INTERACT

Transgenics Scenario

The implications of this new technique, called "recombinant DNA," are widespread - imagine treating diabetes with human insulin from a test tube instead of with animal insulin from a slaughterhouse, or giving hemophiliacs clotting factor that didn't have to come from purchased human plasma!

Two of your colleagues, however, insist on looking this gift horse in the mouth. Rather than embrace the technique, they have called on their fellow researchers to stop performing recombinant DNA experiments. E-coli is a bacteria that normally lives in human and animal intestines. Other microbes used in the laboratory are also able to live in the wild. What happens, your colleagues argue, if a researcher inserts a potentially dangerous gene into some E-coli and then the newly created "transgenic" bacteria escapes?

Your colleagues don't want research to stop forever, just long enough for weaker strains of bacteria, that can't live outside the lab, to be developed. But putting off your research could jeopardize your entire academic career. What if someone else makes a key discovery before you do? And the research you are doing could save countless lives in the future.

Do you put off doing recombinant DNA research?

See what really happened.

Skip forward 13 years.