BIL 104 Final Discussion: How News Portrays The Topic Of Genetics

Final Discussion Assignment
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Final Discussion Assignment
Topic in relation to class study
Genetic variation plays a significant role in determining the factors that contribute to diseases among human beings. The DNA factors and the genome are correlated in achieving gene variation. These genetic variations are achieved through the coding and the noncoding variants in the phenotype as any change in the DNA sequence has a direct effect on the protein structure which is more likely to affect the way the genome functions. Therefore, the study of gene variation is an important aspect in relation to the topic of Genetics and aids in understanding the contributing factors for diseases and how the gene variations are achieved based on the geographical variants.
How news portrays the topic of genetics
Whereas the scientific papers focus on the experimental approaches in the experiments, the news articles have presented the topic on genetic variation in a simplistic manner using inferring to different examples. Also, the news articles rely on the other experiments from other researchers in arguing and supporting their points. For instance, a New York Times article by Yin (2017) has focused on the experiments on the nature of the shape of the nose and the gene variations that have contributed to the various shapes of the nose that people have. Yin relies on a research that was led by a team of researchers from the Pennsylvania State University, which was published in the PLOS Genetics. The researchers found out that the shape of the nostrils among human beings differed across different parts of the world. That the natural selection had a specific requirement that individual in certain climatic regions should have a specific shape of nostril in order to take in more air than other regions. The researchers argued that the higher the temperature and absolute humidity of the region, the wider the nostril. They suggested that climatic variations were an essential aspect in shaping the shape of the nostrils. They argue that once these features of the nostrils were formed, they were passed on to the next generation and that the genes were passed from one ancestor generation to the other.
Cha (2017) of the Chicago Tribune has written an article on the editing of the embryo to erase a heritable heart condition that is known for causing sudden death among young competitive athletes. Cha further says that this is the first gene editing experiment to be conducted on the human embryo. The experiment was conducted using a laboratory tool known as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). The paper that Cha refers to was published in the Journal of Nature. Cha has indicated the details of the experiment, but from the onset, we can tell the relationship between e...