Bioengineering the Future of Humanity

It is predicted that within five years, scientists may be able to create sperm and egg cells from any cell in the body. The university of Wisconsin and Kyoto University have both successfully transformed adult human skin cells into 'pluripotent stem cells', which are capable of self-replication (at this stage it is speculated that they might be able to copy themselves limitlessly) and also have the ability to grow into any type of cell. This development means that Gay couples and infertile couples may have the ability to create a child using DNA from their own skin cells. The development also means that a single person could also provide both of the sex cells needed to have a child. Amazing? Yeah. Incestuous? Ultimately so.
Along with this, there have been developments in Gene targeting, whereby our sex cells may not need to pass on our Genetic traits as they come naturally, but rather through a process called homologous recombination, we can remove the unwanted traits and replace them with helpful ones, gene by gene. Homologous recombination is the process that occurs naturally during sexual reproduction that allows the production of a completely unique new person, however some Nobel-prize winning scientists in 2007, proved that this process could be reproduced in the laboratory in artificially fertilised sex cells. Scientists would be able to 'knock out' stretches of a DNA sequence coding for potential diabetes and replace it with genes that code of intelligence and height, according to the article in Discover magazine in 2009.
The advances in bioengineering effectively put the future of human evolution in the hands of the scientists making these discoveries. However, they raise some serious ethical questions with these advances. Who should decide what changes should be made to the human genome?


Matt Crowley
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From the article “Evolution by Intelligent Design” from the scientific magazine Discover, published online 2 February 2009.
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/mar/02-evolution-by-intelligent-design