• Question: i like what u want to do,i am intrested and you can count on vote if you tell me if you can mix animal dna with human dna

    Asked by superscope98 to Amelia, Jim, Liz, Prateek, Richard on 15 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by noag.
    • Photo: Amelia Markey

      Amelia Markey answered on 15 Jun 2011:

      Thank you 🙂 and a tricky question!

      Well I’ve never heard of animal DNA being inserted into a human, I don’t think a scientist would get approval to do this so who knows if that would work BUT you can put human DNA into an animal! There’s a fancy thing called recombinant DNA technology. What this means is that you can insert bits of DNA into another organism. So you can put human DNA into the DNA of a mouse or pig cell for example and you can put rabbit DNA into mouse DNA. A lot of nasty viruses like HIV can insert their DNA into your DNA.

      This type of work raises a lot of “ethical” questions which mean people ask is it right to do this? Scientists have to show that what they are doing is safe and put peoples’ fears to rest before they carry out their work.

      This technology is used a lot today to make human proteins such as insulin. I found a really good website with cartoon videos that show how it’s done:

      http://www.abpischools.org.uk/page/modules/diabetes/diabetes6.cfm?coSiteNavigation_allTopic=1

      You can also make animals that glow in the dark! There’s a protein that is made in jellyfish called green fluorescent protein which glows green. Scientists can take the gene that has the code for this protein and insert it into animals so that they also glow green. Glofish are a good example of this and here’s a link if you want to find out more (there’s also some videos):

      http://www.glofish.com/

      I hope that answers your question, please let me know if you want to know more! 🙂

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