Gene Therapy Argumentative Essay

In the past 40 years, scientists have developed and applied genetic engineering to alter the genetic make-up of organisms by manipulating their DNA. Scientists can use restriction enzymes to slice up a piece of DNA from an organism with the characteristics they want and spliced (joint) to a DNA from another organism. DNA that contains pieces from different species is called recombinant DNA, and it now has different genetic material from its original. When this DNA inserted back into the organism, it changes the organism’s trait. This technique is known as gene-splicing (Farndon 19).

Genetic engineering is now being used to create new medicines and therapies for many disorders and diseases, and also to improve agricultural plants and animals to produce bigger yields or enhanced nutrient composition and food quality. In Gene therapy, copies of healthy human genes produced in bacteria can be inserted into human cells with defective or missing genes, to fix the problem. Gene therapy is promising because it can use to treat genetic

It was a treatment for a four-year-old girl named Ashanthi DeSilva, who were born with an adenosine deaminase (ADA) deficiency, an autosomal recessive disorder that affect the immune system. Her doctors genetically modified her defective immune cells to function as normal ones. Then, they used a virus that also had been genetically modified to remove its harmful genes to deliver the corrected immune cells back to her body. This early success led to many other gene therapy trials in the 1990s for different kinds of genetic diseases, until a tragic setback happened. In September 1999, Jesse Gelsinger became the first person who died after undergone a gene therapy for ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC) deficiency, a rare metabolic disorder. He died from massive organ failure caused by a bad reaction of his immune system to the virus used in the therapy (Thompson