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Corbin Dorrell

Mr. Lamb

English 102

24 January 2010

Medicine and Business

Bioengineering and cloning have helped society from the ability to remove or repair

dangerous genes, to being able to target helpful genes, and expand on them to aid in the good

health of the patient. These and many other feats that were merely just a figment of thought

even 10 years ago are becoming possible but what would happen if they were to go too far.

The possibilities of going too far are expressed in the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

Brave New World tells the story of a world where your life is predetermined by preset skills

they can medically give you before birth. These genetically predetermined lives are placed in a

caste system and all of society is engineered to feel nothing but happiness. Learning is done

while the person is asleep and no one wants what they cannot have. They live in the ultimate

utopia, but this is not without consequence. All creativity and individual though has been taken

from the peoples’ hands.

According to Medicine’s Brave New World: Bioengineering and the New Genetics, many

of those visions and predictions made by Huxley in 1932 have come true and are standard

practices in modern medicine and some are less practiced but still being done and further

explored. Now scientists have the ability to control many things about reproduction from

selective input or taking out of desired or undesired genes. Modern medical practices allow for

doctors to prescribe medication that can alter a person’s biological structure to make them
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more mentally stable and not emotionally fluctuate. Animals can be cloned and bioengineered

to grow organs for humans or be used to test the affects of new medications. Animals can even

have their genetics engineered to produce things, such as milk, that can fight heart attack or

boost physical health. Scientists have also learned to customize medications specifically based

on he needs and genetics of the patient.

The problem with these advancements and once futuristic achievements is that

scientists have looked past the ethics concerning going too far and are now selling lives, health,

and physical condition. Medical health has become primarily a business. Although there are

students who choose the medical profession to help people, many students say “I want to

become a doctor because it pays great.” It has become more about money than the aspect of

helping people to better their lives. Even the health establishments want to make money.

Hospitals charged upwards of $50,000 for an organ transplant when it only costs a few

thousand for the organ itself. On top of that, a lot of the medical options one has nowadays are

not necessary to ensure the lives of people. For $30,000 dollars you can have a pet cloned

when you have lost the old one. Scientists will sell parents genes to improve their unborn

children or change physical features to make them socially desirable. When surgeries, medicine,

prefect children, and cloning become just a product and a profit, we have reached that point.

ViaGen is a company that functions as a storage facility for animal cloning DNA. They will

take a small biopsy of your pet and they use the sample to farm cells that can be used for many

needs. The cells are then cryogenically frozen it in case you need or want to retrieve it

someday. Another company, Genetics Savings & Clone, ran during 2005, 2005, and 2006. This

company was started based off of a person’s vision to clone his family dog. The company
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successfully cloned their first cat in December 2004. The genetic twin cat was sold to the

woman who requested it for $50,000. This is an example of something that is making medical

science just a business. According to humanesociety.org, at least 25 million animals are used in

biomedical research, but the companies that use them do not provide exact details of what are

done to these animals but they are either killed during or after their use in testing. To make this

worse, there are thousands of animals every year that go unclaimed and are never adopted in

humane societies all over the world. This makes scientists trying to remake something that

already has existed even more unnecessary.

For upwards of $50,000, parents can have the genes of their kids tampered with to

change their physical features. Parents can change the color of the eyes of their children, o

their hair color. Parents can also predetermine muscle mass or other genetic traits. DNA 2.0 is a

company the constructs gene sequences and sells them based on the customers’ wants and

needs. The company can work with“…redesign[ing] entire gene sequences to maximize the

likelihood of high protein expression, easy genetic manipulation, minimal promoter leakiness,

and convenient protein purification…” DNA 2.0 actually sells a computer program to a customer

that allows that person to create and choose genetic sequences and in return it shows the

resulting outcome for the customers. With these things a parent can make their child muscular,

more desirable in terms of attractiveness, and weed out minor abnormalities in the child. These

things are scientific advancements that do not benefit society at all, but instead it is just one

more product scientists sell.

Brave New World shows a world that is not too farfetched. If we are finding it necessary

to sell things such a muscle, skin tone, eye color, and clones, we could easily find ourselves in
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the same, unoriginal, bleak world shown in Brave New World. The only difference between that

world and ours is that we are willingly buying that world slowly from the medical practices that

are selling it.

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Works Cited

"Gene Banking | ViaGen." | ViaGen. Web. 26 Jan. 2011. <http://www.viagen.com/our-

services/gene-banking/>.

Hyde, Margaret O., and John F. Setaro. Medicine's Brave New World: Bioengineering and the

New Genetics. Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century, 2001. Print.

"Genetic Savings & Clone." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 26 Jan. 2011.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Savings_&_Clone>.

"Questions and Answers About Biomedical Research : The Humane Society of the United

States." The Humane Society of the United States : The Humane Society of the United

States. Web. 26 Jan. 2011.

<http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/biomedical_research/qa/questions_answers.ht

ml>.

"Gene Synthesis Customization Options - Improve Heterologous Expression - DNA2.0." Gene Synthesis

and Synthetic Gene Applications - Fastest Gene Synthesis Service - DNA2.0. Web. 31 Jan. 2011.

<https://www.dna20.com/index.php?pageID=217>.