The Controversy Of Genetic Engineering - 1369 Words

Genetic Engineering, for most individuals not knowledgeable on the topic, conjures visions of sci-fi movies and humans being grown in a lab far off in the future. What more and more individuals in the early 21st century are coming to realize is that Genetic Engineering has already exceeded our wildest imaginations in a dark corner of a lab, outside of the view of the main stream public. Indeed, in 2017, genetic engineering is in full swing on both plant and animal life. Only from hearing major news stories such as Dolly the world s first cloned sheep or GMOs already being a major part of North America s corn production, have the masses been made aware of the sweeping advances that science has been able to make. Now that we as a†¦show more content†¦The paper will also attempt to apply well accepted ethical types to the subject in an effort to shed light on the morality of genetic medication studies and experiments. First of all, a definition of genetic engineering is in orde r. Genetic Engineering is defined by Merriam-Webster as the science of making changes to the genes of a plant or animal to produce a desired result (Genetic Engineering, n.d., para. 1). At first glance, genetic engineering sounds remarkable similar to cloning, which is also a hotly debated bioethical issue that has recently arisen. Cloning, however, differences from genetic engineering in the end result. While genetic engineering allows for pinpointing and transferring a specific gene known to produce specific trait in an organism, cloning is making an exact copy of the organism s DNA (Holtzmann, 2014). It s important to note that both cloning and genetic engineering, in their most rudimentary forms, have been practiced for years. As science has progressed over the years, it has become better at and found new ways of injecting new traits into plants to make them less susceptible to insects in an effort to prevent the erroneous use of pesticides, or to produce larger yields with larg er plants. The end result of these technological innovations: known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have started a worldwide debate as to the environmental