Risks Involved with The Human Genome Project
The man in the black suit solemnly steps out of the car. His wife scrambles to catch up with his swift pace. She offers an encouraging tone or two, but the man doesn’t listen. He plunges through the brass, a genetically altered combination of the common bush and grass species, both eyes set on his house. The next-door neighbors dash over to interrogate the deserted wife. The neighbors appear instantaneously in hot pink, plastic body suits, with tanks of oxygen attached to their backs. (This elaborate outfit, for those who may not know, is a common protection against identity impersonation. The decoding of the human genome inadvertently supplies criminals with an ideal method to steal another person’s identity; identity thieves need only a single cell from a person to detect everything about him or her. Body suits, in addition to setting a fashionable trend, safe-guard against this possibility by trapping all cells within the suit itself.)
The wife struggles to suppress a deluge of tears as she warmly hugs her plastic encased neighbors. She briefly relates the day’s events. Her husband lost the court case. He was accused of harboring the gene for prostate cancer, and after a simple genetic test, the accusation was confirmed. Her husband had twenty-four hours to move into a quarantined house, located in an abandoned section of the city. He would live there indefinitely with other potential prostate cancer victims. By isolating all people predisposed to prostate cancer, officials hope to eliminate prostate cancer from the gene pool. The wife is purely devastated that reality is manifesting itself so harshly in her life. The neighbors attempt to console her, but they are quite reli...
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...tter than another. It can be difficult to discern where exactly the comparisons should cease.
The Human Genome Project deserves to have a few cautious skeptics. A breakthrough of this magnitude needs to be carefully examined before assimilated into our culture. Yet, at the same time, this breakthrough has become the very epitome of engineering feats for mankind. My mixed feelings parallel an exemplary quote from The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist by Richard Feynman. “Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tight ropes of logic on which one has to walk, in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen” (15).
Work Cited
Feynman, Richard P. The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist. Reading:
Perseus Books, 1998.
In “Westbury Court,” author Edwidge Danticat tells the readers about how one drastic event in her childhood can completely change her whole life. Danticat grew up in an apartment in a seemingly unprivileged area called Westbury Court in Brooklyn, New York. One day after school, she came home with her younger brother and immediately turned on the television to watch her favorite show. Suddenly, she and her show were interrupted by an abrupt knock on the apartment’s door. Apparently, there was a deadly fire coming from the apartment across from theirs. By then, Danticat realizes the importance of the phrase that her mother told her after the tragedy, “Sometimes
Lewicki, J. R., Barry, B., & Saunders, M. D. (2010). Negotiation: Readings, exercises and cases
When Mrs Hale and Mrs. Peters first walk into Minnie Wrights house, they see how lonely and unkept her house was. The men could not understand why a woman would keep her house in that condition, but the women determine how sad and depressed Mrs. Wright was. "'I might 'a' known she needed help! I tell you, it's queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it's all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren't—why do you and I underst...
The more we know about genetics and the building blocks of life the closer we get to being capable of cloning a human. The study of chromosomes and DNA strains has been going on for years. In 1990, the Unites States Government founded the Human Genome Project (HGP). This program was to research and study the estimated 80,000 human genes and determine the sequences of 3 billion DNA molecules. Knowing and being able to examine each sequence could change how humans respond to diseases, viruses, and toxins common to everyday life. With the technology of today the HGP expects to have a blueprint of all human DNA sequences by the spring of 2000. This accomplishment, even though not cloning, presents other new issues for individuals and society. For this reason the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) was brought in to identify and address these issues. They operate to secure the individuals rights to those who contribute DNA samples for studies. The ELSI, being the biggest bioethics program, has to decide on important factors when an individual’s personal DNA is calculated. Such factors would include; who would have access to the information, who controls and protects the information and when to use it? Along with these concerns, the ESLI tries to prepare for the estimated impacts that genetic advances could be responsible for in the near future. The availability of such information is becoming to broad and one needs to be concerned where society is going with it.
One of society’s problems is that the wrong people are convicted of a crime they did not commit. None have more dire consequences on those than who are wrongly convicted of rape and murder. The punishment for these crimes are as harsh as possible to deter the crimes and when wrongly convicted, the wrong person gets punished while the true perpetrator gets away. In order to increase the chance of convicting the true perpetrator of the crime, the tools to find and convict criminals had to be refined. And it was refined due to extensive research into DNA. This research was done by Alec Jeffreys and Vicky Wilson, the research’s technician, and it found that in the massive amount of junk codes, there exists many repetitious codes that have copied so many times that it varies from person to person. (Ridley 132) This means that people can be identified with only their DNA from their hair, fluids, skin, etc. This discovery has led to convictions of rapists and murderers such as the Pickford case that Ridley wrote about. It has also led to the sentences of many wrongly convicted people to be retracted and this had led to the release of about 200 people known as the DNA 200. (Phelan) Now, most of the world keeps criminals’ genotype information in order to identify repeat offenders. In the United States, every state requires that every convicted
Curare, also known scientifically as, Chondrodendron tomentosum is a substance which is bitter and grows on the stems and barks of some South American plants. Curare is known to paralyze the motor nerves. Traditionally, curare was used by South American Indians to poison their arrows by combining the curare obtained from plants and various poisons from animals and then mix everything up to make syrup like substance. The Indians then would coat the syrup on to their arrows and use the arrows to kill prey and later eat them.
Leroy Moffit is a truck driver, and over the years as his wife Norma Jean is adapting to the changing community his adaptation to things consist of pretty much the way he drives his truck. During this time Norma Jean is left at home to fend for herself and learn the workings of nearly being a single woman. Norma Jean started to play the organ again, practice weight lifting, and take night classes. When Leroy came home after years of being saturated in his work he expected things to be like they were in the beginning of their marriage. As time goes on at home, Leroy takes notice to Norma Jean’s keen, and independent understanding of what goes on around her. He observes and is afraid to admit that she has had to be her own husband. Over the years Norma Jean developed a structured routine that does not include him. As Leroy sits around and plays with a model log cabin set Norma is constantly working to advance and adapt herself with ...
Before the 1980s, courts relied on testimony and eyewitness accounts as a main source of evidence. Notoriously unreliable, these techniques have since faded away to the stunning reliability of DNA forensics. In 1984, British geneticist Alec Jeffreys of the University of Leicester discovered an interesting new marker in the human genome. Most DNA information is the same in every human, but the junk code between genes is unique to every person. Junk DNA used for investigative purposes can be found in blood, saliva, perspiration, sexual fluid, skin tissue, bone marrow, dental pulp, and hair follicles (Butler, 2011). By analyzing this junk code, Jeffreys found certain sequences of 10 to 100 base pairs repeated multiple times. These tandem repeats are also the same for all people, but the number of repetitions is highly variable. Before this discovery, a drop of blood at a crime scene could only reveal a person’s blood type, plus a few proteins unique to certain people. Now DNA forensics can expose a person’s gender, race, susceptibility to diseases, and even propensity for high aggression or drug abuse (Butler, 2011). More importantly, the certainty of DNA evidence is extremely powerful in court. Astounded at this technology’s almost perfect accuracy, the FBI changed the name of its Serology Unit to the DNA Analysis Unit in 1988 when they began accepting requests for DNA comparisons (Using DNA to Solve Crimes, 2014).
As a child, Lisa was able to witness the true and pure love of her parents. Her mother was diagnosed with cancer and decided that it would be best if she said goodbye to her family before it got worse because she didn’t want her children to see her waste away. She remembers how her father went through hoops to get permits and permission to build a sandbox that was visible from her m...
“Sleep deprivation is epidemic among adolescents, with potentially serious impacts on mental and physical health, safety, and learning. Most teenagers undergo a biological shift to a later sleep-wake up cycle, which can make early school start times particularly challenging.” says Boergers.
Lewicki, R. J., Saunders, D. M., & Barry, B. (2006). Negotiation Readings, Exercises, and Cases Fifth Ed. Bill Brubaker, Mark Asher, A Power Play for Howard Negotiation (pp. 616-626). New York, NY: Mcgraw-Hill Irwin.
You may think that you have full control over your body, the way you may look, how you dress, and even how you do your own makeup. You have control over your hair color, how much knowledge you have, and even how strong you can be, but could you imagine having control over how tall you would like to be, the color of your eyes, and potentially the color of your very skin? Can you imagine altering EVERY aspect of yourself, including the omission of disease? These are some of the questions that the USDE hoped to find solutions to through The Genome Project.
David staggers into the kitchen of the old wooden home where his wife is washing the dishes. As she scrubs a pot he can see that she is raw with exhaustion and jittery with coffee. David holds the letter out to his wife, not wanting to meet her eyes. He stammers that it’s time to move and sell the farm, ashamed that there is no other option. When his wife lifts her head from the notice, the turmoil he was feeling was not reflected in her face.
Scientists and the general population favor genetic engineering because of the effects it has for the future generation; the advanced technology has helped our society to freely perform any improvements. Genetic engineering is currently an effective yet dangerous way to make this statement tangible. Though it may sound easy and harmless to change one’s genetic code, the conflicts do not only involve the scientific possibilities but also the human morals and ethics. When the scientists first used mice to practice this experiment, they “improved learning and memory” but showed an “increased sensitivity to pain.” The experiment has proven that while the result are favorable, there is a low percentage of success rate. Therefore, scientists have concluded that the resources they currently own will not allow an approval from the society to continually code new genes. While coding a new set of genes for people may be a benefitting idea, some people oppose this idea.
It was late and the house was silent. Tom came home from work late a lot, so the silence was expected. By this time, Marie was in bed and his dinner, the evening newspaper, and the mail were waiting for him on the table. Tom closed the door and walked down the short hall to the kitchen. Everything was set on the table. He quickly looked through the mail and went over to the bin to throw an unwanted advertisement away. Tom noticed a crumpled piece of his wife’s stationary inside. He picked it up and opened it.