Is It Ethical To Genetically Engineer Animals?

Biotechnology

James Watson and the late Francis Crick discovered the construction of Dna in 1953; Watson has spoken in favour of genetic engineering

Biotechnology isn't something new - selective convenance to create more useful varieties of animals and plants is a form of biotechnology that human beings have used for thousands of years.

Biotechnology includes any use of science or engineering science to change the characteristics of a particular breed or animal.

Biotechnology can be good or bad for animals - and it may too produce an answer to the upstanding bug of experimenting on animals.

Transgenic animals raise a specially difficult problem.

Human being problems

Newspaper articles about the ethical problems of genetically engineered animals are usually concerned about the danger these animals may pose to man beings (usually to human health), rather than any implications for the animals themselves.

Animate being rights

Genetic engineering science and selective breeding announced to violate animal rights, because they involve manipulating animals for human being ends as if the animals were cipher more than human being property, rather than treating the animals every bit beingness of value in themselves.

Recent action to allow animals to exist patented reinforces the thought of animals as human property, rather than beings in their ain right.

Animal welfare

Biotechnology can exist good for animals. Selective breeding and genetic engineering can benefit animals in many ways:

Improving resistance to disease
Breeding to remove characteristics that crusade injury
- eg selecting cattle without horns

But biotechnology tin also be bad for animals - the adept effects for the breeder can offset past painful side-effects for the animals:

Modern pigs accept been bred to grow extra fast - some breeds now grow also fast for their hearts, causing discomfort when animals are too active
Broiler chickens are bred to grow fast - some at present grow besides fast for their legs

Regulating genetic engineering

Profitability is ane of the major drivers of both selective convenance and genetic technology.

If animal welfare is non to exist compromised, research must be restricted by a counter-balancing ethical principle that prevents altering animals in a way that was bad for the creature.

One author, Bernard Rollin, suggests that a suitable rule to regulate genetic technology would be this:

Genetically engineered animals should be no worse off than the parent stock would be if they were not so engineered.

This principle tin easily be adapted to embrace selective breeding.

Biotechnology and experimental animals

Information technology's been suggested that genetic applied science may solve all the ethical bug of laboratory experiments on animals. The goal is to create a genetically engineered mammal that lacks sentience, but is otherwise identical to normal experimental animals.

Such an animal could not suffer whatever was done to information technology, so in that location should exist no ethical difficulty in performing experiments on it.

Ethical issues:

This argument seems convincing, simply exercise you feel comfy virtually information technology?
Is there any ethical objection to creating genetically engineered man beings without sentience, and experimenting on them?

Transgenic animals

Quagga Less controversially, scientists are reconstructing the quagga - which became extinct in the 1870s

Transgenic animals are animals that accept been deliberately bred for research and that incorporate elements of two different species - they are creatures that blur the bulwark betwixt species.

These animals are often deliberately created with genetic defects, and these defects may well cause the fauna to take a bad quality of life. A mouse has been created, for case, that has been genetically modified to develop cancer.

Upstanding bug of transgenic animals

Transgenic animals raise several particular moral problems (quite autonomously from any damage they might do to the surroundings):

Are animals that combine species an unethical alteration of the natural order of the universe?
Is it unethical to modify an animal's genetic brand-up for a specific purpose, without knowing in advance if there will be any side-effects that will cause suffering to the animal?
Does 'creating' animals by genetic engineering corporeality to treat the animals entirely as commodities?
Is it unethical to create 'diseased' animals that are very likely to suffer?
- Suffering may last for a long time in these animals equally researchers want to conduct long-term investigations into the development of diseases

Religious views of transgenic animals

Against transgenic animals:

God laid downwardly the construction of creation and any tampering with it is sinful.
Manipulating DNA is manipulating 'life itself' - and this is tampering with something that God did not intend humanity to meddle with.

In favour of transgenic animals:

As man beings take been given 'dominion' over the animals, they are entitled to tamper with them.
Palaeontology shows that the structure of creation has inverse over time as some species became extinct and new ones came into being. They say that this shows that at that place is nothing fixed about the structure of creation.

Transgenic animals and religious food laws

Transgenic animals pose problems for religions that restrict the foods that their believers can eat, since they may produce animals that announced to be ane species, but contain some elements of a forbidden species.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/using/biotechnology_1.shtml#:~:text=Genetic%20engineering%20and%20selective%20breeding,being%20of%20value%20in%20themselves.

Posted by: brownleehatterouble.blogspot.com