Jesse Gelsinger, an 18year old man from Arizona, suffered from a rare inherited liver disorder called OTC deficiency. He was being treated with adenoviruses altered to carry healthy OTC genes into his liver. When trillions of the viruses were injected into his body, he suffered a violent reaction to them and died. It is worth remembering that, to date, no-one has been cured using gene therapy. .
Another use of genetic engineering been used in the medical area is eugenics. This is where foetuses that have been identified as having hereditary disorders are been aborted, the risk with this is that perhaps in the future people will abort babies due to cosmetic imperfections. Some people would say this is wrong as everyone was made in the likeness of God and destroying a baby, destroys a part of him. This is also the case where "designer babies" are concerned. With developing genetic techniques, it may become possible to select certain characteristics for children, obviously with a price tag. This could result in a genetic underclass of people with more faulty genes than richer people. This means that genetic engineering allows humans to initiate certain traits and qualities that nature was previously held responsible for. Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned physicist and cosmologist and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, has often commented on the future role of genetic engineering, "for the first time in history, natural evolution has come to an end and has been replaced by humans meddling with their own genetic makeup. With genetic engineering science has moved from exploring the natural world and its mechanisms to redesigning them.".
This is not only the case for humans; plants, crops and animals also have the potential to be redesigned to better suit our needs. Animals could be made meatier and less fatty, fish could grow more rapidly and bigger, and through gene therapy, there is the possibility that animal's organs could be adapted to be more like human organs so they could be transplantable in the future.
