Concerns about Genetic Engineering

There are many different beliefs about genetic engineering. To start, what genetic engineering is the changing of DNA. Genetic engineering can be done to any organism including foods and viruses. One famous genetic engineering scientists is George Church who owns his own laboratory at Harvard Medical School. A different person named Luhan Yang who is a Harvard recruit from Beijing believes that it is very possible to genetically engineer human beings. Luhan Yang even went as far as to say that Harvard's laboratory was working on a project to see if it was completely achievable.  It may be even possible to fix disease genes by changing the DNA. It is believed that it may be possible to in the future put special genes in your body that protect you from certain diseases. Some new technology that that is being developed for these purposes to change DNA is called CRISPR-Cas9.

Although genetically engineering babies allows you to prevent diseases, it also makes us ask the question are we gonna be able to choose everything about are children. Also is choosing how are children act and look a good or bad thing? In my opinion I think that although I would love to protect my children from diseases, but I don't like the idea of being able to control what my child is. Also although we have know about DNA's structure for sixty years we have taken a very long time to get to where we are now and who knows how long it may take before we even have the technology available in order to do genetic engineering.Some of the things that genetic engineering could do for the whole world which would change the way we live is that it could wipe out some diseases and even change our whole ecosystem. Although genetic engineering can be a do many good things for humanity it has been shown that it is not an easy call of to go through with it or not. Because once you start this it may be extremely difficult to stop.

To help make a call, in Washington DC many experts, ethicists, lawyers, and curious everyday people gathered to discuss genetic engineering. They discuss how although technology to eliminate disease may be available, it is unknown what can all go wrong. Jennifer Doudna who has been awarded   a Nobel Prize worries about genetic engineering. Jennifer said, Human-germline editing for the purposes of creating genome-modified humans should not proceed at this time, partly because of the unknown social consequences, but also because the technology and our knowledge of the human genome are simply not ready to do so safely.

Also another concern of genetic engineering is that if we control what the future what future generations are like, it would take away the diversity in the world. Also in my opinion it may even cause the generations to be almost like robots that are genetically made to do one task their whole life. So to conclude although genetic engineering can have many strengths and good improvements I believe that we should find another way of gaining what genetic engineering gives up. Because genetic engineering's cons outweigh its pros.

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