GMAS Biology Practice Test

Placing a gene into a cell to fix a hereditary disease or to improve the genome is gene therapy. This term describes a therapeutic approach that delivers, replaces, or repairs genetic material within a patient’s cells to treat or prevent disease, often using delivery methods like viral vectors or modern gene-editing tools such as CRISPR. Gene therapy is specific to medical treatment and aims to alter the patient’s genetic information in somatic (non-reproductive) cells, so the changes aren’t inherited by offspring. This distinguishes it from broader genetic engineering, which covers altering genes for a wide range of purposes beyond therapy, and from bioethics, which concerns the moral implications, or evolution, which is about how allele frequencies change in populations over time.