MADISON, WISCONSIN — James M. Wilson, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Human Gene Therapy, will leave his post effective 1 July 2002, and return to research at the university. The resignation, first reported on Saturday by the Philadelphia Inquirer, comes after a faculty committee review of the institute said the university needed to broaden its approach to treating disease.

University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Dean Arthur H. Rubenstein, who announced Wilson's resignation in an e-mail to faculty on Friday, was traveling Monday and could not be reached for comment.

LeRoy Walters, a professor of bioethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, told The Scientist that the resignation is clearly part of the fallout of the1999 death at the institute of Jesse Gelsinger, an 18-year-old patient who was being treated for an inherited liver disease. After shutting down all gene therapy trials at the university, the FDA cited the institute for violations in the conduct of the project.

The agency is also continuing proceedings that could lead to Wilson's being banned from doing research with human subjects. Gelsinger's family settled a lawsuit against the university for an undisclosed sum in November 2000.

In the wake of the Gelsinger case Wilson was faced with a choice, said Arthur Caplan, head of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "Jim has basically been pulled out of human research, and he had a choice to make about going back to the lab to do cell work or moving into the private sector," Caplan told The Scientist. "I think he's strongly committed to academic medicine, so he stayed."

Walters, who as head of the National Institutes of Health's Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee helped review the therapy protocol in 1995, said governmental oversight of gene therapy is now stronger. "The fact that one institute is changing directions, and Dr Wilson is resigning is sad for him, and a change for that particular institute should not have an adverse effect on the field as a whole, given the other researchers working hard in this field," Walters said.

Gene therapy "has adjusted to the tragedy of the Gelsinger death," Caplan said. Wilson's stepping down, he concluded, is "the last chapter of a book."