How many treatments does genetic engineering provide?

Question

Can someone give me an estimate? Like over 100 or 1000 or 10? something like that. and if u can please provide a source.

Answer 1

If you are asking how many diseases are treated directly by genetic engineering, the answer is currently zero. There are experimental treatments being tried for cancer, diabetes, hemophilia and a few other diseases (maybe a dozen or two), but even these have had enough major setbacks that I know of nobody who would consider genetic engineering on humans to be even close to an accepted practice. See link 1.

On the other hand, there are quite a few significant medicines being produced mostly or entirely by creatures that have been engineered to make them. These include insulin, human growth hormone, interferon, and a variety of other things that you aren't likely to have heard of (link 2). Medicines rarely have just one use, so each of these may be given for dozens of different diseases on their own. So if you include these, there are easily hundreds of diseases that are now treatable (or INEXPENSIVELY treatable) only because of genetic engineering.

And though it doesn't get quite as much press, we have been engineering plants in a crude way about as long as we have been cultivating them. The crops farmers grow often as little resemblance to their wild types as poodles do to the wolves that all dogs originally came from. Genetic engineering has taken that one step further, allowing us to much more easily produce crops that produce vitamins that populations are otherwise deficient in. But it might be fair to include just about every nutritional need we have on the list of diseases treated by genetic engineering because without modern crops only a fraction of the world's population would have enough food to survive. Link 3 is a good start for this and other genetic engineering issues.

Answer 2

I'm not a genetic engineer nor a psychologist, but I feel I can speak about this because I have an identical twin. Yes, we have the same DNA, and we grew up together, so it's neither nature nor nurture, and no one was happier than he when he figured out that not everything about was was identical. I don't think we'll ever figure out what makes people the way they are, but scientists will always come up with theories, only to be debunked in a few decades.