Paul Root Wolpe: It's Time to Question Bio-Engineering

Paul Root Wolpe: It's Time to Question Bio-Engineering

Introduction

In the last century, the development in different technologies has grown progressively. Our society has progresses a lot further then it was a century ago. Humans have built different tools to make the daily jobs easier and faster. Over the past century, different inventions have and are still emerging from all over the world. As the technology is progressing, humans are thinking of more and more ways to modify, make them more advanced and even develop innovative technologies to perform the task even faster. Bioengineering is a direction of science and technology, developing the application of engineering principles in biology and medicine. Bioengineering is the forefront of current efforts in research in biology and medicine. It aims to address the major issues of public health and industrial performance in different sectors. With the so much advancement being made in the area of bioengineering, the ethical principles and values are being questioned by many. Some are in favor of it while some are against the advancements which have been made. This paper evaluates a video titled “Its's time to question Bio-Engineering” in which the speaker Paul Root Wolpe describes the different advancements of bio-engineering and examines the ethical principles and implications of this new science.

Discussion

The speaker effectively speaks about the various series of developments in the field of bioengineering. The main topic that he talks about is designing and altering bodies- animals and humans. He demonstrates to the audience a number of prominent experiments from glowing pets to mice that have been genetically engineered to grow human ears. He captivates his audience with these experiments using slides and maintains the interest of the audience through asking though provoking questions and providing a laugh here and there (Wolpe, 2011). The speaker has successfully managed to deal with a subject that has been a growing concern for many of the individuals. He starts his talk by discussing the three great stages of evolution - Darwinian evolution, civilization and directed evolution. He explains that through this development, we are putting pressures on our environment and bodies to evolve the way we want to by intentionally designing and altering the physiological forms that inhabit our planets. In the video, Wolpe also talks about selectively breeding the animals and show images of these animals to the audience. The animals including, Geep (sheep- goat sheep), Cama (camel and lama), Liger (lion tiger), Zeorse (zebra and horse). He questions whether we are merely playing with the technology to provide ourselves with entertaining pets? The pets like the glow in the dark pets, are already available in some of the states while some states have banned them as there are no laws or legislatures about them (Wolpe, 2011). Genetically engineered food products are available in the markets that include genetically engineered components without any identification or labels and we have allowed them to enter our daily lives even though we worry about ...