Another Ripley's Believe it or Not

On November 10, 1997, the following article appeared in the local paper.

Scientific advancements are news. Can you believe that the new "gene therapy" described in this article has already been tried on 41 "hopeless" patients? (Do you think these patients know that Linus Pauling invented a cure for their condition in 1991?) Can anybody reading this help us to understand why 41 people were studied in the case of a "gene therapy", but no medical research has been done to investigate the claim of outright cure for heart disease?!?