Genetic Engineering

• Genetic engineering involves finding an organism with a desirable characteristic, such as a plant with lots of big fruit, and transferring the gene responsible for that trait to another organism, effectively modifying the organism's genome by adding a new helpful gene.
• Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) can be created by using the genes of one species to modify organisms of another species.
• Genetic engineering has been used to genetically modify all sorts of organisms, including sheep, bacteria, and crops, for various purposes such as producing substances like drugs in milk, producing the human hormone insulin, and improving the size and quality of fruit.
• Gene therapy, a potential treatment for inherited disorders due to faulty genes, involves giving a person a healthy version of the gene in the hope that it will fix the problem, but it's proving difficult to actually get it to work due to the faulty gene being in all of the person's cells.
• The pros of genetically modified crops include being able to easily make crops have desirable characteristics like more edible fruit or being resistant to disease, which can increase food production in developing countries.
• The main issue with genetically modified crops is that there is currently no evidence that they are bad for human health, but there is also a chance that they could affect our health in the future.
• Another potential problem with genetically modified crops is that they could make their way into the wild where they might out-compete local plants and change the whole ecosystem.
• The first step in genetic engineering is to find the gene that we want and cut it out to isolate it, which is done using enzymes.
• The gene is then inserted into a vector, which could either be a virus or a bacterial plasmid, and is then introduced to the organism of choice, such as a pig or a plant, to start producing the protein that the gene codes for.