ethical Issue 1

Ethical Issue: recombinant DNA Technology
In today’s world there are many issues that can cause great confusion, cell phones, although they are extremely convenient, are they potentially harmful? Prescription medications, they make us feel better, they must be healthy right? In this essay I will focus on the differing viewpoints of genetically modified foods.
Farmers have always had a difficult time keeping their crops healthy with insects constantly eating at them. Therefore insecticides were manufactured to rid the plants of these insects. It was later discovered how harmful those insecticides could be if ingested. So now that there is DNA technology, scientists are able to modify plants to actually resist the insecticide. They are also able to modify the plants to grow larger, require less fresh water etc. Another advantage to genetically modified foods is that they can be mass produced much less expensively than non modified foods. These advances in technology make our lives so much more convenient, simple and cheap.
Although there are many conveniences of modifying foods to produce more, quicker, cheaper, some believe that there are dangers in this type of modification. There are significant changes within the food, therefore potentially causing a reaction to the change when consumed. Although these reactions may not have an immediate effect, they will possibly be seen later on. Another scary discovery is that in a study rats were fed genetically modified tomatoes and died shortly thereafter. It is safe to say that there are many pros and cons to genetically modified foods, the question is do the pros outweigh the cons or the other way around.
The fact is that there have not been enough tests done on the long term effects of humans consuming genetically modified food to determine the outcome. It seems as though the tests that have been done show that consumption of these foods have negative effects on the body. This is shown in the tests that were done on rats consuming GM tomatoes. The rats were tube fed the tomatoes and quickly showed signs of internal deterioration.
These genetic modifications may make life more convenient, but in the end we all have to make a choice and take a stand for what is best for the human race.