Homework

Topic 1 - Personal Habits & Choices

Explain how personal habits and individual choices can affect a person's risk of developing cancers. Do you have a personal habit and/or an individual choice that affects your risk of developing cancer?

Topic 2 - Genetically Engineered Organisms

In what ways might genetically engineered organisms pose a threat to the health and safety of human populations? What kinds of safeguards exist to reduce this threat?

Student discussion One:

There are tons of things and habits that affect a person's risk of developing cancers. cigarette's are a man cause of cancer, not only are the people who smoke at danger of developing cancer, but the people around can also be apart of this. This would be called second hand smoke, second hand smoke has been known to be alot worse than just being the primary smoker. This type of thing happens when people smoke in restaurants, or even when they walk around in public. One of my personal habits used to be tobacco dip, if i was to keep doing this i would of started developing gum disease but fortunately my wife hated it so i quit.

Student discussion Two:

Genetic engineering, is when you modify an original organism to have the same qualities of another or to make it better. One example of this could be long lasting tomatoes, which were genetically engineered to produce less of the substance to make them rot. However these tomatoes where made to be resistant of antibiotics. This was a disadvantage, cause it was believed that these genes would spread to people and animals. The problem with this is that vets and doctors use antibiotics to fight infections. If people or dogs are now resistant to antibiotics, then theres no way to help them fight infection luckily this is no longer done. Some safeguards that are put into play are that the workers in genetic engineering, should observe a strict code of laboratory practice to avoid the genetically engineered experiments to escape into the environment, and also learn all the physical contaminant techniques. This should reduce the threat of the saftey of human populations.

Work Cited

http://www.gmo-compass.org/eng/grocery_shopping/fruit_vegetables/15.genetically_modified_tomatoes.html

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/cen-v053n009.p008b