Ahmadinejad stresses Iran's significant progress in genetic engineering

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad underscored the country's astonishing progress in genetic engineering, and said Iranian scientists will soon be able to transfer Positively Selected Genes (PSGs) to living creatures, including human beings. "Today, our young people have achieved the know-how of biotechnology and in other words, we will be able to transfer the ingenuity and PSGs to living creatures, including humans, in a not far future" Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday. "We have attained this advanced know-how and it won't be too far when diseases like cardiovascular diseases are fully treated," he added. Populations evolve as mutations arise in individual organisms and, through hereditary transmission, gradually become “fixed” (shared by all individuals) in the population. Many mutations have essentially no effect on organismal fitness and can become fixed only by the stochastic process of neutral drift. However, some mutations produce a selective advantage that boosts their chances of reaching fixation. Genes in which new mutations tend to be beneficial, rather than neutral or deleterious, tend to evolve rapidly and are said to be under positive selection. Genes involved in immunity and defense are a well-known example; rapid evolution in these genes presumably occurs because new mutations help organisms to prevail in evolutionary “arms races” with pathogens. Many mammalian genes show evidence of positive selection, but open questions remain about the overall impact of positive selection in mammals.