Well, my paper is due in about 3 and half hours! I haven't time to cite my sources, but I need to you guys to read my paper so I can change my sentence structure and style or I would have a bad grade on this paper. Don't worry about grammer!
Here is my almost finished paper and please help me out! Note:It doesn't have a conclusion and there are more argumentsfor me to write!
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Binh Bui
Mrs. Wallenberg
Advanced English 12/Hour 2
10 January 2007
Genetic Engineering Is the Next Step in Evolution
Henry I. Miller, a researcher at the Hoover Institution and Gregory Conko, director of
food safety policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, they both claim that genetic
engineering has the ability to obtain results in improvements in agriculture and in life-saving
medicines. They disagree with accusations that are cipher those products that are genetically
engineered that threat children’s health which discourage the use of these products that could
actually save children’s lives. There are always people who are skeptic about the consequences
provided by genetic engineering unless there are more people that can influence others about the
benefits of genetic engineering. The benefits of genetic engineering that it has to offer should not
be impede just because of some special-interest groups out there are using it as a scapegoat for
their own ethnical issue.
According to Ron Epstein, a research professor at the Institute for World Religions in
Berkeley, California, he believed that the long-term negative effects of genetic engineering
exceed the short-term benefits it has to offer. It is a fact that genetic engineering does not poses
a threat to mankind just because modification of organisms at the basic genetic level existed for
at least back to 6000 BC when the Babylonians used microorganisms in the process of
fermentation to brew alcoholic beverages and there are many scientific bodies, including the
World Health Organization, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, have studied on modern
biotechnology and arrived at conclusions that they are safe.
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Many skeptics, including Ron Epstein, believes that genetic engineering is a threat to the
environment and human because of genetically engineered pathogens that either be use in
biowarfare, recombined in a toxic form from harmless, rapidly mutating engineered organisms,
or release into the environment by accident. In reality, there are no effective means of
transportation to deliver mutated pathogens to be used as biological weapons and there was a
Japanese terrorist group that interested a lot of money into making deadly pathogens with no
prevail.
Some people believe that genetic engineering have a possibly of causing harm to the
future of the human race if we genetic engineer our children which would support why genetic
engineering of humans is largely unethical. Bernard Gert, the Eunice and Julian Cohen Professor
for the Study of Ethics and Human Values at Dartmouth College, stated:
“... genetic therapy risks great harm for many in future generations and that there is not
sufficient harm prevented to justify these risks. Genetic therapy, like genetic
enhancement, not only is permanent during the entire lifetime of the affected individual,
the transgene becomes inheritably transmitted to countless members of future
generations.
Advocates that support genetic engineering of humans is ethical it is because genetic
engineering prevent our children from getting undesirable genes that can give them life-
threatening illnesses. Also, it is our duty to use our intellect to pursuit for more knowledge and
achieve new scientific breakthrough. An example of a scientific breakthrough is found in Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein when Victor’s mind precluded into thinking about making his creation, he
questioned himself, “Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? Another
reason why genetic engineering of humans is ethical is that Oliver Morton, a contributing editor
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at Wired magazine editor at Wired magazine stated:
“Biology, after all, is about life, not nature. It’s just an accident of history that, until
recently, everything alive was more or less natural. Nature is a record of 4 billion years
of life’s successes, written in the language of the genes. Biology’s new strength comes
from being able to read that record; cracking the genetic code has ushered in one of those
wonderful eras of scientific progress when new discoveries keep leading to new
techniques with which yet discoveries can be made.”
Advocates including Bernard Gert claims that genetic engineering is an unethical ordeal
it is back up by the fact that positive eugenics or genetic enhancements is morally wrong just
because it is dealing with something we do not know that there are risks.
Advocates opposes this because they believe that that a species’ genetic variation affords
evolutionary plasticity or there is a potential for new subsequent adaptation.
Lee M. Silver, a molecular biologist and the author of Remaking Eden: Cloning and
Beyond in a Brave New World, who believe that human cloning is ethical quoted, “Real human
clones will simply be later-born identical twins—nothing more and nothing less.” According to
Lee M. Silver, he concluded that most people are against human cloning because of religious
beliefs that he feels are not good enough to influence public policy to be on their side on human
cloning.
E.V. Kontorovich, a writer living in New York, who claims that human cloning, is
unethical quoted, “Cloning would take the humanity out of human reproduction, and in doing so
rob our spirits of something that cannot be replaced artificially.” According to him, he believe
that the relationship between the cloned child and their parent would be awkward, and the clone
might be viewed as an economic good that as made than rather a person who was born. Also, it
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is unethical that the scientists harvest organs from cloned human fetuses.
People who are on the same side as Lee M. Silver believe than cloned children will be no
different in biological terms from everybody else of the species. According to Lee, one of the
reasons why there are so many scholars, ethicists, and scientists that oppose human cloning
it is because they wonder if it is safe or not. Since the cloning process has not been proven to be
safe and its applications toward generation of newborn children could have negative
consequences such as birth defects. Secondly, they are afraid of the psychological effect of the
cloned child even if the physical defects are preventable. And at last, the skeptics are worried
about the negative effect that cloning will have an impact on the whole society. His reason
about would why people make these excuses up to oppose human cloning stated:
“They have latched on to arguments about safety, psychology, and society because they
are simply unable to come up with an ethical argument that is not based on the religious
notion that by cloning human beings man will be playing God and it is wrong to play
God.”
Kontorovich like other advocates who are against human cloning believe that human
cloning will be an advance where it will undermines the human race in the long run. That is
there is a good reason that all higher life forms are reproduced through the process of random
combination of the DNA by the two parents. In respond to changes in the environmental
changes, the genotypes goes through constant change, failure to vary the genotype would creates
genetic stagnation that can be harmful to all forms of life.
People that are for human cloning and it is ethical including Lee M. Silver agree that
human cloning will not harm society because if human cloning is going to become legal, the
cloned children would only be accounted for a fraction of a percent of all the children born into
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world.