Transgenic Organisms Quotes

American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains.

Like other new and potentially powerful technologies, gene editing raises legitimate questions and understandable concerns about possible risks and misuse. How, then, should the technology be regulated? Rules developed decades ago for other forms of genetic engineering do not necessarily fit. Noting that gene-edited organisms are not transgenic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has reasonably concluded that genetically edited plants are like plants with naturally occurring mutations and thus are not subject to special regulations and raise no special safety concerns.

Fiddling with the genetic identities of domesticated plants and animals ever since we had become human. We are the fiddlingest animal the world has ever seen.

If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.

Moreover, the concern of some that moving DNA among species would breach customary breeding barriers and have profound effects on natural evolutionary processes has substantially disappeared as the science revealed that such exchanges occur in nature.

What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.

All the food we eat, whether Brussels sprouts or pork bellies, has been modified by mankind. Genetic engineering is only one particularly powerful way to do what we have been doing for eleven thousand years.

If you can modify a cell, it's only a short step to modifying a mouse, and if you can modify a mouse, it's only a step to modifying a higher animal, even man.

Science fiction went through a period that was mostly object-oriented or inventions for distant galaxies.But when we cracked the genetic DNA code, opened the big Pandora's box, and it really did become possible to produce chimeras, my ears shot up.

Genetically modified foods are good.

The problem with existing biology is you change only one or two genes at a time.

You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed and call it LIFE. You have not created life, instead you have only polluted it.

Right now people are interested in genetic engineering to help the human race. That's a noble cause, and that's where we should be heading. But once we get past that - once we understand what genetic diseases we can deal with - when we start thinking about the future, there's an opportunity to create some new life-forms.

Now we have technology where we can modify the genomics of individuals by gene transfer and genetic meddling, we may find that people will want to modify their children, enhance their intelligence, their strength and their beauty and all the other so-called desirable characteristics.

With worms you can just change genes at random and see if you can find a mutant that does what you want it to do.

I wondered whether the nuclear transfer techniques could be used to introduce purified macro-molecules into an egg, and hence into embryonic cells.