Transgenic animals can secrete needed proteins, such as blood clotting factors needed by human hemophilia-sufferers, in their milk. Incorporating genes coding for growth hormone protein into a transgenic animal's genome can produce a faster-growing, leaner animal. When injected into dairy cattle, BST stimulates milk yields. Developing ideas or viable technologies does not exempt scientists from ethical responsibility. Once that information has been disclosed, however, the task of determining the ethical applications of scientific knowledge and technology falls not to scientists themselves, but to ethicists, advisors, regulators, and informed members of the public.
Science produces ideas about how and why the world functions the way it does.
Technology uses these ideas to produce usable objects. It is the study of ethics, however, that addresses what we ought and ought not to do, rather than the how or why of what actually happens. According to many regulatory bodies, genetically modified crops pose no greater threat to health than those crops produced by traditional breeding. According to some researchers such as Mike Gale, head of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England, the precision and accuracy of genetic modification offer a great advantage over the comparative clumsiness of conventional breeding. Although genetic manipulation more efficiently and elegantly permits the production of desired traits within an organism, this is hardly the end of the story.