mrsculedhel
I don't think that biologists and epidemiologists are going to back away from proven strategies because they were derived from evolutionary theory. I am pretty sure that even fundamentalist Christians will use whatever works, while at the same time finding some way to rationalize how it operates in their own minds or simply ignore its origins. Working with microbes and even animals such as rodents or birds are not really an issue with anyone. Animal breeding and genetic manipulation of plants and animals are cutting edge science that no one dismisses except extreme eco-paranoiacs who worry about meddling with mother nature. Do protestants have any dire worries about this? I think I read once something about putting human genes into other species might be a problem. Does anyone know more about this?
Making customized sequences of DNA is most easily done with a bunch of bacterial enzymes meant for breaking down the DNA they ingest. Now, what that means to anyone who isn't a Biologist is that we've got some chemicals that break up DNA.
So.... how? Well, to break up DNA they cut it- but it's not just straight across both strands of the DNA, it breaks one strand further up than the other so you have a "sticky end" just hanging out there. We can take two sources of DNA, use that chemical on them, and then put them together and they will be happy to stick their ends to each other (since each one of these cutter molecules always cut at the same sequence.)
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Sometimes the two ends from the original thing meet up instead of the ones you wanted so if you don't have any way to pick out stuff of the right size you'd have to you stick these things into lots and lots of cells and then wait and see which ones got the strand you wanted.
Because of this it's really hard to go and put a gene into every cell of an adult organism but since we start off as one cell you've got some good opportunities to deal with an organism with few cells. In mice a lot of the time people would take half of the cells from a blastocyst, stick the genes in them, then wait for the mouse to grow into an adult. If you did something to, say, fur color, then you'd see a mouse with splotches of the different color fur all over them since it only had half of it's cells altered. Now, after the mouse had children you could tell which type of cells ended up as it's reproductive organs and if it's the kind that shows the changes you made then you've just got some mice that have that alteration in 100% of their cells.
We've got an awful lot of those chemicals so you pretty much just need to look at the DNA past the edges of the gene you want to put in something and then look at the genome of the target organism and find some section of junk DNA with the same sequences.
there would be some cases where you would want it in a particular location due to more complicated systems but for simpler purposes it doesn't matter very much where you put it as long as you kept the promoter region intact.
Putting human genes into other things could be rather useful, since you could make a plant that produces insulin and then a diabetic might be able to just eat that plant like they would any other and get their medication in that way.
Well... that's probably pretty unlikely for insulin since you need to control the dosage but you could still produce massive quantities of insulin then just separate it from the other plant stuffs.
We already share a lot of genes with animals and we even share a lot with plants so I'm not too concerned with inserting our genes into them. You don't have to worry about accidentally making sentient plants or anything since it takes a whole lot more than one gene to give us that quality- err, it's the way all of our genes interact with each other that makes us what we are more than the genes themselves. In the same way you wouldn't worry that putting atoms from a human into a plant would make the plant partially human... basically.
Now, it's putting genes from other sources into humans that raises some alarm. Right now we couldn't just grab the right combination of genes to make a cat-person but eventually that probably won't be beyond our ability. It's certainly not something anybody would call ethical right now though so I'm not worried about this either.
At current, about the biggest thing we can practically do to a human's genome would be adding in a gene that got rid of some genetic defect, such as cystic fibrosis- but even then we'd need some way of knowing that a couples next child was going to have that problem long before the child was born.
The way with the mice I mentioned above would be a pretty horrible way to do it with humans but some decades down the road we might just manufacture some altered viruses to go and stick target DNA into cells in a more automated way or we might have some totally unconceived of way to do it.
But as far as I know there aren't any target genes we know about in animals we'd want to stick in humans to create super-people anyway. Maybe in the future but right now we could do little more than guess and check anyway.
At current there's nothing really "big" we could do sans some ridiculous conspiracy theory grade projects that would only technically be possible.
