Gene therapy, according to one of the contributing authors, has suffered a decade of 'failures, false hopes and death' since the first edition of this book, and cancer gene therapy, in particular, now also competes with targeted cancer therapies that have concurrently enjoyed a decade of success. Thus, the question that this book is really attempting to answer is whether (cancer) gene therapy has a future. In reading this edition, my personal view is that cancer gene therapy has only a very limited future. Nonetheless, the book succinctly conveys how recombinant viruses - the usual suspects [retroviruses, lentiviruses, adenoviruses, herpesviruses (HSV)] and newer entrants [paramyxoviruses (NDV), reoviruses] - remain the vectors of choice for gene therapy, but successes have been few and far between since the first real gene therapy experiments of Cline and Anderson et al. in 1980. In vivo gene therapy remains out of reach and ex vivo gene therapy may be the discipline's only salvation, but, as noted above, oncologists now have a range of alternative specific therapies and supporting alternative technologies (RNAi, therapeutic DNA vaccines), and so this book may well describe an approach that has run its course. As such, I would suggest that interest and readership amongst SGM members is likely to be limited.