FREE ESSAY ON GENETIC ENGINEERING

GENETIC ENGINEERING

It is a well-known fact that drugs and alcohol can damage the fetus. The drugs may damage
chromosomes in the fetus, which may develop into a deformity, mental problems, or even
addiction to the drug. It is also
possible that a drug damaged the father's sperm cells, which damaged inversely damaged
the fetus.
This information may be used for genetic engineering or cross breeding. If a person where
to crossbreed a type of cucumber that has a good resistance to disease, but tastes bad,
and a cucumber with no immunity
that tastes good, you may get a good tasting disease resistance cucumber. Then again you
may get disease prone bad tasting cucumber. It depends on the dominance of the genes
involved.
Another aspect of genetics is evolution. Evolution is a series of mutations that result
positively. For example, once ducks had no webbing on their feet. Only mutant ducks had
webbing at the time. The mutant
ducks were better swimmers, so they survived attacks from predators while ducks without
webbing did not. Thus only ducks with webbed feet survived, and we have the modern duck.
Man has, supposedly,
evolved from apes in a similar manner.
Both evolution and inherited traits are interesting sciences, which may be important in
the future. It may be possible, someday, to encourage evolution, and perhaps manipulate
traits. I learned... 1. that environment
can affect what a person becomes in life. 2. that evolution is a part of life. 3. birth
defects may be caused if the father uses drugs. 4. that hybrids may or may not be
superior to the originals. 5. that the amount of
chromosomes an animal has does not determine its superiority. (People have 46
chromosomes, potatoes have 48)