I was pondering over the breakthroughs in genetic engineering. For example there has been successful cloning attempts, or genetically modified food etc. What do you guys think? Is genetic engineering justified?
I'm not pretty sure what you mean by genetic engineering, but if you do mean like changing the genetic makeup of plants to get higher yield, I think it has its pros and cons. One simple positive impact is of course, higher yield, leading to greater amount of food produced to supply the world. Hopefully this will resolve hunger issues, provided that multinational corporations do have a heart and actually think of these people (which many MNCs don't). However, we need to realise that once we introduce such artificial genes into the environment, it is impossible to retrieve them and remove them from the system or undo the damage which is done to the environment. Plants can cross-breed very easily and if a gene is messed up, they could pass them to other plants and cause large-scale damages.
I was thinking that genetic engineering also applies to humans. Eg. Cloning. Yes genetic engineering does lead to higher yield and it also enables farmers to cut down on pesticide usage because it is now actually possible to genetically engineer plants that no longer attract pests. But what are some of the ethical issues that have been brought up regarding genetic engineering?
Cloning has a lot of implications, especially ethical and moral issues. If you remember Dolly the sheep, while she was being experimented on with cloning, there was a huge public outroar about the morality of "playing God" and creating life as a human. I cannot imagine the amount of outrage that would be present if a human were to be cloned. You could see that one ethical issue is regarding the amount of money that is involved. Only the extremely rich would be able to be cloned in this case. What about the poorer people or your average Joe? This is one ethical issue that we have to consider.
Yes thats true but what about those that have life threatening diseases? (Terminal illnesses such as Stage 3 cancer) The best way to lengthen their lifespan would probably be through cloning. I do agree with the fact that it would only be for the rich but shouldnt it be only exclusive to those who are able to afford it to avoid possible abuse of such technology?
So, what happens if a person has stage 3 cancer like you've mentioned, but unable to pay for their cloning. Does the hospital still help with the cloning? That is what kind of ethical issues I'm talking about - who is "worth" cloning, and who isn't.
