Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Selective Breading and Genetic Modification

Have you ever wondered how you can get a chicken for so cheap from the supermarket? Well with selective breading scientist have been able to grow a 3 kg chicken in one third the time a natural chicken would grow to be 1 kg. Selective breeding is just what it sounds, taking characteristics from two breeds and breeding them to get a better kind of animal. There is also Genetic Modification where you can take DNA from a fish and put it in a plant in-order to make it taste better, grow larger or what ever you are wanting to achieve. Scientist have even taken DNA from a jelly fish and put it in a rabbit and made the rabbit glow. With genetic modification we can make plants grow their own pesticides. A large downfall to genetic modification is that if the pests become immune to the genetically modified plant then we will have to us even hasher pesticides. Selective breeding can create very large animals and make them cheap for the public, but a lot of the animals have health defects and can hardly move or carry their own weight. If we don't keep an eye on what is going on both of these can harm our society greatly, right now I feel that selective breeding is worse than Genetic modification because the food we are eating has so many problems that the animal can't even walk, if it were to have enough room to do so. I think that if Gregor Mendel were to see where we have taken his discoveries he would first be very amazed, then he would be ashamed that he led us to allow our food to become so unnatural.