Something’s that’s been brewing in my head for awhile… after reading the articles from last few weeks of TIME / Newsweek magazines.

Cloning

This was a conversation between an atheist -A – and a young Christian convert – C – when news of Dolly the cloned sheep hit the news many years ago.

A: ‘C, stop wasting time. There is no God. Through science, scientists have created life.’
C: ‘Created life? Out of scratch?’
A: ‘Read this. They have cloned a new animal. No sperm included.’
C: ‘But they didn’t actually create life out of nothingness like God did, did they?’
A: ‘Come on… why dwell on semantics?’
C: ‘It’s not semantics man. It’s untruthful reporting and exaggeration. They didn’t ‘create’ life. Look at this… they took the nucleus off an egg, fused it into another cell, then fooled the cell into splitting like an embryo. Makes me wonder if there will be problems later.’
A: ‘Gee. I can’t stand you religious fanatics.’
C: ‘Nah. It’s common sense. Let me give you an analogy. You do IT, right? Say, you take the registry of Win95, and then wack that into WinNT, and then actually got the Win2K to work, did you actually _CREATE_ a new Windows.. let’s call it Win95N?”
A: ‘Eh….’
C: ‘And can you be sure that every copy will work, and subsequently, these copy of Win2K won’t be giving you problems?’

Today, we are finally aware that Dolly itself is an anomaly. Scientists admit that thousands of cells going through this process would fail or never go far enough to actually come into being like Dolly. Above which, most clones suffers defects later in their lives, and lived shorter than most normally birthed animals. Even the ‘maker’ of Dolly admitted as much and has come out against the methods.

10 years after Dolly, scientists have come no closer to improving on this method. No primates has been cloned though I won’t be surprised if that is in the works. One Korean scientists into cloning humans have been discredited as a fraud.

Did we really create life? Or did we not?

Stem Cells Research

For Bush’s detractors, Bush is an idiot. He is denying mankind another new way to find cures to diseases. Being one of his supporters in the 2004 elections, I would say his opponents constantly under-estimated him and I am not surprised he veto-ed the bill to please his voters. But as to whether he knows WHY and for WHAT he is veto-ing, that’s anybody’s guess.

However, I do know exactly why I supported his veto. One word: Chimeras. Even Greeks consider it an abomination when they coined the word.

It’s not so much an issue about morality though it has its part to play in my decision. But it’s the chimeras that put me firmly into Bush camp.

Pigs growing human livers. Mice growing human ears on its back and having brain cells in their brains. Human kidneys that is already secreting urine in god knows what animals!!

I am not against merging the human genome with animals because I am a Bible thumping fundamentalist believing that humans are created in the image of God (yes, I believe in that), but rather, the danger of disease in other species that we do not know about.

SIV, a cousin of HIV, is dormant and harmless in a certain species of primates. I think it’s a Chimpanzee. But when migrated into humans, it kills us by the millions.

And now they have put human brain cells into mice. So, if one day they have a mouse with 100% human brain cells, won’t those rats be human since their actions and thoughts are originating from a brain cell 100% human! And I suppose some of you will like it… Stuart Little in now a reality!!

If they can find something else to grow another kidney artificially using stem cells, I am all for it. Growing it on a non-human animal?

No thanks.