Gene Yang

The possible prevention of a disease or enhancing a trait is not worth potentially harming or ruining your child’s life. Around 95% of all gene therapy process results in failures, including disorders, gene mutations or even death (Bohlin). In other words, there is a less than 5% chance that the child will receive the positive, intended results. With these success rates it’s important to ask if it’s worth the chance of doing permanent damage to a child who didn’t even have a say in this process.…

Engineering was intended only to modify the genetic makeup of someone or something. (“What Is Genetic Engineering?”). But it is believed that one day the overuse of genetic engineering can lead to a serious epidemic. The controversy of modifying a gene…

Gene Therapy and Genetic Engineering in Human Beings We, as human beings, all start off the same way. A lucky sperm meets an egg and forms the beginning of a whole new life. From that very moment it is predetermined in our DNA that we will have a certain color of hair, be of a certain height, and what color that our eyes will be. Then, approximately nine months later we are welcomed into the world carrying with us every trait that our DNA tells us to have. People will come in to see the miracle…

13. Our advantage in the “survive and reproduce race” is that we are intelligent. We know that we want to reproduce and survive. We learn mechanisms or tactics to protect ourselves and survive. An example of this is antibiotics. The author describes the battle between bacteria and antibiotics as an “Arm race” because whenever new antibiotics are introduced or discovered bacteria always develop resistance to it. An example is penicillin when it first came out in 1928, it worked great but 22 years…

World Book Student defines genetic engineering as “techniques that alter the genes (hereditary material) or combination of genes in an organism… Beginning in the 1970’s, scientists developed ways to reintroduce individual genes into cells or into plants, animals, or other organisms” (Rubenstein, 2015). Genetic engineering is a controversial subject not only in science but also in popular culture. Some research, such as stem cell research, has led to serious questions concerning ethics. Other…

Have you ever imagined the world with an identical copy of you? If you have you know it can be a terrifying thought. Duplicating ones – self would be walking in a world of no individuality. The world would lack diversity if nobody ever had the chance to be unique. Scientists are fascinated with the idea of cloning. You may ask, what is cloning? Cloning is the production of an organism with genetic material identical to that of another organism (Seidel 1).One’s physical character and behavioral…

aeruginosa as measured by a Miller (beta-galactosidase) assay. I will test the reporter strains PlacP1-lacZ to confirm that pJN105 does not affect transcription of Vfr, another gene involved in T3SS regulation. I will also examine the activity of transcriptional reporters for the exsD, rsmY, and rsmZ genes to confirm that these genes are reciprocally affected by the plasmid, as previously observed. PexsD-lacZ activity should decrease when carrying an empty vector and PrsmY-lacZ activity…

Gene Therapy: The concept of gene therapy emerged in the 1970s. The basic premise of gene therapy is using DNA enclosed in a vector as a therapeutic treatment for diseases. In the decades after it was conceptualized, many clinical trials of gene therapy were developed but stalled in phase I or phase II. During the 90s, only 1% of gene therapy trials made it to phase III and none of them went past phase III. The excitement for gene therapy was reduced when a participant of a clinical trial died…

mutations, gene flow, and non-random mating. Mutations involve a permanent change in the DNA sequence of an organism. Mutations can be beneficial, neutral, detrimental, or fatal to organisms. Mutations are passed on from parent to offspring and can cause evolution by increasing the size of the gene pool. Another mechanism of evolution is gene flow. Gene flow takes place when organisms immigrate or emigrate from a population permanently. This can can either increase or decrease in the gene pool…

that their study was constrained by the limited number of samples with appropriately preserved DNA and by the fact that mitochondrial DNA is inherently sex linked. They thus theorised that Neandertals may have possible contributed a small number of genes to contemporary humans, which may have been lost to genetic drift. Ghirotto, S., Tassi, F., Benazzo, A. & Barbujani, G. (2011). No evidence of Neandertal admixture in the mitochondrial genomes of early European modern humans and contemporary…