Term Papers on The Promise Of Genetic Engineering

Term Paper Title	The Promise Of Genetic Engineering
# of Words	972
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	3.89

The Promise of Genetic Engineering

David Duong
Ms. Glassow
English Honors I
November, 1998

     A girl is born without Tay-Sachs disease, a devasting genetic disorder that has decimated a lot of babies worldwide.  A leukemia patient has defective bone marrow replaced with healthy bone marrow that was cloned from tissue from her own cells.  These futuristic scenarios are not part of the debate for genetic engineering but they should be.  Many people are afraid that somebody will clone Hitler or some evil person, but that is far from the fact.  Genetic engineering can be used to make many aspects of human life better, including saving lives.
The rapid development of humanity’s ability to control the gene will eventually lead to a promising future for the entire planet as a whole.  Genetic engineering resulted not from the belief that nature should be manipulated and perfected by humanity.  Rather, its principle aim is, as of any other technology, to improve the quality of life for the people of this planet.  Therefore, it is necessary to weigh the benefits and consequences of this relatively recent breakthrough and determine in which ways it can be used to humanity’s best advantage.  This speech will investigate the ways in which genetic engineering affects two important areas in today’s society.  The first one will be the improvement of the world’s agricultural techniques.  With an ever-increasing growth in world population, the Earth’s resources are constantly becoming scarce.  The advent of genetic engineering may be used to avert the occurrence of worldwide famine and starvation.  The second one investigated will be in the field of medical development and study.  Currently, genetic diseases are decimating the world’s population.  Thousands of people have already died without a single worthy treatment or cure.  Worldwide acceptance and support of this technology would aid in our battle against these diseases.
     According to the United Nations medium projections issued in 1990 (Population Council, 1994), the global population will be increasing from 5.3 billion in 1990 to 8.5 billion in the year 2025.  Consequently, there will be a much greater need for food, therefore accelerating further the consumption of Earth’s resources.  To achieve this, it would be necessary to extensively use agricultural technology.  However our current use of pesticides and other chemical fertilizers pose a serious evironmental threat.  Using genetic engineering would ultimately reduce the amount of potentially dangerous chemical substances we introduce into the environment.  It would as well make food production more efficient therefore reducing distribution costs.  Thanks to genetic engineering, Geneticists are currently able to create a resistant strain of the ordinary supermarket tomato (Pendick, 1992).  Using a technique called antisense genetics, the gene that is responsible for allowing tomatoes to soften and ripen can be transformed to produce the opposite effect.  The billions of tomatoes that circulating all around the world can therefore be made to resist the normal abuse of shipping and tran...

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