Genetic engineering

Genetic engineering is the term given to the process of producing living forms with altered characteristics by alteration of their genes, usually by implantation of genetic material from som other species into the DNA of the plant or animal to be modified. This report outlines the principles on which genetic engineering is based, and briefly surveys some of its economic and social implications.

Since genetic engineering burst on the public scene in the 1970s, few areas of scientific endeavor have been so subject at once to exaggerated fears and to exaggerated hopes. Genes are the fundamental building blocks of life, in the sense that it is essential a creature's genes that determine its nature, whether man or mouse or mulberry tree. To artificially manipulate genes thus rouses deep fears of scientific monkeying with the essense of life, fears that go back at least to Mary Shelley's early nineteenthcentury classic, Frankenstein. The very phrase "genetic engineering" conjures up nightmare images, some unlikely or even absurd rats the size of elephants, minotaurs, supermen and "submen" others all too conceivable, such as genetically tailored germwarfare epidemics which would attack only certain racial or ethnic groups (7:9394).

At the same time, genetic engineering raised some unrealistic hopes: cures for cancer, for example, or for geneticallybased birth defects. On a less exalted level, "biotech" became a Wall Street darling during the lat

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DNA molecule, some genes are replicated many times, while other sections of the DNA are part of no gene at all, and have no known function (7:2729). (Note that this is not the same thing as saying that these portions of the DNA have no function; they may be vital, but we do not yet know what role they play, if any.) It has long been known that embryos, representing an early stage of an animal's growth, are quite similar among all mammalian species. This linkage among living forms is even more vividly expressed in DNA. Over ninety percent of the DNA in human genetic material is homologous identical in its sequencing of base pairs with the genetic material of a mouse (7:19). The remainder, less than ten percent of the total, is what determines the differences in appearance and behavioral capabilities between mice and human beings. In a notuntypical instance of scientific serendipity, research into viruses in the 1960s, unrelated to genetic studies, led to the discovery that the long strandlike DNA molecule could be "cut" by use of certain enzymes. The cut ends could then be "spliced," perhaps in a different order or to a new, foreign segment of DNA placed between them (7:3942). This process gave r

Category: Science - G