Documentation
Getting Started
FAQ
Formatting
Troubleshooting
Program Credits

• genetic engineering October 6 - 12:31 am

genetic engineering is nice. I want to clone a
brussle sprout. Tell me how to do it.

Do people believe that genetic engineering of human embryos should be permitted? Why or why not?

Do you think that genetics/cloning should be used to help keep alive endangered species or bring back extinct ones?
Where can I find information about this?

With reference to Bob, dated April 15th:
Cloning a brussel sprout is easy! Plants have the ability to grow into whole new plants from just a single cell if the conditions are right.
Taking and cultivating a cutting of a plant is the same as making a clone of it. In this case a cell from the said sprout would be needed, just regenerate it on an appropriate media.
Cloning animals is harder because once animal cells have "differentiated" it is not possible to make them "totipotent"(able to grow into any cell in the body). Cloning of Dolly involved putting a mature nucleus into an egg cell (the cytoplasm of which reprogrammed the nucleus).
ANYWAY THIS ISN'T STRICTLY GENETIC ENGINEERING AND SHOULDN'T BE HERE.

Personally, I don't think human beings should be genetically engineered in ANY way just yet. New techniques are coming out that allow medicines to be created that serve the exact same function as a certain gene. If you are missing a gene, these medicines can replace it. In other words, it's the same thing as genetic engineering, but it can be turned on and off AT WILL.
As for embryos, definitely not. We aren't talking about heart surgery here; this is an irreversible change to the genetic structure of a person that will forever play a role in determining who he is.

I have always been of the mind that we must never stop learning and should always strive to better the human species so that we might "be all we can be" (which actually would never happen since we should never stop bettering ourselves). I think it is likely that there are advanced civilizations on other worlds we have yet to discover. I think we should overcome our superstitions and dogmatic philosophies. We ought to explore all avenues for possible advancement that exist and will exist. We should pursue genetic engineering with extreme caution, but nevertheless we should pursue it and learn all we can from it. All research needs management and regulation, but if we consider any form of research, experimentation, and pursuit of knowledge to be "taboo" (within reason) then we have pointlessly crippled ourselves and our ability to learn and evolve.