Turning into a different gender, race or species.

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Would it be possible for humans to transform into a different gender, race or species by genetic engineering?

Who's first in the Telepod?

MJ turned into a white woman, so I guess it's possible.

Even if the cells changed genomes, the adult form is already set so the person would basically be a mutant form of whatever they had changed into. Only ongoing functions - digestion, wound repair, aging, that sort of thing - would proceed as if the person were the gender/species that their genes had changed into.

Genetic Enhancement... it's been the subject of science fiction from Star Trek's KHAAAAAN! to the more recent GATTACA, etc.

Technically still "human" but very tinkered-with. How much alteration before one is no longer considered human?

Closer to the here-and-now... how much genetic modification can our current franken-foods be mucked with before it's no longer considered the food it once was? I remember reading how wheat was supposed to have X chromosomes, but has been modified so often it's at X+7(?)... small wonder so many people are developing gluten/wheat intolerance!

It's good to know science well enough to know when to leave some things un-altered! I think it's a slippery slope to go tinkering with our human DNA.

Confirmed, as in experiment? No, of course not. But it's basic sense: once your growth plates close up, for example, your bones are done growing - your bones aren't going to change into dog bones just because some of their DNA is switched.

As I mentioned, healing and other ongoing things (like ongoing regeneration of tissues) would occur as if you were the organism whose DNA had replaced the original - but you would at most end up like some sort of mutant combination of the two (and not in the good sense of 'mutant').

Wrt. wheat: a lot of that modification is natural - IIrc wheat is a natural hybrid between two different species, that humans found and took advantage of. Plant genetics is, from the perspective of someone who focused more on the zoological side of things, really freaking bizarre. Even normal angiosperm seeds have multiple polyploidies in several different combinations, and a lot of plants have free-living monoploid stages. Complete genome duplications, and complete genome hybridizations (as with wheat) are far from rare.

Yes, cells die - gradually. They're replaced by division of remaining cells.

The cells themselves, with the new DNA, will have the metabolic processes of the new organism, but the arrangement of an organism, it's shape, is determined quite early on by its growth and development. In the prior example of a human-to-dog DNA replacement, you would have human-shaped bones made up of dog bone cells. Individual cells don't have any kind of programming to make take the overall shape of an organism into account.

^good chance!
It's actually possible that the person might start to get fairly furry, since skin turnover is fairly rapid and hair growth is controlled by hormones.