Question: Is there a possibility that humans can fabricate new organisms by pulling apart different cells and genes and joining them together to create a new species or race?

  1. Hey aginn8 wow what a question! We do things that are a little similar, although not at the level that you are thinking! We manipulate genes in different organisms by changing them, removing them, or even adding new ones. We cross-breed organisms to create hybrids, and we analyse changes to cells by removing genes that will prvent growth of different parts of those cells.

    This difference with what you are asking comes down to ethics, mostly. In any part of the world, engineering on this sort of level would not likely be approved. Creating whole new organisms can have massive problems for the environment, similar to what happens if you introduce a new species. That, and there is not really a way to predict accurately how the organism will turn out. You could create some kind of globally fatal new disease by accident! We simply don’t know enough about this sort of science to get it done yet, and it’s a pretty dangerous thing to do anyway!

    All of that being said, in the future, with more research, I’m sure we will probably have the capability to do this with simple organisms. Lots to learn though!

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  2. Aginn8 I total love seeing you guys thinking outside the box and asking questions like this.
    Sam is right, there is a lot of ethics involved when it comes to creating new species and their unpredictability.
    But you know, Humans have been altering the genetic code of plants and animals for millennia, by selectively breeding individuals with desirable features 🙂 This is sort of along the lines you mentioned.
    Scientist are interested in genetically engineering the bacteria E. coli to make human insulin for people with diabetes. and that is very very cool 😀 With obesity and diabetes becoming a major problem, we can engineer or modify organisms but to create brand new life is still a big NO NO!

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  3. Aginn8, that is an awesome question.

    There are some hybrids that have already been made by taking some enzymes from one organism and putting them into another! Best example is when geneticists use GFP, also known as Green Fluorescent Protein, to make animals glow!

    Actually glow! (Well, fluoresce, which is when they glow under a UV light or a black light).

    https://news.nationalgeographic.com.au/news/2002/01/0111_020111genmice.html

    There’s this guy who’s doing the same thing with plants that you can buy and grow yourself, so you could have a living night light!

    Might not be entirely new organisms, but it’s a cool way of combining the genetics of two different things to make something creative and maybe one day useful!

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  4. not sure about making a new species from scratch! Science can alter cells or organisms to be slightly different though!

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Comments

  1. Fabricating new species could help us in the future. We could start with plants and work our way from there. There are many things that we will run out of in the future like oil. If we could fabricate a plant that could provide us with oil think of all the other things that people would suggest and help engineer. If controlled it could become a great tool. Don’t you think?

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