Blog 17: Revised Paragraph

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After learning about nominalizations, passive vs. active voice, and sentence clarity in English class, I will apply them to one of the paragraphs in my quick reference guide draft. This is one of the two supporting paragraphs taken from one of the sections titled "Is Gene Therapy Perfect (Safe) Yet?"

BEFORE:

One blaringly conspicuous report that made many headlines was when Chinese scientists decided to apply gene therapy using the CRISPR/cas9 to alter human embryos. As stated by Rob Stein, the speaker at NPR, “The work was done on 86...embryos that weren't viable, in order to minimize some of the ethical concerns. Only 71 of the embryos survived, and just 28 were successfully edited. But the process also frequently created unintended mutations in the embryos' DNA.”7 This not only crossed the line between being ethical and unethical according to some people, but the less than satisfactory results also placed gene therapy in a controversial position due to its variable success rate based on this one experiment.

AFTER:

One conspicuous report that made many scientific headlines was when Chinese scientists decided to edit human embryos with CRISPR-Cas9. As stated by Rob Stein in an NPR podcast, “The work was done on 86...embryos that weren't viable...to minimize some of the ethical concerns. Only 71 of the embryos survived, and just 28 were successfully edited. But the process also frequently created unintended mutations in the embryos' DNA.”7 Gene therapy finally crossed ethical lines, casting more doubt upon both the scientific community and the general public, with its ability to edit humans before they are born and variable success rate.

I deleted any unnecessary words from the paragraph and quote to further clarify the message being conveyed. For the last sentence, I made gene therapy the main subject in the sentence saying that it stirs up controversy rather than saying how different people interpret this (which would make gene therapy more passive). The different interpretations of this experiment will instead by mentioned in the next section called "GMH's: Genetically Modified Humans. Is This Ethical?" With these ideas in mind, I shall continue editing my rough draft.