A Genomics Primer
Jennifer Zambone
October 1, 2000
December, 2023. You are at Christmas dinner, surrounded by family and friends who are even more delighted than usual to have you there, because six months ago you almost died. Over the years, a viral infection slowly compromised your heart. Six months ago, your heart could no longer take the stress and finally began to fail. Your doctors determined that you needed a heart transplant. But since the government banned motorcycles and set the speed limit for those little electric cars to 20 miles an hour, the number of available human organs has dropped dramatically. You, however, are one of the lucky ones. Knowing that, sooner or later, you would need a new heart, the doctors at the Toms Mopkins University Hospital ordered one for you. The researchers at Toms Mopkins used recombinant DNA technology to splice part of your DNA into the DNA of a pig. They also spliced some of the pig's DNA into the DNA of your bone marrow. Through the splicings, the scientists greatly reduced the chances that your body would reject the new heart, as it would perceive the heart to be "your" heart. Veterinarians carefully and painlessly killed the donor pig and removed the heart. The medical team rushed the heart to the operating room where doctors were removing your old heart. They then replaced your old heart with "your" new one. The operation was completely successful. Because of the genetic compatibility between your body and your new heart, you took low amounts of anti-rejection drugs, and thus did not suffer their deleterious side effects. Now, six months later, you are back to your old routine and happy to be alive. You are also about to bite into a juicy, perfectly done sausage that just happens to contain … your genes. The Toms Mopkins University, ...
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