Sunday, October 26, 2008

Scientists develop purple, cancer fighting tomato

happy weekend for everyone!!
This weekend I read a news which is"Scientists develop purple, cancer fighting tomato".
This article introduces that British biologists studies out a gene engineer that they found a ingredient called anthocyanins,a type of antioxidant found in berries such as fruit blackberries and blackcurrants.This ingredient has turned out can decrease the possibility to get cancer.And it can be made in tomato,so scientists modified the tomato genetically turning it to purple with anthocyanins and experimented on the cancer-prone mice by feeding them on modified tomato,it proved that these mice can live longer than those which were fed on regular tomato.So, scientists primarily defined that the modified tomatos can make people healthier and take less risks to get cancer.
After reading the article,I feel thankful to the scientists who are working hard to figure out a lot of scientific problems for our health,so that people who are suffering from the disease have prospect to recover.They are really helpfull.
However,I also think that in primitive times,people lived in the world without any science technology,meawhile,they also lived in the world without cancer and terrible disease.But why today,in the more cilverlized and advanced times,we have so many untreatble diseases? We have people woking on them but we also have people dead because of them...
Today,we try best to modify the world,we creat a lot of new nouns,like transgene,clone and so on.But, there appears the new disease as well.I think this two situations have some kind of subrelationship between them.We do experiments and study on animals,plants and nature ,we created the usefull,but nature created disease...
So,in my opinion, not every modifiction is practicble for our nature.Scientists should consider a second for what should be continued or stopped.

2 comments:

Abby said...

Hello Ying,

The article you read is very interesting. I also like to read about science and health care, it is very important and is related to us in same way. I think your comments are very interesting. You make me think about the relation between our life style and our health.

Alyssa R. said...

Hmmm, that is an interesting article, and I really like your questions because they ask much bigger questions about a debate - should food be genetically modified?

One question that I thought of while reading your summary was this - why not just eat more berries where the antioxidant is naturally occurring? Why is it advantageous to develop the tomato? (Though, I did see pictures of it on the news the other day and it is really pretty!).