The Future of Geomic Research in the United States essays

The Future of Geomic Research in the United States essays Too often, when the term genetic engenering is uttered, people envision a world of geneticly "perfect" people where thouse who are normal are looked down on by genetic supermen. The fact that this vision could not be further from the truth does not dissuade the nay sayers from vemonently dissparaing the practice of genetic engenering, in any of its many forms. The truth of the matter is that the genetic feilds of study, particularly the feild of genomics (the study of sequences of genes known as genomes), have bee revollutionised recently and have become a science of prevention and prediction rather than one for the creation of superhuman beings. The future of genomic research is, however, in question as federal funding in the United States has not been keeping level with the new advances in research. "Early in the development of their discipline, geneticists treated the unit of inheritance, or gene, as a purely formal concept; their experiments consisted cheifly in analyzing the characteristics of individuals in order to determine the genetic constitutions (genotypes or genomes) of those individuals. In recent times - and it is difficult to say exactly when this change began - geneticists began explorations at higher and lower levels of organization than the individual. In decending to the molecular level, geneticists were concerened with the physiochemical nature of the gene"(Ravin 2). In other words therecent advances in genetics and genomics have led to a revolution within the field. With this shift in attitude came a new focus on genomes and gene structure. The United States has done relativly little to encourage the growth of these genome studies, at least when you compare federal spending with that of the private sector. "In 2000 the private sector had already overtaken public sources in funding geonomics research, US$3 billion to US$2 billion. This trend is only expected to continue" ("Genomics and Health Inequa...