One of your classmates is still unsure as to how transformation works. so, he performs the following experiment: - a competent e. coli culture is tranformed with dna coding for penicillnase ( and enzyme that degrades the antibiotic penicillin) . - a different sample of the same strain of e. coli is also transformed with dna coding for penicillinase. in this case, though , a small amount of penicillin ( the antibiotic) is also added to the reaction tube during the transformation process. what results would you expect?
a) neither organism would be transformed because you cannot put a gene for antibiotic resistance into a prokaryote
b) the tube without penicillin would have many more transformed organisms
c) the two tubes would produce very similar results
d) the tube with penicillin would have significantly fewer transformed organisms

i think its the first one

"1. it should be, it has been for about 20 years, and it's really not much different in the end than breeding animals to have particular traits. there are always concerns about genetically engineered animals/plants affecting the environment in unexpected negative ways, but i can't think of an example where the fears didn't turn out to be baseless.  

first, as you point out, it would be a great advance in pharmacology, to be able to tailor drugs and their doses to me. the pros involve better medical treatment. the cons involve privacy issues like insurance companies denying coverage to people with genetic risk factors. looking at dna markers wouldn't affect the frequency of genetic diseases, but it would allow detection of them earlier. and ok, actually i suppose that if people used this information to avoid having children with genetic diseases, some might decrease in frequency."