Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Valenzuela

Maysan Road Corner Tongco Street Maysan, Valenzuela City

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

Learning Assessment
Name: Jherjhon C. Morallos
Section: BSA 1-1
Topic: Gene Therapy
The Great Genetic Debates
DNA technology has the potential to improve our lives dramatically. But it also
raises a large number of moral, ethical, social and political issues. You need to choose
at least three topics below and explore its benefits and cost. Give your stand about each
chosen topic.

a. Cloning
Cloning sound pretty cool, but are there any practical reasons why it should be
done? What benefits may arise from cloning animals? What about humans? Should
countries around the world fund or support research into cloning?
Nowadays, cloning is not only limited to the realm of science fiction anymore.
Obviously, cloning has significant potential advantages and several possible
negative consequences. Way back 1996, a female sheep named Dolly was the first
mammal who have been artificially cloned using an adult cell as the source of
genotype. After 276 attempts, Ian Wilmut, a British scientist who finally produced
Dolly. It will enable the researchers to make copies of animals with the potential
benefits in the field of medicine and agriculture. For instance, Wilmut cloned another
sheep which have been genetically modified to produce milk where it contains a
human protein that is essential for blood clotting. Also, cloning animals has its vital
role on building populations of endangered, or possibly even extinct species of
animals. In 2001, researchers produced the first clone of an endangered species: a
type Asian ox known as a guar. Sad to say that the baby guar died just a few days
after its birth. However, obstacles and drawbacks are inevitable, researchers have
observed the existence of adverse health effects in cloning sheep and other
mammals. After only 6 years of life, Dolly died due to rapidly decaying including
progressive lung disease and arthritis. In my perspective, human cloning will surely
face ethical dilemma from a majority of concerned people, as well as opposition from
diverse religions. In our world everything is possible, through human cloning we can
avoid generating children with genetic disease and also we can reproduce
individuals with desirable traits. Yet, the cloning procedure was still unsafe even a
high success rate in animals would not suffice by itself to make human trials morally
 acceptable. I guess that countries around the world would not support cloning after
all the drawbacks and low success rate of cloning happened in the past, as Wilmut
noted, in many cases, the death of the fetus occurs close to term, with devastating
economic, health, and emotional consequences in the case of humans. In with
accordance to Ayala (2015), while in mammals, in general, the animals produced by
cloning will suffer from health handicaps, early death, distorted limbs and
dysfunctional immune systems, and organs, including liver and kidneys, and other
mishaps.

b. Stem Cell Therapy

Scientist believe that human embryonic that stem cells hold the key to treatment
and cures for a wide variety of disease. But others are fundamentally opposed,
on moral grounds, to the use of human embryos for scientific purposes. Should
countries around the globe support or fund research that involves human
embryos?
In my humble opinion, stem cell therapy offers potential for treating
humans who suffering from a disease yet it would require the destruction of
human embryos in the test tube. Therefore, countries should not fund research
that involves human embryos because it entails adverse effects regardless of its
benefit that may bring to injured people. Yet, it was still very promising and
advanced scientific research topic and the development of various treatment
methods has evoked great expectations. Stem cells play an essential role in
regeneration so as they can divide easily to replace dead cells. Historically, the
usage of stem cells in medical research has been controversial due to derivation
of human stem cells from embryo during late 1990s. It creates complex issues
due to different perspective arisen that extracting the stem means destroying the
embryo. I suggest that further research must be conducted on finding another
alternative courses of actions to avoid using human embryo as a therapy
method.

c. Gene Therapy
Gene therapy has the potential to cure diseases such as Parkinson’s disease,
Alzheimer’s and cancer. But the same technology could potentially be used to
make designer babies, “where the parents choose various traits of their offspring,
such as sex, eye, color, height, etc., before they are born. How far should we go?
- I think it will raise many unique ethical concerns if an entity allows to use this
tool to make designer babies. We shouldn’t transcend the prehistoric practice
of random genetic variation through sexual reproduction and natural selection
into new era of designed human. As a rational being, it is a radical choice to
utilize genetic engineering in altering the biological state of a human and it
probably holds consequences that might destroy the humanity itself. Besides,
manipulating inheritable genetic traits has its potential destructive impact on
the framework of our society.