In the book, The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Jenna has no recollection of her entire life or who she is or how to even do the simplest things like laugh or cry. In the books, you find out Jenna was burned to the extent that there was hardly any unharmed skin on her entire body from a near death car crash. In addition, she was suffering from organ failures and was on the verge of death. Her father, the owner of a well known tech and pharmaceutical company in the book, Fox Biosystems, has created a substance called Bio Gel, "an artificial neural network built on a biological model. It's condensed, oxygenated gel that is filled with neural chips. These chips are as small as human neurons, and the wonderful thing is, they communicate and pass messages in the same way human neurons do, through chemical neurotransmitters." (126). Jenna has now been out of her coma for a few weeks, although her parents never told her she was in a coma, and they never told her any major details about her past, especially about the car crash. But she slowly regains her memory and begins to grow curious. Because of her curiosity and desire to uncover the secrets of her old life, Jenna discovers her body is not what she expected. She accidently reveals a blue substance under her skin and goes to her parents for answers. Jenna discovers her body is almost entirely made of Bio Gel, the blue substance underneath her skin. She is told that her father and other doctors basically grew skin from Jenna's unharmed skin cells, preserved organs, tissues and other damaged parts of the body, and replaced parts of the body that was beyond repair, including about 90% of her brain all using Bio Gel. In the book, the doctors are able to almost genetically engineer a body from scraps.
In my research, I searched for what scientists are capable of genetically engineering in a human body. I found one website that talked about the possible forms of genetic engineering on a human. According to Dr. Raymond Bohlin, there are two possible forms of genetic engineering in a human, gene therapy and an attempt to cure the disease all together. Gene therapy is an attempt to reduce a genetic disease in the body, by inserting genes without the disorder into the tissues most affected by the disease. The person who receives this treatment might live a longer and less painful life, but they will still be a carrier of the disease, meaning their kids have a chance of getting the disease from them. In an attempt to completely eliminate a genetic disease in a human body, although it is possible, this type of genetic engineering has not yet been tried on a human, only on animals. Scientists would have to remove every gene carrying this disease throughout the body and replace it with a non disease carrying gene to get rid of the disease, which is nearly impossible. On the other hand, scientists have discovered that if you are able to trace a gene carrying a disease when the zygote is still in the state of an embryo, then the scientists have the ability to remove the gene and replace it with a non disease carrying gene, which has been tested on animals such as, cows, sheep and pigs. Theoretically, this tactic would remove the disease from the body, because when the genes would replicate through mitosis, they would replicate non disease carrying genes. However, Lee Silver says this is a bad idea, for two main reasons. When tested on animals, this technique has worked only 50% of the time. Also, about 5% of the animals that successfully had their disease carrying gene removed ended up having a mutation because the new gene, put in by scientists, overlaps a gene that has been present in the cell. After researching genetic engineering, I have realized, in The Adoration of Jenna Fox, the ability that the doctors have to genetically engineer a nearly identical body of Jenna Fox is completely fictional.
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