haasystem.blogg.se

Their promise, and peril, suggests author James Trefil, lie in their ability to let us get under the hood of living systems and change the way they operate. None of these advances—or the suggestion of future advances—has come without controversy. If that isn't enough, on the heels of decades of work in animal cloning—most notably the birth of Dolly, the first clone of a mammal from an adult cell, in 1996—three scientists announced this spring that they each, separately, intended to clone humans in their private labs. And in the past few years, scientists have managed to isolate from IVF embryos those "embryonic stem cells," so much in the news of late, that have the potential to develop into any cell in the body. We've long been able to create life outside the womb, through in vitro fertilization (IVF) as a result, we can now screen embryos for many diseases. In 2000, scientists from the public and private sectors co-announced that they'd sequenced the human genome, the arrangement of our DNA's fundamental components. Researchers have learned how to manipulate genes in plants and animals, and to a much lesser extent, in humans. In the past 30 years, particularly in the past few, science has made enormous strides in the fields of molecular and cellular biology.