Transgenic Plants and Animals Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Transgenic Plants and Animals - Essay Example Transgenic plants can help in the area of food sufficiency, through production of high yielding crop varieties; improving plant tolerance against extreme conditions such as drought or floods; increasing resistance to pests; and increasing resistance to herbicides. These improvements would reduce production cost, reduce wastage, increase yield per hectare and thereby increase food availability. Today, varieties of peanuts and corn resistant to pests are already grown throughout the world. In health, genetic modifications can aid in making life saving drugs in large amounts. Transgenic livestock that produce recombinant proteins in their milk can provide an economic and safe system for production of valuable proteins, such as pharmaceutical proteins for treatment or prevention of human disease or biomaterials for medical use (Keefer, 2004). As an example insulin and the clotting factors are made by human systems. If we insert the gene that is capable of producing insulin from humans into cows in the right way, then we can get the cows to produce the insulin or clotting factors in their milk. Then we have a potential mass producer of insular greater than human is capable of doing. In the areas of nutrition, common staple crops like rice, corn, root crops, and others can be modified to produce varieties high in necessary nutrients. In the area of environment, organisms can de modified to degrade non-biodegradable plastics and other materials and make them more useful to the environment. Major concerns on transgenic plants and animals The production of transgenic plants and animals has faced several concerns among conservatives in Europe, America, and almost every corners of the globe. Thro (2004) emphasized that there are conflicting views about the idea... The researcher states that recent development in biotechnology that gains attention in the scientific world is the alteration of genetic components of plants and animals. The process involves adding and integrating foreign genetic material into the genetic structures of the plants and animals. Transgenic technology affords methods that allow the transfer of genes between different species. The produced organism is generally called as GMO or transgenic plants or animals. A transgene is a gene with desirable characteristics that is moved from a source organism implanted into a new organism in order to improve the desired characteristics of the recipient organism. This is an improvement from the traditional process of breeding wherein a plant or animal with a desired trait is mated with an existing plant or animal of the same type, to transfer the desired trait to the offspring. The limitation of this old method is that the only genes that are involved are the genes already present in t he parental plants or animals. For example, if you bred dogs, you get dogs with genes coming from both dog parents and nothing else. In genetic modification, genes from plants can be integrated into animals or vice versa; genes from birds can be integrated with horses. Production of transgenic plants is expensive and complicated since it uses costly technology and facility. Companies producing GM seeds in countries such as the US desire to produce more revenues on them because they put a lot of resources into making them.