Genetic Engineering Essay
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What's Genetic Engineering?
Nowadays, scientists have learned a great deal about the chemical changes taking place inside living things. They have deciphered the code, DNA, by which animals and plants pass on their characteristics to their offspring. They have even leant how to alter that code to produce life forms with new characteristics. This new technology involving both chemical and biological science is known as genetic engineering.
Through this new technology, we shall soon be able to provide much better treatments, and possibly even cures for certain serious diseases, especially those like inheriting diseases, which cannot presently be cured. Besides, we shall be able to create new kinds of life, or altered version of existing animals and plants, for medical and industrial uses.
Basic, Individual, Building Unit of Life
All living things are built up by millions of millions of same fundamental working parts. These are called cells. Cells are microscopic, however there are many different kinds of cells with different properties for a particular task in a living things. For instances, a nerve cell is particularly used for carry messages to and from he brain and have a specific shape differs the others.
Nucleus, the most important part of a cell, which directs the making of essential substances, called proteins, on which all life depends. However, each different organism has its own specific kind of proteins. How do they know which kind of protein are essentials? Inside the nucleus of the cell of each organism, has a special, complex chemical called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). These DNA contains the instruction and informations of what kind of proteins have to be made.
DNA is shaped like a twisted rope ladder. The rungs of the ladder are made up of four chemical bases, which are adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C). Each of these bases has special shape that A can only attach with T and G can only attach with C. The sequences of how the bases arrange are the information of what proteins are made. A section of DNA that has the complete code for a single protein is called gene. That's also what's genetic engineering working on.
Genes determine the type of proteins our bodies make. It controls a huge variety of factors that help make us unique individuals. As this fact, nobody has exactly the same set of genes as you have, unless you have an identical twin, everyone is looks exactly like you. Genes are stored on long strands of DNA known as chromosomes inside the nuclei of our cells. Most of the cells in your body contain 46 chromosomes, arranged in 23 pairs. Each cell contains the complete set of DNA. Not every cell in the body uses every instruction on the DNA in its nucleus. Instead, it reads only those parts needed to manufacture certain proteins.
Inheriting Disease
Most of our cells contain 46 chromosomes. However, two type of cells in human beings that have only half this number. These are the egg cells in females and the sperm cells in males. When fertilization takes place, a sperm joins with an egg, and the 23 chromosomes from each combine to make a new set of 46. That is, all genes in human come from two versions that are 23 chromosomes from your mother and 23 from you father.
Although there is two version of the same type of gene, sometimes only one version is used, this gene is call dominant gene. The other is said to be recessive.
Inherited diseases or genetic diseases are of two types. The first are those resulting from a disease-causing dominant gene inherited from either the father or the mother. In this case, the parent who passes on the unhealthy gene must also be a sufferer of the disease. The second type appears when two recessive genes receive from both parents. Since there is no choice but for either one switched on.
Huntington's Disease
One of the well-known genetic diseases is called Huntington's Disease named after George Huntington, the doctor who first described it in 1872. This inherited disease affects about 30,000 people in the United States. It causes depression, bursts of anger or violence, memory loss, confusion, and shaking movements that, as the disease advances, grow into a grotesque, writhing "dance" that never stops. All these effects result from destruction of small but vital areas of the brain called the basal ganglia, destruction masterminded by a single dominant gene. Huntington's disease is one of about 4,000 human diseases had known to be inherited.
There is no cure or even treatment for this relentless disease. Perhaps most tragic of all, signs of it usually do not appear until a person is 30 or 40 years old. By then, many of its victims have had children. There is a 50-50 chance of passing it on to each offspring. Because the gene is dominant, anyone who inherits it will develop the disease.
Scientists all over the world went through a several years of hard work to find where the disease-causing gene is located. It is significantly important to know where it located and discoveries how it produces certain proteins to distract the brain, in order to cure this disease. By this disease we can see how genetic engineering applies for medical uses.
Nancy Wexler
If we talk about this disease, it is impossible not to mention about Nancy Wexler. When she was 23, she learned that her mother, Leonore, had Huntington's disease. That means there is 50-50 chance that she has inherited the genetic mutation and will eventually die just as her mother finally did.
"She went from being dismal to being challenged and wanting to be a knight in shining amour going out to fight the devils," recalls her father, Milton Wexler. She didn't devastated by the experience of...
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