Now, genetic engineering is one of those topics that can seem quite complicated at first, but it's really quite simple. The basic idea is that we find one organism that has a desirable characteristic, like a plant that has lots of big fruit. Then we take the gene that's responsible for that trait and transfer it to another organism, so that this other organism develops the same trait. So effectively... What we're doing is modifying the organism's genome by adding a new helpful gene.
And so we can call the organism Genetically Modified or GM. We're not just limited to organisms of the same species like we've shown here though. We can also use the genes of one species to genetically modify organisms of another species.
We've now genetically engineered all sorts of genes into all sorts of organisms. For example, some sheep have been genetically engineered so that they can produce substances like drugs in their milk, which we can then extract and use to treat diseases. In a similar way, we've genetically engineered bacteria to produce the human hormone insulin so that we can harvest it and use it to treat diabetes.
And we've genetically modified crops to do all sorts of things. from improving the size and quality of their fruit to becoming resistant to diseases, insects, and herbicides. Scientists are now researching how we could use this idea to treat some inherited disorders that are due to faulty genes. The idea, known as gene therapy, works by giving a person a healthy version of the gene in the hope that it will fix the problem, but it's proving pretty difficult to actually get it to work.
One of the problems is that the faulty gene would be in all of the person's cells, so to fix this, we'd have to transfer the new gene into every cell in the body, which is really difficult. A potential solution to this though, is transferring the gene at an early stage of development, such as at the egg or embryo stage, because then as the person develops, the healthy gene would get passed on to all of the other cells. As with everything in science, there are some potential problems with genetic engineering. So to explore these, let's take a quick look at the pros and cons of genetically modified crops.
The pros are that we can easily make crops have desirable characteristics, like more edible fruit or being resistant to disease, which means we can make more food for less money. And this is particularly important when it comes to developing countries. as people still die from starvation, and we can also make sure that plants produce special nutrients.
For example, golden rites contains beta-carotene, which can protect people from going blind. One of the main issues though is that we don't know for certain how genetically modified plants might affect our health. There's currently no evidence that GM crops are bad for us, but we just can't say with 100% certainty yet.
There's also the chance that plants could make their way into the wild, where they might out-compete local plants and change the whole ecosystem. This concern is pretty unlikely though, as the plants have been specifically modified to survive in a farmer's field, not to survive in the wild. The last thing we need to cover is how we actually transfer the gene from one organism to another. The first step is to find the gene that we want.
and then cut that section of DNA out to isolate it, which we do using enzymes. Next we insert the gene into a vector, which could either be a virus or a bacterial plasmid, which remember are those little loops of DNA that bacteria have. We then introduce the vector to whichever organism we want to have the gene, for example a pig or a plant, and the idea is that the organism's cells will take up the vector, and the useful gene it contains, and so they'll start producing the protein that the gene codes for. Anyway, that's the end of this video, so we hope you enjoyed it, and we'll see you next time!