19. In Girl’s Last Hope, Altered Immune Cells Beat Leukemia

Denise Grady wrote an article about a the story of a leukemia patient who was saved by a new treatment. Emma Whitehead was diagnosed with Leukemia at age five and had been struggling with it for two years. After several failed treatments, doctors and her parents began losing hope. That is when Emma's parents turned to an experimental treatment developed by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The treatment consists of injecting the patient with an inactive form of the AIDS virus that in turn reprograms the patient's immune cells to destroy the cells. The treatment, which causes severe side effects such as fever, almost killed her. But after doctors administered a drug to reduce the symptoms, she recovered. The treatment was tried on other patients with mixed results. However, the treatment is promising, so much that a major drug company, Novartis, has committed 20 billion dollars to the establishment of a research center in a University of Pennsylvania to bring the treatment to the market.

The author's purpose is not as much to persuade as much as it is to inform. Although the author relies heavily on the element of emotion when describing the Emma's story, the author does not take a stance on the issue.