• Question: Do you agree with Genetic Engineering?

    Asked by matt5495 to Andrew, Emma, Marianne on 17 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      I suspect you have a specific aspect of genetic engineering in mind. In general I do agree with it and have been involved in it. We use genetically modified bacteria to do some of our work (and then we modify them some more!). It’s less dramatic than it sounds.

      I have made a new protein by sticking 2 different proteins together. You do this by manipulating the DNA available to a bacteria so that it starts to prefer to make the protein you’re interested in.

      Often these kind of genetic changes make the bacteria less fit than an average bacteria so they’re unlikely to survive outside the lab let alone go on the rampage and eat people’s faces…(Or whatever movie scenario you had in mind)

    • Photo: Andrew Maynard

      Andrew Maynard answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Hi matt5495,

      Interesting question. I have no problems with people modifying the genetic code of organisms to make them better in some way – after all, we’ve been doing this for tens of thousands of years through selective breeding; we’re just getting a lot better at modifying organisms genetically these days.

      But I do think we need to be very careful that what we do is safe and ethical. And that means trying to work out what the consequences of genetic engineering might be, and how to prevent bad things happening. It also means thinking about the social consequences – like who decides what is done, who gets the benefits and who pays the price?

      What do you think about the idea of genetic engineering?

    • Photo: Marianne Baker

      Marianne Baker answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Certainly, matt…

      We do it all the time.

      Without it, we wouldn’t have good treatments for diabetes or any other illness that, for example, requires human hormone injections (people used to get them from pigs or dead people!! That, as you can imagine, is hardly ideal – now we get bacteria to make tonnes of it for us).

      Also it’s probably our best shot at solving world hunger; engineering drought and disease-resistant crops for example.

      We have used genetic engineering to understand the functions of many human genes and genes in other organisms. Without this, we wouldn’t understand many diseases as well as we do now. We’re still learning, though.

      Genetic engineering has been fantastically useful since genetics began!

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