Thursday, February 20, 2014

Group 1 Discussion Post for Venter Chapters 1-2

So sorry for the delay, everyone! Totally slipped my mind!

Our group discussed our group projects for a while. We will be presenting on scandalous dead bodies and the ethics behind using corpses for entertainment, art, or simply a keepsake.

We then discussed our opinions on artificial life. Kat said she was fine with it as long as it would help society. Dr. Oliver said this was all very dangerous without the researcher being omniscient. We then talked about the ways in which this revolutionary research could have adverse consequences.

I then suggested that not much had happened after Dolly the sheep was cloned, so maybe the creation of artificial life will not have any negative consequences, either. However, we then discussed that there were many things I was not informed on about cloning, and that wealthy people now clone their pets.

We agreed that Venter should try to be protecting of his research and careful of who all learned how to replicate his success. We also agreed that any seemingly beneficial results should be thoroughly studied and completely safe before they are mass distributed due to unknown effects.

3 comments:

  1. Looks like we'll be crowd-sourcing the rest of our quiz in class today. Whatever works.

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  2. I still came up with some things for today!

    (FQ) What is special about restriction enzymes/endonucleases?
    They target and cleave a specific sequence of nucleotides

    (FQ) True/False: Ribosomes transcribe DNA into RNA
    False

    (FQ) What year was the first transgenic mammal created, and what species was it?
    1974; a mouse

    (DQ) To what extent and in what situations is genetic engineering ok?

    Below is a link with everything you could want to know about DNA!
    http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/handbook/basics/dna

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