Education! Education! Education! (GM and cloning)

Member Name: JacintaZoo

Product:	GM and cloning
Date:	28/11/00 (14 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: We may finally move forward on this issue

Disadvantages: Will cost money to educate the public in a real sense

Now that the human genome has been mapped, there has been much controversy surrounding what ought to be its use.

I think that the first thing the government ought to do is educate the public as to what exactly genetics is. I have studied the subject at GCSE, A-Level and as part of my degree (dentistry) and I have to say that the subject only gets more and more confusing for me.

How can we expect the person in the street to evaluate genetically modified foods if they don't know really even know what a gene is, let alone recombinant DNA?

To anybody who is truly confused about what the implications of the mapping of the human genome are, I'll put it as such:

Somebody in my sister's A-level biology class stood up and said, "Having the map of the human genome is like having a dictionary without knowing what the words mean."

My sister corrected her. For we do know what the 'words' mean in this analogy, for we know what the function of all the genes are in the genetic code (or so we're told).

Rather, my sister said, "It's more like having a dictionary but not knowing how to consruct a sentence."

We as a society have the responsibility to consolidate just what it is we intend to 'write' with this code. Which is why it is imperative that we all learn the 'language', which first means having some basic understanding of the field of genetics.

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