Ethical Issues In Human Genetics

Introduction

Genetics, human genetics and other terms related to inheritance are on everyone's lips lately. The great advances that are occurring in this science and high expectations have caused a public outcry, which has been invaded and at certain points distorted by the "mass media".

Although human genetics is a new technique, humanity has been involved in the genetic makeup of other organisms for many centuries. The first performance of scientifically engineered can be ascribed to Mendel, when investigating the inheritance, mixed peas selectively operating on the cores of the seeds planted. With the development of science have appeared all human genetics techniques well known ambitions to cure human genetic diseases. As you begin to act on the man, his genes and his children is when they start to emerge ethical questions about these techniques, whether or not respect human dignity.

After the publication of the first cloning of a mammal in the UK, there has been a big boom around all these techniques because expectations have been created while many fears about human cloning. Then it has begun work on the prohibition of human cloning by the aggression that this implies for human dignity. Although this has been tried. At the time of Michelangelo, a scholar of the time tried to cross two close relatives of the great artist repeating all the conditions that occurred during her pregnancy. This paper will analyze what is human genetics and what it means scientifically and ethically at all levels that is being applied or could be applied.

Human genetics

It's called human genetics to a range of techniques that allow the scheduled transfer of genes between different organisms. Is a meeting artificial DNA molecule in order to isolate genes or DNA fragments, cloned and introduce them into another genome to be expressed? Human genetics can be described as the formation of new combinations of genes by isolating a DNA fragment, creating it with certain changes and the reintroduction of this fragment in the same organism or another. When new genes are introduced into plants or animals, the resulting organisms are now called transgenic genes introduced transgenes (Foster, pp 696).

Human genetics as such is not a science but a compendium of techniques to isolate and modify genes. Also known as recombinant DNA technique. It refers to all procedures by which a DNA molecule is cut at a particular place and then "pasted" (with the same or another fragment) by using naturally occurring enzymes in microorganisms (ligases restriction enzymes); also relates to processes for multiplying a given DNA molecule (or fragment thereof), by incorporating them self-reproducing elements in microorganisms.

Human genetics is not one, but a set of techniques:

Extraction of DNA

Reverse transcriptase

Chain reaction (PCR)

Molecular hybridization of nucleic acids: Southern blot, Northern blot and Dot Blot

Cloning

Techniques

In order to extract the DNA of a cell must break their plasma membranes and nuclear lysis. Subsequently, to prevent the DNA is digested by the cell is added ...