1 . The past few months have brought electrifying news that, for the first time, a gene treatment has provided some hearing to children born with deafness.

Eli Lilly announced this week, for example, that a profoundly deaf boy from Morocco given its treatment as part of a clinical trial in Philadelphia can now hear. And five children in China treated similarly at younger ages gained hearing with some able to verbally communicate without their cochlear implants (人工耳蜗). Their hearing recovery, first covered by the press in October 2023, is described in detail this week in The Lancet.

“It’s an enormous achievement,” says geneticist Karen Avraham of Tel Aviv University. Otolaryngologist (耳鼻喉科专家) and gene therapist Lawrence Lustig of Columbia University, whose lab was among the first to test the same approach in mice, agrees. “Other than cochlear implants, we haven’t really had any successful treatments to treat deafness,” he notes.

The various efforts from companies and academic centers each use a virus to insert the same gene, OTOF, into the children’s inner ear so the so-called hair cells there can sense sound and transmit it to the brain.

The new deafness treatments add to a string of recent successes for the gene treatment field, but also raise questions. The ear’s hair cells don’t divide, so the new copies of OTOF they contain should persist and continue to instruct the cells to make OTOF. Gene expression could drop off over time or the ear could mount an immune response that shuts it off.

But Lustig is optimistic that the various challenges will be overcome. “Now that we’ve got one success story, there’s going to be more money coming in to fund some of these other projects,” he says.

2 . When my son Reace celebrated his sixth birthday two years ago, he made a wish that I would get a transplant. Less than a week later, his wish came true when I received new _________.

Born with a breathing disease, I was able to manage my _________ without a hospital visit until I was 23. At 30, _________, it steadily worsened and I was _________ for a transplant. I started having check-ups once a year, then every six months, then every three months until I was _________ living at the hospital and reliant on oxygen to survive. Everyday _________ like having a shower or brushing my hair became _________.

After four months on the list, I _________ the call to say a pair of lungs was available. The transplant was successful and the _________ was noticeable. Before my transplant I had been so __________, I couldn’t even walk from the couch to the front door without __________ my breath—and it was only six paces. __________, I was so used to being breathless that I didn’t know any difference. I had __________ what it would be like to be a __________ person and now I know. I can do everything an ordinary mum would do: housework, workout, or taking Reace to basketball.

I am extremely grateful to my __________ and his family.

Back in    1    late 1700s, long before people understood the reason behind immunity (免疫),farmers and doctors in rural areas of Britain noticed that dairymaids(牛奶工) and other people who got a mild disease called cowpox(牛痘) seldom caught its fearsome cousin, smallpox (天花). Was there a connection? Some decided there was an inserted (植入) material from the cowpox into an incision (切口) they cut on the arm of healthy people, thus somehow     2    (protect)them from smallpox. In 1798,a doctor named Edward Jenner published the results of his experiments using this procedure,earning     3    (he)fame as the“Father of Smallpox Vaccination (疫苗接种).”

Scientists later figured out that cowpox somehow protected one from smallpox. When people caught cowpox, their bodies made special cells     4     (call) antibodies. They fought the disease.That's not all. They stayed in the blood       5    case the disease ever returned. Because cowpox and smallpox are fairly similar, if a person was later exposed to the more serious disease, anti-bodies were ready     6    ( fight) it too.

That knowledge helped scientists develop vaccines. The term vaccination was coined from the Latin for cow (vacca).They contain the virus, weakened, dead or modified (改良的) . Injected into the blood, they trick the immune system into making antibodies.    7     the body ever meets with those same    8    (virus),even at full strength,the antibodies make short work of them.

Vaccination prior to     9    (expose) to the virus is ideal. But a vaccination given within three days of exposure will     10    (complete) prevent or significantly modify smallpox in the majority of people and given within the first four to seven days will likely offer some protection or soften the diseases.