Anecdote: “Missy, an eleven-year-old collie-husky mix, recently boarded an aircraft bound for College Station, Texas, where she’ll make pet history. Missy’s owners have arranged for scientists at Texas A&M University to make their favorite dog the first ever to be cloned” (Gurak, 71).

Current event: Last week the National Academy of Engineering announced the 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering, one of which is to provide access to clean water.

Question: Should the clinical applications of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) be restricted? The ethical and moral issues surrounding appropriate applications of PGD are complex. PGD is being used to select individuals who are at minimal risk for inherited genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia, and Huntington’s disease. It’s also being used to select embryos on the basis of sex.

Statistics: “Capable of one quadrillion double precision floating-point operations per second, the Blue Gene supercomputer will be used to simulate from first principles the folding of a protein. This calculation requires on the order of 30 sextillion operations and will run for about one year” (Denneau, 2002).

Dissonance: “As we drift into sleep, our temperatures drop, our metabolisms slow, and a chemical called melatonin begins to circulate in our blood. Melatonin is made in tiny amounts by the pineal gland, a quarter-inch long gland at the base of the brain, and little is known about the hormone’s effect on the body. Nonetheless, health food stores around the country sell bottles of melatonin, billing it as a sleep-inducer, and thousands of users tout its powers. Yet there is now evidence that melatonin not only sometimes fails to promote sleep but in fact disrupts it” (Gurak, 164).

Prediction: “In 1959 physicist Richard Feynman . . . [argued] the possibility – even inevitability– of ‘atom by atom’ construction. What at the time seemed absurdly ambitious, even bizarre, has recently become a widely shared goal . . . Many researchers now predict that in the future we will be able to construct objects with molecular precision in ways that revolutionize manufacturing, permitting materials properties and device performance to be greatly improved” (Drexler, 74).

Issue of concern: “I have been on a personal journey for the past year and half in a search to find some happy answer to the energy problem. I believe the problem is, simply stated, that we have to find a new oil. Oil was, unquestionably, the basis for prosperity for this country and the planet in the last century.

But it is very clear to many of us, including leading scientists and policymakers, that if oil remains the basis for prosperity for the world throughout this century, it cannot be a very prosperous or happy century” (Jaffe quoting Nobel Laureate Richard E. Smalley, 2008).

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This work is licensed by The Cain Project in Engineering and Professional Communication under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 2.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.

Last edited by The Cain Project in Engineering and Professional Communication on May 4, 2008 5:58 pm GMT-5.