Is genetic engineering and cloning good or bad?

Question

I think it's pretty cool that people get to change the code for once and prevent a person from having a genetic disease or disorder, but i i'm still wondering about the risks. can someone give me a couple of pros and cons.

Answer 1

At the stages both genetic engineering and cloning are at right now I would say, overwhelmingly... GOOD!

Some of the best examples are seen in corn. By inserting a gene, corn plants can be resistant to glyphosate herbicide (trade name: Round-Up). This allows a farmer to spray a field with Round-up and kill the weeds but not kill the corn. But, keep in mind that this is not a long term answer, because the weeds will eventually become resistant to the herbicide through natural selection, like they would to any other herbicide, at which point agriculture scientist will have to develop a new GM (geneticly modified) variety. The same prinicple is used to make corn resistant to the corn bore and corn rootworm. This greatly reduces the use of pesticides which may kill beneficial insects. (Just an FYI, corn modified for all three of these traits is called triple stacked). As far as cloning goes, I had a class in a lab that uses cloning to determine gene expression. Think of genes as a house plan, and gene expression as the portion of the plan used to complete a task... a plumber will want to know where the water is, not necessarily the landscaping, the same is true for a muslce gene and say the gene for brown eyes. This is very important in determining the causes and effects of disease.

So, I guess to sum up, at this point, both are very good.... but the some ot their potentials seem bad.... designer children for example (I'm not talking stoping a disease, but say... stopping a big nose and poor athletic skills.... that's bad!)

Answer 2

Genetic engineering is a science, for human it is a tool. You can use it for good or wrong. The problem is when yo make things wrong with your tool. Similar to the chain reaction you can use it to produce energy or destroy. You can make things wrong if you don't take account the possible dangers because of some benefits for some people. The main problem with GE is this. You can make money or make life easier with GE organisms in short term but the long term effects are far from well known. You cannot know if a GM food is OK or poisson which effect is delayed for 20 years. The knowledge of genom is very leaky even so much research is involved. Especially with plants you cannot controll where to insert a gene into the plant's DNA. So "cheap" GM food is a try and error game in long term and is tested on you. Other aspect: when you play with cell cultures to produce insulin it is not problem because your cells exist in the laboratory only and yo can destroy them amytime. But when you grow GE plants in field you cannot just collect every pollen if it reveals that there is problem with your plant. Actually the flagship of GM organisms are crops despite this 2 main threats but they are "easy money". It is not well known for example that degradation of hazardous substances by microorasms is also promising. You can put the substance and the organism into a fermentor so the whole process is controllable and isolated. So it is safe for the environmet and safe for us. But much more difficult to get money for research an innovation.

Answer 3

I would say cloning ios a very bad idea. aside from the moral factor of manipulating mother nature and doing unnatural things, there is the policy factor. the cloning rate of suceass is 1% or less, and most clones will be born wiuth defective hearts, lungs, immune systems, body size, or mental problems, while some will just die in the womb or soon after birth because the moclecules that are in charge of making your brain grow uin your head not your stomach (for example) get scraped off as the scientist inevitably manipulate the DNA. this would constitute as large amount of retarded people loving in our society, sucking up our tax money, and sinmce we couldnt just kill them (come on you have SOME morality)... arg i gotta go. i m,ight anwser more later! BAI

Answer 4

You are right! It is pretty cool that we can do this stuff!

There are always some risks with anything new, but the possible benifits are far greater than the risks.

Answer 5

Con- Bigger population
Pro- Can save your life if you need an implant, blood transfusion, etc

Answer 6

very bad,dont mess with mother nature..