Essay on Genetic Engineering

Free Genetic Engineering papers

Cloning Animals
 The cloning of animals will be beneficial to human beings inthe near future. Experiments in cloning animals started in theearly nine-teen-fifties. Over the next forty years, scientistswere only able to clone animals from very young embryonic cells. When these scientists tried to use older

Air An Water
1Air and Water To fly at one hundred and twenty miles an hour or to float to the bottom of the ocean ? When you are trying to decide between skydiving and scuba diving, you may ask yourself that question. Skydiving and scuba diving both have diving in the name but that is where the similarities end.

"Those who are ignorant to history are destined to repeat it." Although genetic engineering is an entirely new field, it brings up issues, especially in eugenics, that society has previously had to deal with. It gives people the power to change many aspects of nature and could result in a lot of life-saving and preventative treatments. However, if this power is misused or abused, the damage could be very great. Therefore, although genetic engineering is a field that should be explored, it needs to be strictly regulated and tested before being put into widespread use. Some say that people have been trying to change and manipulate nature for many years and that genetic engineering is only an expansion of what has been done. They feel that whatever genetic engineering allows us to do, it is just a natural step in the process. However, in the past, people have been limited by nature and the boundaries that it has set. Until now, people have never had the capability of getting past these boundaries completely. Although occasionally the species boundary has been crossed, nature has set its limits. For example, scientists have been able to cross the horse and donkey to create the mule, but its reproduction has been restricted by it being sterile. With genetic engineering, however, changes can be made at the genetic level and these limits could be completely ignored. If a limit is not set between using genetic engineering for treatment and using geneticengineering for enhancement, then many parents could use it purely for eugenic purposes. One survey done by researchers showed that eleven percent of couples would abort a child predisposed to obesity. With genetic engineering they could decide to substitute their child s undesirable characteristics for more desirable ones in order to "customize" their children. This could not only cause ethical concerns but social concerns as well. If this was allowed to occur, it would also give the rich even more advantages than they already have to begin with and drive the social classes even farther apart. The use of genetic engineering may also lead to genetic discrimination. In the future a person could easily get a print-out of his or her genotype. This same information could then be used by schools, employers, insurance companies, and others, giving rise to a new form of discrimination based on a person s genetic profile. Already, insurance companies and others are using information from genetic tests or a person s genetic background for discrimination. One survey of people who are at risk for certain diseases showed that 455 out of 917 said that they had experienced some sort of...