Depending on who you speak with, you might hear that genetic engineering is the most dangerous thing ever, or that there are no dangers at all. Well, I’ll try and give you an objective view. Although, I you know, I personally am a scientist, I do have, I lean towards, there’s not a lot of dangers. But if there were dangers, this is what they would be, essentially. Say you, you know, you’re creating creatures here in the laboratory, who don’t exist in the natural world. So most of the time, we have to try really hard to keep these creatures alive. Because all the microbes and bacteria that are floating around in the wind and the air and on you, has been around for billions of years. And they know how to fight really well and they know how to eat something that’s, that you know, a genetic engineer just created in the lab. But the problem comes in when we’re engineering things to maybe live longer you know, or be more hardy than the natural kind. What we risk here, is that our engineered version will overcome and destroy the natural, natural niche.

So say, we’re making a genetically engineered rice and we lose control of this rice crop. And soon this rice crop is going around the country, taking over other people’s rice paddies. And then before we know it, ninety percent of all the rice crop in the country is coming from this one rice. And if this one rice is susceptible to a disease, that means all the rice in the country is now susceptible to a disease. So we really have to think that, just because we can create our own creatures doesn’t mean that the creatures that nature already has out there, aren’t good to keep, because the key is to keep diversity up. You know, genetic engineering’s main issue is that, once we make something really nice, like, wow, every one of these apples will be sweet, you will never have a sour apple, you know. Then everybody wants the tree which will only give sweet apples, everybody wants that. But the problem with that is, now we’re taking away genetic diversity.

So the dangers of genetic engineering and medicine, I think you know, the pros far outweigh the dangers. But the dangers in this situation would be creating things which, because we’re using other creatures to create things that are useful to us, that we will be putting into our body. And our immune system has a wonderful ability to attack foreign substances in our body and it will just attack and eat it up. So we don’t want to create something in a bacteria or create something in a goat or in a cow. That’s going to be turned into medicine, which has traces of that bacteria’s protein or traces of the cow protein or goat protein.

Because then your body might start attacking it, which would be a problem for you. Not only that, you know, when we’re using genetic engineering, think of it as simply a factory to make the medicine that we want. Instead of machines and gears, you have creatures, you have bacteria or you have, you know, plants or you have cows. We just program into them, what we want them to make and their cells will make it. Now what the problem is, what if you program something wrong, you know. What if your medicine, the molecule in your medicine should you know, look a certain way. But it looks a little different because of what you programmed wrong. And then you don’t get to test that medicine out properly and you realize that ten percent of the human population will have a fatal reaction. Because that molecule is missing an extra tail or it’s missing an extra arm or something. So the dangers are really in writing and getting a purified product in our medicine and not having any of the leftovers from the creatures that made the medicine in our medicine, when using genetic engineering.