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- THE NEW REALITY
BREAKING THE CLONE BARRIER
Summary and comment from TIME MAGAZINE, March 29, 1999.
A Scottish scientist called
Ian Wilmut has
successfully conducted
some amazing experiments
in the field of embryology.
He has succeeded in getting
a cell taken
from an adult mammal to
behave like one from
a developing embryo.
 Until now scientists thought that it was
impossible to deprogram
a differentiated
mammalian cell. However,
Wilmut took just
one cell from adult female
sheep and managed
to clone a sheep called
Dolly, in February,
1997. The experiment was
simple and done
with limited funding.
Wilmut's aim was not to
cause an ethical
earthquake but only to
improve the productivity
of farm animals. However,
an American scientist,
Richard Seed has said that
he intends to
clone humans for commercial
purposes. He
affirmed that cloning is
"the first
serious step toward becoming
one with God."
Is he a Modern Frankenstein? Human Cloning!
Is science fiction about
to become a new
reality?
In fact, the ethical foundations on which
our society is based have
been shaken by
Wilmut's experiment. Some
of the questions
that have been raised are:
Could clones be used as
slaves? Could clones
be used as organ donors?
Do they have a family?
Are they made in God's
image or in man's?
Ian Wilmut himself said
it would be unacceptable
to use his technique to
create a human clone.
Human cloning, he said,
should be banned.
Cloning has been prohibited in most European countries,
Australia and China but
not completely in
the USA. So perhaps a human
clone will be
produced secretly in the
near future. Maybe
the age of Frankenstein
has arrived.
Are we waiting for the first human clone
to be created secretly?
Someone, like Dr. Richard
Rawlins, director
of the in-vitro fertilization
laboratory
for the Rush Health System
in Chicago says
it is only a question of
time before scientists
announce that a human infant
has been cloned.
"In my opinion,"
he said, "all
it takes right now is time,
money and talent."
The only question is who
will do it first,
he added. Perhaps the two
fertility experts
who recently announced
that they wanted to
clone a human, Dr. Panayiotis
Zavos of the
Andrology Institute in
Lexington, and Dr.
Severino Antinori, a fertility
doctor in
Rome. Perhaps it may be
a relative unknown.
***
FIRST CLONED SHEEP DOLLY DIES AT 6
Dolly, the world's first
cloned sheep, has
been euthanized after being
diagnosed with
progressive lung disease,
the Roslin Institute
has said.
CCN.com - February 14, 2003
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- GMO
WILL FRANKENFOOD FEED THE
WORLD?
By Bill Gates
Summary and comment from TIME MAGAZINE, July 3, 2000.
 Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), now
a reality and part of daily
life in the U.S.A.,
have found strong opposition
in Europe and
in all those countries
with long agrarian
traditions. In wealthy
European countries
the concept of genetically
altered food raises
safety and ethical questions,
although some
people say it represents
the possibility
of a better life in the
future, especially
for the developing countries.
In the U.S.A. a third of the corn and more
than half the soy-beans
and cotton are the
product of biotechnology.
Yet, there are
some problems to be faced.
First of all,
GMO must be subjected to
testing. By 2050,
the United Nations Organization
estimates
that the world population
will probably reach
9 billion. Considering
that cultivable land
is declining and will decrease
by half over
the next 50 years, nearly
800 million people
in the world will be undernourished,
suffering
from vitamin and iron deficiencies
and other
diseases caused by lack
of food. Will biotechnology
help to improve this situation?
American scientists are optimistic. They
have already modified rice
with beta-carotene
which is converted by the
body into vitamin
A and iron and they are
working on GM crops.
According to biologists GMO can improve farming
productivity in places
where food shortages
are caused by crop damage
because of pests
such as the European corn
borer which destroys
40 million tons of the
world's corn crops.
Yet there are those who
say that GM pest-resistant
crops might kill good insects
as well as
bad ones. However the biologists
answer that
these are unfounded fears.
Scientists say
that GM virus-resistant
crops can reduce
the damage of massive failure
in staple crops
in developing countries,
as well as being
able to reduce drought-tolerant
seeds in
regions where water shortages
limit the amount
of land under cultivation.
Scientists believe biotechnology could raise
crop productivity in developing
countries,
as a consequence there
are increasing collaborations
between government agencies
and private biotech
firms.
WILL FRANKENFOOD FEED THE WORLD?
Biologists think that biotech promises to
transform agriculture in
many developing
countries.
But, are we sure that GMO are not dangerous
for our health? In Italy
scepticism is greater
especially among some political
parties.
In particular "the
Greens" express
a strong opposition to
the introduction of
GMO. They are fighting
against GMO in Parliament
claiming that we are not
sure of the innocuous
effects on human beings.
They state that
there is not enough proof
to affirm that
modified food is completely
innocuous. Ordinary
people think that GMO are
dangerous.
Today, April 4th 2001, we can read in the
newspaper that someone
set a deposit of GM
seeds on fire in Lodi.
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- GENETIC ENGINEERING
In the USA, micro-organisms, plants and animals,
all results of genetic
manipulations, have
been patented since 1984.
A bacterium and
any other kind of animal
or vegetable that
has a gene added artificially
in a laboratory,
becomes exclusive property
of the scientist
that discovered it, exactly
as happens to
a song or a book. It is
a real ethics revolution.
If the genetically modified organisms become
private property of the
creator, this means
that life does not belong
to nature but it
is mankind's common good.
The risk of creating "monsters"
through genetic modifications,
and here the
parallelism with Frankenstein's
creature
is very strong, halted
to the European research
. With an unexpected vote,
the European Parliament
rejected the "Frankenstein
directive"
which aimed at approving
the possibility
of making a patent for
the results of genetic
research. The investment
for genetic research
has been 400 million dollars
and the whole
project is called "Genome".
The "Genoma Project". The "Genoma Project" aims at knowing
the 3.2 billion biochemical
letters of DNA
in a person's book of life
that are the basis
of the hundred thousand
genes which constitute
the human organism, enough
to be able to
recognize or substitute
the faulty gene which
causes hereditary diseases.
Last summer the
National Institutes of
Health's Human Genoma
Project announced the completion
of a "working
draft" of the human
genome. The final
copy-edit will probably
take another two
years.
Scientists'point of view. The Nobel Prize winner for medicine, Renato
Dulbecco, considers that
the veto from the
European Parliament risks
penalizing Europe
in favour of the U.S. and
Japan. Scientists
affirm that genetic manipulation
can have
almost infinitive applications
which go from
medicine to agriculture
and that it is not
possible to stop the research.
Rockfeller
University biologists,
for instance, have
proved in principle, though
only in mice,
the futuristic concept
known as therapeutic
cloning. The idea is to
take an ordinary
skin cell from a patient,
convert it into
an embryo and use the embryo's
cells to repair
any desired tissue of the
patient's body.
The embryo is destroyed
in the process.
Cloning. Biology is undoubtedly one of the greatest
protagonists of this final
part of the century,
but during the last years
surprising scientific
discoveries have brought
polemics and discussions.
The discovery of the DNA,
the molecule responsible
for the inheritance of
genetic characteristics,
recognized in the 1950s
by Watson and Crick
opened the way to the transformation
of one
organism into another of
the same kind.
It is the process of cloning, a technique
of producing a genetically
identical duplicate
of an organism by replacing
the nucleus of
an unfertilized ovum with
the nucleus of
a body cell from the organism.
Are scientists
like Victor Frankenstein
going to "reproduce"
life in a laboratory, creating
human beings
obtained after an accurate
choice of elements?
Risks of genetic engineering. Nowadays the risks of genetic engineering
and the ethical implications
that some experiments
imply lead us to consider
to what extent
it is allowable.
And again the comparison with Frankenstein
the scientist or the Modern
Prometheus or
the Modern Faust is surprising.
What are
the limits of human knowledge?
An alarm has
been spread with the experiments
of some
American scientists on
the cloning of human
embryos for the purpose
of insemination.
It seems that the American
scientist, Richard
Seed, is ready to double
human beings using
the same procedure adopted
with the famous
sheep Dolly. In the meanwhile
we read in
newspapers dated 5 May
2001 that modified babies have been born in an American laboratory
at the St. Barnabas medical
Center in New
Jersey. The babies, born
from a new method
used to treat infertility,
have genes from
three different "parents"
in their
cells: the infertile mother,
the father who
fertilized the ovum and
the fertile woman
whose ovum was the source
of the additional
cytoplasm which made fertility
possible.The
researchers, among whom
Dr. Jacques Cohen,
assure that there are no
risks for the 30
babies who have been born
worldwide by means
of this technique. They
say that the added
genes appear to have no
effect on the babies
who are healthy. Doubts
remain and some scientists
affirm that it is an alteration
of human
genes. Is it genetic manipulation?
A positive
answer comes from different
parts including
the American scientific
community since cytoplasm
contains mitochondria with
their own genetic
material which is transmitted
to the baby.
Some others, such as the
Nobel Prize Renato
Dulbecco, minimize the
case affirming that
it is not a matter of genetic
manipulation.
However such treatments
which produce permanent
genetic alterations might
not have been approved
without the federal committee's
permission.
But the work was privately
funded and consequently
needed no approvation.
In Italy the Church
and many politicians express
alarm and anxiety
about the case.
GM Food. Genetic manipulation does not affect medicine
only but agriculture, too.
After years of alarmistic tendencies, and
disputes over the security of bio-nourishment
and transgenical plants, the European Parliament
has approved a directive. The new regulation
expects more rigorous controls for the concessions
of GMO cultivation. Firstly they cannot last
more than 10 years, secondly there must be
a public register locating the cultivations
and verifying their impact on the environment
and towards the biological and traditional
agriculture. Lastly, and above all, the European
Union establishes the obligation of a label.
Many people would like to know what guarantee
this label has. The packing of GM Food must
be marked by an asterisk to signal the presence
of GM ingredients so that the consumer can
decide to buy it or not. According to the
directive, the exporters of seeds and flour
have not got the obligation to signal their
products if they are GMO but it is the manufacturer
that has to certify the presence of genetically
modified ingredients in his produced food.
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| clonazione - genetica - organismi geneticamente
modificati - mendel - OGM |
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