“I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and convulsive motion agitated its limbs […] His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful” (Shelley 287). In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein gives life to a creature he had spliced together from the remains of bodies in the local cemetery. And just as Victor Frankenstein spliced together his monster, scientists around the globe are splicing together DNA sequences from multiple organisms in order to create genetically altered foods and viruses. The first genetically engineered organism garnered worldwide attention in 1973, when Herb Boyer and Stanley Cohen created the first recombinant DNA organism by joining a gene from the
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Researchers were able to splice together the virus protein of a previous vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease with the DNA of E. coli in order to produce bacteria that reproduced the vaccine protein at a much faster rate, which reduced the risk the previous vaccine posed of introducing foot-and-mouth disease to its host. Before this vaccine, foot-and-mouth disease could decimate a countries’ livestock, as it did in 1967 when the United Kingdom was forced to slaughter 442,000 animals at an estimated loss of 370 million British pounds. While the vaccine has yet to eradicate foot-and-mouth disease, it has curved the impact foot-and-mouth disease has had on farmers (“Science: More Magic from Gene Splicing”). Many would place blame on the science or scientist if a gene splicing or similar experiment were to go wrong, however this blame would be misplaced. As J. Michael Bishop points out in his essay “Enemies of Promise,” critiques often blame science for what is in reality “the failures of individuals or society to use the knowledge that science has provided” (306). Scientists need to free of restrictions to envision all feasible solutions to a
Researchers were able to splice together the virus protein of a previous vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease with the DNA of E. coli in order to produce bacteria that reproduced the vaccine protein at a much faster rate, which reduced the risk the previous vaccine posed of introducing foot-and-mouth disease to its host. Before this vaccine, foot-and-mouth disease could decimate a countries’ livestock, as it did in 1967 when the United Kingdom was forced to slaughter 442,000 animals at an estimated loss of 370 million British pounds. While the vaccine has yet to eradicate foot-and-mouth disease, it has curved the impact foot-and-mouth disease has had on farmers (“Science: More Magic from Gene Splicing”). Many would place blame on the science or scientist if a gene splicing or similar experiment were to go wrong, however this blame would be misplaced. As J. Michael Bishop points out in his essay “Enemies of Promise,” critiques often blame science for what is in reality “the failures of individuals or society to use the knowledge that science has provided” (306). Scientists need to free of restrictions to envision all feasible solutions to a