TABLE OF CONTENTS By 2015, biotechnology will likely continue to improve and apply its ability to profile, copy, and manipulate the genetic basis of both plants and animal organisms, opening wide opportunities and implications for understanding existing organisms and engineering organisms with new properties. Research is even under way to create new free-living organisms, initially microbes with a minimal genome (Cho et al., 1999; Hutchinson et al., 1999 [79, 80]).
DNA analysis machines and chip-based systems will likely accelerate the proliferation of genetic analysis capabilities, improve drug search, and enable biological sensors.
The genomes of plants (ranging from important food crops such as rice and corn to production plants such as pulp trees) and animals (ranging from bacteria such as E. coli, through insects and mammals) will likely continue to be decoded and profiled. To the extent that genes dictate function and behavior, such extensive genetic profiling could provide an ability to better diagnose human health problems, design drugs tailored for individual problems and system reactions, better predict disease predispositions, and track disease movement and development across global populations, ethnic groups, and other genetic pools (Morton, 1999; Poste, 1999 [21, 23]). Note that a link between genes and function is generally accepted, but other factors such as the environment and phenotype play important modifying roles. Gene therapies will likely continue to be developed, although they may not mature by 2015.
Genetic profiling could also have a significant effect on security, policing, and law. DNA identification may...
