Genetic Engineering Essay, Research Paper

Imitating God

Genetic engineering is an unprecedented alliance between bad science and big businesses, which will curse the end of humanity, as we know it. Lately the scientific advancements have been drastically changing the way that we live our lives. It seems everyday that we wake up, there are new products on the market. However the products that the medical fields are hoping to bring out on the market today, are astonishing to any human s eyes, given that the products actually can be made into humans organs and cells, and maybe someday an eye. There are many organizations out in the world today that are fighting against these medical advancements, primarily because of these upcoming three main reasons.

First of all, the world today is overcrowded, and if we began to prolong life it will just get worse. Secondly, there is always the chance that what products the medical companies produce will be bad, and that isn t a chance we should be taking anytime soon. Finally, many people feel that if God didn t give us extra body parts, we should not act like God and try to make them ourselves. So, for these reasons you can see that there are many reasons why people should be frightened; by the power man is receiving every day.

By simply taking a trip to the closest major city, you can see our countries one major problem today, overpopulation. It is a pretty well known estimate that for every one person that is born, one person will die. However imagine if we started to play with humans lives, we would change that statement to, for every three people that are born one person will die. Could you imagine how crowded this world would be? It would be impossible to even drive to work everyday, for there would be millions of more cars on the roads than there are today. Jobs would be even worse; there would be masses of people with no jobs and no way to make money. In turn, this would make our country, and maybe even the entire world very meager, which definitely would not be a good thing. Just the thought of being able to save peoples lives, no matter what happened to them, is kind of scary. This would mean if you had money you had perpetual life. Subsequently, just think about this issue next time the topic of genetic engineering comes up in conversation.

Every year the government is giving away some billions of dollars to be put to use to help increase the food yield to feed the hungry, to improve human health and control population, to purify water, to clean up the environment, and reforest wasteland, in short, to solve all the problems of this world. At the same time, the hazards as well as impacts from the new technology, are consistently glossed over by the use of some of the verbal ploys. For instance, the supposed continuity between conventional biotechnology, which is wine making etc., and modern biotechnology, which is genetic engineering and so on. The doctors claim that this new modern biotechnology is safe and easy, but when explaining it to the public they are using the exact same terms as the people who use conventional biotechnology. This is not surprising at all, given the openly partisan view expressed by the government in favor of the industry. Basically all the government cares about is making money and making it fast.

There have already been serious indications of what can happen when safety is ignored. Unexpected toxins and allergens have been associated with genetically engineered food. The first particular case of this was in 1989, when small contaminants in the amino acid tryptophan, produced by a Japanese biotech company, caused an outbreak of eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome, better known as EMS, which lead to thirty seven deaths and over fifteen thousand infected. After this single event there have been several more cases exactly alike that have taken numerous peoples lives.

In many third world countries there aren t laws that regulate genetic engineering. They can not control the use and sales of genetically altered drugs and chemicals, that have already been put on the market, nor is there any legal requirement that there must be a label noticing the customers of what they are about to buy. This is a very serious issue, because the third world countries are already at a disadvantage health wise, and with a deadly genetically altered pill being passed around hastily, who knows what could happen.

According to the 1996 World Health Organization Report, at least thirty new diseases including AIDS, Ebola, and Hepatitis C, have emerged over the past twenty years, while old infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, and malaria are coming back worldwide. Almost every month we will hear of new breakouts that have occurred, and of many people dying. This is not what the medical doctors were hoping for when they thought of the process of genetically engineering products.

Many groups, especially the religious ones, feel that if god didn t send us down here with spare parts, we are not meant to be manufacturing them. But there are people out there today who still feel, that if they have the technology they have the right to do whatever their minds can deceive, which definitely is not a good way to look at things. Everyday there are ongoing battles between these two groups, trying to prove to the other who s right and who s wrong. But the scientists that are trying to produce new organs and body parts are so stubborn that they will not slow down their innovations at all.

These main problems of genetically altered products and soon to be genetically produced organs are problems that will not get off of our backs any time soon. Who knows, someday these products that are supposedly helping us could be slowly pushing us towards our demise, and if we don t stop them now there will be no hope for our future generations.