Evaluation of General Sources

In this post, I'll be evaluating 2 articles about a controversy in engineering, my field of study. Most controversies in engineering revolve around genetic engineering, or modifying DNA in hopes of solving whatever problem is at hand.

Bock, Christopher. "DNA methylation". 2/18/06 via wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution License.

Article 1

The first article I found, "Scientists Genetically Modify Human Embryos in Controversial World First", is from "The Guardian" which is a .com site. So, I was a little hesitant about its credibility until I looked further into the author. Ian Sample not only has worked as a science journalist for the "Institute of Physics" and "New Scientist", but he also received his PhD in biomedical materials from the University of London. Also, this was last updated on April 23, 2015 which is pretty recent. That definitely reassured me that this was a credible source.

Genetic modification has always been a controversial topic in the science world, especially when it comes to modifying human DNA; when ethical lines are being crossed is the real question here. Sample was trying to inform his readers of a situation in China where scientists had begun to modify human embryos. That definitely raised eyebrows as an infinite number of questions came up about everything from ethics to safety to passing down traits to offspring that were modified instead of actual family traits.

Sample doesn't seem to be that biased about the topic, I couldn't really pinpoint a side he was on. It was meant to inform and I think that he accomplished that goal. He includes quotes from legitimate sources from pro genetic modification as well as those against it. Also, the author include 2 links, one being to another article about this topic and the other being to a journal he got information from.

Article 2

This next article is called "Ethics of Embryo Editing Divides Scientists" and was taken from Nature.com, a respected science journal. It was last updated on March 18, 2015 so again, it's fairly recent. The author, David Cyranowski, has done work all over the Asian-pacific region writing and teaching, but he has always focused on stem cell research. Being an author for this journal also adds to his credibility. 

Like the previous article, this was focused on human embryo genetic modification. This author went more into detail about different scientists' views and the actual genetics. He listed different issues people had with this process including the forming of diseases from these modifications and the passing down of these modified (and possibly defective) genes. It's from a science journal so I didn't expect anything less. Several different scientists' quotes were included in this article along with a reference list directly under the article. 

In this article there doesn't seem to be a clear bias on the topic as quotes were again included from both sides of the spectrum. There's a list of related articles linked to their respected articles which would be helpful for the readers. It was overall pretty credible and not a huge point of view from the author, it was written to inform.