Enhancing Mankind

The present work is about the most recent progress in the world of genetic biology, in particular of genome editing technologies, and about the ethical challenges that such progress raises.The work starts by illustrating the history of genetic biology, from the discovery of DNA to the last innovation in the field: the CRISPR/Cas9 technology, that allows to modify the genome quickly, efficiently and economically.It was the late 1860s when Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss biologist and physician, first isolated and identified deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA for short), which can be found in the nucleus of every cell of a living body, and raised the idea that nucleic acid could have a central role in heredity. The scientific community did not understand the significance of his discovery at first: however, slowly but surely, new advances were made during the Twentieth century, until in 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double- helix structure of DNA. The 1970s saw the birth of the famous genome sequencing technique known as The Sanger Method, which quickly became the most widely used method to sequence genome. As progress in the field increased, in 1983 Mullis invented the Polymerase Chain Reaction, which made it possible to identify diseases, viruses and bacteria, and to help law- enforcement authorities to recognize convicts at crime scenes.Perhaps the greatest endeavor ever undertaken so far in the field of DNA mapping was the well-known Human Genome Project. A genome is the complete set of DNA of an individual, including all its genes. The genome contains the totality of information needed for that particular organism to function. It is found in every cell of the body that has a nucleus and is different for each specimen of a species. The genome of the human species has more than three billion DNA base pairs, which are the building blocks of the double helix of the deoxyribonucleic acid. Men and women have what is known as a diploid genome, that is, a genome which is provided with two copies of chromosomes of the same type. Our species has in most cases forty-six couples of chromosomes, of which twenty-three are inherited from the father and twenty-three from the mother.If you want more books like these, visit the publisher's website: www.onlineuniversitypress.comThis book's personal page: https://onlineuniversitypress.com/enhancing-mankind-bioethics/