Question

What are the benefits of the human genome project?

What are some ethical and legal concerns?

How do you feel about genetic research?

Answer 1

The Human Genome Project can be defined as an international research work that aims to find out the sequence of every nucleotide in the human genome. It also aims to identify all the genes present in the human genome.

It was initially started in 1990 and supposed to be completed by 2005.

The benefits of the human genome project are as follows:

• By mapping the human genome it would be possible to find out specifically which gene is responsible for which disease. Thus it would greatly help in prevention and cure of disease.
• Due to human genome project the face of medicine would change drastically. This would pave way for more accurate diagnosis as the link between the disease causing gene and the disease would already be known.

The ethical and legal concerns surrounding the human genome project are multifolded. Some of them are as follows:

• Discrimination against people with faulty genes: People with faulty or diseased genes would be discouraged from starting their own family. Also discrimination while giving jobs, potential marriage partners would become biased.
• Genetic treatment of diseases would lead to the possibility of treatment through germ line therapy which means removal of the faulty genes. In the long run it would have the social and ethical implications of parents trying to enhance their kids by removing undesirables genes in the child and this pave a way for eugenetics.
• Commercialisation of other human genome project and use of the same for financial gains is the other legal and ethical concern.

Genetic research though useful is only one of the many factors that leads to onset of disease. According to new research such as that of mind body connection and bruce lipton's epigenetics which shows that the internal emotional environment of a person has an influence on their genes tells us that genetic research can't solve the whole problem of diseases.