E-Book :: How Does Gene Therapy Work?

BIOlogy :: This free e-book was designed for primary school students and based on a lesson already given. It seemed like a shame to erase it from the whiteboard and not record it somewhere. It will probably be useful as the field of synthetic biology expands and stories continue rolling in about successes in gene therapy -- stories like this one about lung cancer being cured in mice.

Clicking on the image above will bring you to the .pdf on Scribd. Feel free to share. If you notice any mistakes, inaccuracies, or typos, please do contact me so I can quickly fix them -- and thanks in advance.

If I get some positive feedback on this, or if it is helpful in the classroom, it may lead to future publications.

How to make your own :: The book itself was made in SketchUp and GIMP, and finally put together in SketchUp's LayOut.  Using SketchUp's components features allowed me to quickly assemble faces, cells, DNA etc., that would have taken ages to draw by hand.

Once I had all the assets built up, it was just a matter of laying them out. Anything that didn't work or needed to be adjusted was quickly changed -- which again, would not be easy if I were hand drawing it. And because I was using components in SketchUp, I could dynamically change assets. I decided to add DNA into the nucleus of each cell - since the cell was a single component, all I had to do was add the DNA into one, and it dynamically changed the rest instantly. 

I used a style filter before exporting each scene. I'm not sure how much I like the sketchy style, but that's what prototypes are for.