Is it Easy to Be the Creator?

Deineko Elena

Blue roses, “gold” vitamin-containing rice, honey sweet diabetic strawberry… These are not science fiction details, but real things invented by genetic engineers. Would you like to learn HOW they managed to do this? The scientific and technological outburst at the end of the Second Millennium did not set aside such traditional area of knowledge as biology. Advances in genetics and molecular biology enabled scientists to manipulate with DNA as the carrier of hereditary information beyond the living cell. Using the methods of genetic transformation and cultivation of cells and tissues, they can create “new” organisms with completely unusual properties.

The achievements in genetic engineering of plants, whose “fruits” are everyday on our dinner table, are widely used in practice. Nevertheless, genetic engineering and its methods still remain a sort of “black box” for the wide public, which to a great extent causes suspicion about genetically modified products. Such fears are of emotional and psychological nature since they are based on ignorance of the essentials of the matter. Elena Deineko, who has been dealing with transgenic plants for more than sixteen years, will shed some light on the problem.

More information on these and other subjects you can find in the printed version of our journal.