The Dangers of Genetic Engineering on Natural Selection i.e. Don't Mess With Mother Nature
Its not very often I speak out as a scientist and I apologize if this seems lame, but the frequency and severity of things like this continue to grow and cause me great distress. As a biology major, I fully appreciate what genetic engineering can and will do for humanity in the future. It just seems to me that the scientific community is way to gung ho when it comes to things like crop yield, medicine, or sterile environments. When we mess with nature too much it bites back hard. This article seems like a fairly mild example but believe me, it’s simply starting a domino effect. With rapidly reproducing organisms like bugs or to a much greater degree bacteria, there is no way we can keep up with the mutations that naturally occur when an organism is faced with a biological threat, they simply evolve too fast. It seems ridiculous but there are strains of staph infections we can’t treat because they are resistant to every antibiotic on the market, STAPH INFECTIONS for crying out loud! The resistances seen in bugs is exactly the same, the more chemicals we throw at them the more resistance they build up until eventually we have nothing left and they are essentially immune. I guess my point is this: genetic engineering is going to improve the lives of people everywhere more than we can ever imagine, but there has to be some restraint or else we’ll be doomed by our own shortsightedness.
