Persuasive Essay On Genetic Engineering

Genetic Engineering Imagine waking up to hunger pangs. Just eat breakfast, right? If you don’t have food, there is a easy solution; you go to the grocery store. However, what if there is no grocery store? Then where will you get food? After a week of no food you desire to eat anything, that feeling you have is an ongoing crisis that poverty stricken countries deal with every day. Ramessar reports 840 million people in developing countries are undernourished and “survive” on less than 2,000 calories per day (Ramessar & et al, 2012). “Many more people, maybe half the world’s population, suffer from diseases caused by dietary deficiencies and inadequate supplies of vitamins and minerals.” (Ramessar & et al, 2012). So how do we create more resilient crops, more lean livestock, and greater quantities of food more efficiently? Genetic engineering is a solution to this problem. Therefore, genetic engineering could and should be used across the world to feed the hungry because it is already a natural process, it can boost economies globally and locally, and it poses no known harm to health and the environment. …show more content…
Jeffery Scott Coker, an assistant professor of biology at Elon University, says that gene mutation is very common in nature, and happens multiple times every day by cells duplicating in our bodies. Our DNA is constantly changing its genetic code. Nature uses bacteria and viruses to deposit their DNA into our DNA. This process changes our DNA through lateral gene transfer, which is the transmission of genes through asexual or sexual reproduction. Given this, our DNA is already very “non-human”, since we are given DNA by bacteria and viruses. Also, our DNA is continuously changing as we encounter new diseases, viruses, and cell mutations. Genetic engineering is no different from nature using microbes to carry out the same process of changing DNA (Coker,