Thursday, January 14, 2010

Can the genes/DNA be altered? As in changing the eye color, hair color, skin color, height,weight.?

What can and what cannot be done?Can the genes/DNA be altered? As in changing the eye color, hair color, skin color, height,weight.?
To answer your question directly - yes.





For the offspring (I'm not using child as this can just as easily apply to other animals, plants etc) when it is in single cell form, it is possible to map the entire DNA and change the bits you want.





For adults this will be much more troublesome, as eye color doesn't just change when you change the DNA - existing cells will not be able to take up the DNA. The eye must be removed, a new one with the right DNA created with a stem cell and inserted back. Quite fiddly.





So basically, this is doable in the future, but it will raise more ethical issues than science issues as we can potentially create super-humans.Can the genes/DNA be altered? As in changing the eye color, hair color, skin color, height,weight.?
Not right now, the current technologies do not allow that.


As I said, if someone does manage to map our entire genome, we could.

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We have only begun to scratch the surface of human genetic engineering.





For example, we have exploited viruses to modify the DNA of a patient's cells in hopes of curing certain diseases (gene therapy). The process involves viruses that can perform reverse transcription and insert viral DNA into the host cellular DNA. This treatment has been pretty successful in helping people with cystic fibrosis.





However, something like weight is very complicated because it is affected by many factors. For instance, we have to find the gene(s) that are the key players for that certain trait. This task is no walk in the park (and that's an understatement). Even if the gene(s) were somehow unequivocally identified and located, we would have to find a way to specifically modify those portion(s) and only those portion(s).





We're not at the point at which we can confidently modify a zygote (or whatever) to produce the results we want. But bear in mind that we have already managed to genetically modify plants to make them more resistant to insects and weather. It's only a matter of time.

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