Genetic Modification: What is it and should I care?
While this heading may conjure up images from sci-fi movies such as Splice, worry not and stay with me (Please do. As a person who struggles with writing, it would be a great boost to my ego). Mankind has always tried to prove its dominance over nature and natural creations. One of the latest strides in this power play is the control achieved over one of the most fundamental building blocks of living beings- willful command over Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA).
Scientists recently developed a system known as CRISPR. No, this is not the newest innovation in chip technology patented by Lays. CRISPR stands for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats”. It was originally seen as part of a bacterial defence system that evolved to destroy foreign DNA that entered a bacterium. But this system is also capable of editing DNA — and now geneticists have honed the technology to alter DNA sequences that we specify.
If you are anything like me, you are probably wondering whether these can be used on humans. Optimistically speaking, yes. I know what you’re probably thinking- “But, Aditya, why on God’s green earth should I care?”. I’ll tell you why. It’s because the real world applications to this are endless. Read- 1. Altering the genotype of crop plants to make them more productive, nutritious, rich in proteins, disease resistant, and less fertilizer consuming. Recombinant DNA technology and tissue culture techniques can produce high- yielding cereals, pulses and vegetable crops.
2. Microorganisms and plant-based substances are now being manipulated to produce a large number of useful drugs, vaccines, enzymes and hormones at low costs. Genetic engineering is concerned with the study of inheritance pattern of diseases in man and collection of human genes that could provide a complete map for inheritance of healthy individuals.
3. Modifying a foetus’s genetic code to prevent currently incurable diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and genetic cancer to name but two. Unfortunately, this kind of genome modification (called germline modification) has been banned in over 40 countries. Depending on how you look at it, this may be a good thing. One possible boon is that our world may not get infested with babies looking like this-
Okay. Okay. You and I both know that I’m just kidding with you. Or am I? The truth of the matter is that genetic engineering is definitely something that will revolutionize the world in times to come and we must be prepared for this change by passing fair and just laws that neither undermine nor overplay this hand which science has dealt us. Also, that baby looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger as a child.
If you liked this article, be sure to clap so that other people will be able to see this article too(Definitely not because of the massive stoking that my ego will get from it. Nope. Not at all;) )
