritis. Mohr had acquired the massive infection that eventually killed her just three weeks after receiving her shot of gene therapy in her inflammed knee. The timing gave the FDA enough reason to call off the whole trial.

But now, after two years and an extensive investigation into Mohr’s case, the doctors who treated her at the University of Chicago Medical Center say that in all likelihood, gene therapy was not the source of the lethal infection. As they explain in a full report published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the culprit was actually Histoplasma capsulatum, an environmental fungus from the Midwest U.S.

Still, gene therapy was the cause of death of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger, in 1999, who was receiving the experimental treatment for a rare liver disease. With such horrible publicity, I wonder…is it too late to save gene thearpy’s reputation?