Interesting topics related to human gene manipulation?

[Who]

I am doing an "issues project" for a college-level biology course and need to come up with a topic related to the manipulation of human genetics. It needs to be something that I can directly relate to biological processes in some way.

Ideas?
It's actually not an ethics course, which makes it more difficult. It's just general biology. So we're supposed to cover a controversial topic... from the perspective of biology and how it relates to processes we're learning about in class. Oy.

 

[Bryan]

I take it you mean this is an ethics type course. There are hypothetical situations like "gene therapy" which is when you play with the genome of human zygotes. There's also stem cell (iPS induced pluripotent stem cells) especially with regard to sickle cell and diabetes. With sickle cell, the idea is that you take the blood of a patient with the disorder and induce the cell into pluripotency then fix whatever genes you need (perhaps with homologous recombination), irradiate the patient to remove their immune while culturing the new cells and putting them back in. This was discovered after they noticed bone marrow transplants fixed sickle cell. With the diabetes, they wanted to induce cells to become pluripotent, then make them develop diabetes so they could observe the development of the mutation in vitro on human tissue.

There's also the whole HeLa cell and cancer in general. This is more experimental and not as clinical. I'm not really sure what you mean by issues project, but tumorigenic inclined cell lines are where we typically do our human genetics work.