non viral vectors, I read a paper recently, where they injected plasmids into the skin, and the reporter gene was taken in by cells.

http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle ... 11874.html

Was it tested on people?

I've often thought about reading up on how gene therapy actually works. The way I understand it plasmids insert their DNA at random locations in the target DNA and sometimes they get interrupted during the process resulting in an incomplete transfer. It sounds like that would suck if it's in vivo(at least in me). I wonder how they solve that. I need to go find out how gene therapy works, I realize I hardly know anything about it.

There is a discussion about HIV in the latest Futures in Biotech (FIB 32). Apparently people have successfully used the virus as a vector. HIV seems to be extremely efficiently designed and have a host of useful features(apart from the reverse transcriptase machinery).

it was tested on 17 melanoma patients in an proof-of-concept phase 1 study.
http://www.charite.de/forschungsbericht ... 13238.html
It lists the papers at the botom of the page.

I would not use any virus, its a non-self protein, it may interact with the iimmune system in an unhealthy way. If I flood myself with alien protein, the body may overreact.
But I am not interested to use this for therapy anyway, so all I need is getting what I want into skin cells.

This is a poster of an earlier experiment.
http://www.egms.de/en/meetings/dkk2006/06dkk589.shtml