Gene Therapy Argumentative Essay

In the past 40 years, scientists have developed and applied genetic engineering to alter the genetic make-up of organisms by manipulating their DNA. Scientists can use restriction enzymes to slice up a piece of DNA from an organism with the characteristics they want and spliced (joint) to a DNA from another organism. DNA that contains pieces from different species is called recombinant DNA, and it now has different genetic material from its original. When this DNA inserted back into the organism, it changes the organism’s trait. This technique is known as gene-splicing (Farndon 19).

Genetic engineering is now being used to create new medicines and therapies for many disorders and diseases, and also to improve agricultural plants and animals to produce bigger yields or enhanced nutrient composition and food quality. In Gene therapy, copies of healthy human genes produced in bacteria can be inserted into human cells with defective or missing genes, to fix the problem. Gene therapy is promising because it can use to treat genetic

disorders and diseases where no other effective treatment is available, but it is also controversial.
The United States’ first successful gene therapy in humans took place in 1990.

It was a treatment for a four-year-old girl named Ashanthi DeSilva, who were born with an adenosine deaminase (ADA) deficiency, an autosomal recessive disorder that affect the immune system. Her doctors genetically modified her defective immune cells to function as normal ones. Then, they used a virus that also had been genetically modified to remove its harmful genes to deliver the corrected immune cells back to her body. This early success led to many other gene therapy trials in the 1990s for different kinds of genetic diseases, until a tragic setback happened. In September 1999, Jesse Gelsinger became the first person who died after undergone a gene therapy for ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC) deficiency, a rare metabolic disorder. He died from massive organ failure caused by a bad reaction of his immune system to the virus used in the therapy (Thompson

24).
Recently researchers discovered CRISPR/Cas9, the most advanced genome-editing technique that enable scientists to edit genomes with unprecedented accuracy and efficiency. CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a part of a bacterial immune system that record the DNA code of viruses while Cas9 (CRISPR-associated proteins) is one of the enzymes produced by the CRISPR system that cut DNA (“Project Spotlight”). What makes CRISPR/Cas9 stands out among other genome engineering techniques is its ability to cut DNA strands without has to be paired with other enzymes like the other gene editing tools do.
In his article “British Researchers Gets Permission to Edit Genes of Human Embryos,” Nicholas Wade reports that in April 2015, Chinese researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University had conducted an experiment using CRISPR/Cas9 technology to alter faulty genes on human embryos. Even though, they claimed that the embryos they used were unviable; it still sparks great concern about the idea of modifying the human germ line that could be passed to the next generation, which might bring unforeseen consequences in the future. Scientists and ethicists also strongly oppose the idea of editing the genes of human embryos to make “designer babies” or for the prospect of human enhancement. It is dangerous and ethically unacceptable.