A Widely Held Dissention

Mood: just peachy
Listening to: the news

          The reoccurring topic of this blog has become death, or so it would seem.  While I think everyone out there would agree that death is as important of a topic as it gets, to devote all off one’s time pondering it gets a bit on the monotonous side.  I’ll be the first to admit that I am a card carrying cynic of the first degree, so this will never be a ‘happy-go-lucky’ style of blog, but on the other hand I don’t want to be banging on the same old drum every time one of my readers blesses me with their presence.  Tediousness is not considered a golden virtue of blogging, or of writing in any form what-so-ever, as far as I know.  Which, as you probably have already noticed, ‘what I know’ amounts to ‘not a whole Hell of a lot’.  Whatever.  Practice makes perfect, or so I’ve heard somewhere.

          Death, being a taboo topic, (for this entry at least, I don’t know how long I can hold out, though) doesn’t leave us many options if we want to, say, comment on recent world events, or the news period.  Yes, troubled young American Indian boys shotgunning their grandfather and his ‘companion’(live-in-girlfriend, but I suppose that’s to risqué for prime time news) then stealing his police cruiser for a quick joyride to school only to shoot the shit out of his school killing about six, I believe.  That would defiantly be out of bounds for this blog, today.  Nothing about the war, all death, all the time over there in Iraq.  Here’s one piece of sunshine; the deadly bouts of disease that was expected after the tsunami was avoided through the prompt response of international aid.  Untold numbers of volunteers, spending their own money on airfare, hauled ass over there to help in any way they could.  I’m talking about doctors, engineers and all sorts of professionals handling the business of disposing of mountains of dead bodies and fixing the sewage systems. This is the reason that we’re not mourning many, many more killed by the nastiness brought on by having your drinking water contaminated by rotting human remains, animal carcasses and human shit.  Could you imagine shitting yourself to death?  If I’m not mistaking, basically that’s what cholera is.

          Since I have made the decision that death and the act of dieing is not going to be the main topic of today’s piece, I’ll swing the other way.  Today we shall reflect on the intricacies life.  It truly is amazing to me that there is such a wide rift in the view of what alive entails.  Now if we where to broaden that question to what would be considered to have a soul, I mean…Wow, that is a whole lot of information.  I think that the most recent installment of modern agoraphobia the topic will be about life made to order.

          Lets talk about cloning, folks.  While we’re at it, since I just so happen to be a resident of the Golden State and I did vote a loud resounding ‘yes’ for state funding of stem cell research, we’ll talk about that, too.  I think that ‘Genetic Savings and Clone’ is possibly the coolest damn name for a company that specializes in creating carbon copies of beloved pet (cats, for now at least) that anyone could have ever conceived.  I mean, it’s really cute.  But regardless o how novel of a name you think up for your ingenious company, you mention the word ‘clone’ and people go apeshit.  The religious right gets up-in-arms, politicians start lobbing and things start to happen.  The Fox network denounces you as junk science…it gets ugly fast.  I don’t know if the Fox network really denounced anyone in at Genetic Savings and Clone as junk scientist, but they would have lickity-split if George Dubya threw a few hand signals.

          My point being that the American public, at large has an unreasonable fear of furthering the technology of cloning.  Its obvious that I’m not a scientist, saying that this issue is going to be relayed in layman’s terms is an understatement, to be sure.  I can not for he life of me figure out what exactly people are so terrified of, that the government is going to start cloning huge armies of mindless clones that will be mistreated, that we will inadvertently create the anti-Christ?  That must be it because the religious folks go nuts.  The creation of life is the sole domain of The Lord, cloning is therefore an abomination.  Watching those cute, fuzzy little guys rolling around all kitten-like, its hard to keep in mind that they are abominations, but as we all know the Devil is a tricky bastard and not above using kittens to get his way.  Persistent, too.  It took one hundred and eighty-eight tries to get CopyCat in February, ’02.  But Ole’ Sparky kept on keeping on and cloning and stem cell research are becoming more acceptable and mainstream as the years go by.  Famous actors and actresses help by endorsing stem cell research in the name of finding cures for diseases that affect millions.  Diabetes and Alzheimer’s are the two with the largest bandwagons.  I mean, who could deny Nancy Reagan, the great mind behind “Just Say No!” fame?  When Nancy gets in front of a camera talking about how her husband suffered from Alzheimer’s for the last fifteen years of his life (a couple of which he was still the leader of the free world, but what the heck) and how stem cell research could keep other elderly men from having their memory ravaged like her husbands, we want to help.  Of course, some of us think it ironic that if Ronald Reagan died dirt poor, there wouldn’t be any place for him to go because he closed all of the state-funded homes for the mentally unstable in California.  He would have died entombed in cardboard mumbling into pissy blankets if he lived in California.  He must have passed the laws that closed down all of the homes for the mentally unstable (unless you where dangerous, then you could go to jail first) before the Alzheimer’s got that bad.  Yeah, you gotta feel for poor ole’ Nancy.  Just say no, girl…just say no.

          Anyways, I digress.  Cloning pets, that’s what I was talking about.  Forgive me, sometimes I’ll just go on a tangent and it takes a minute for me to come back.

          As the backers of the ‘X-Prize’ knew, if something is going to thrive beyond its allotted fifteen minutes of fame, it must have commercial value.  The people behind the x prize are all about furthering space travel and all things having to do with extraterrestrial, they knew NASA isn’t up to the job.  Our astronauts are surviving on candy and the charity of the Soviets up there right now.  If outer space could be made a tourist attraction, commercially viable, oh yeah, baby.  Genetic Savings and Clone appears to be doing that for cloning.  When God’s minions have decided that your doing the Devil’s dirty work for him there had better be some private industry to fall back on for research grants.  Years down the road, God’s minions will be screaming about how expensive medicine is and how it’s a crime that the pharmaceutical companies are allowed to price gouge.  Conveniently forgetting that they themselves where the ones picketing the laboratories where these medicines where being developed.  By Satan.  Making biology a crime is not going to make it go away, once an idea is out there, its there, no taking it back.  No special wand to make everyone think the earth is flat again no matter how many people get burned.  That is the way we are, as a species.  We’ll do it just because we can, just to prove it can be done.  How else can you explain a hundred megaton nuclear weapon, not because we needed one that big, because those scientists in that lab knowing damn good an well the only thing a hundred megaton bomb is good for is destroying civilizations, just had to prove it could be done.  Humans are not capable of being rational about this one thing.  We know we shouldn’t, know in our hearts that its suicide to go on but we wont be able to stop ourselves.  Human nature that runs this deep can not be swayed, stopped or persuaded, ask all of those Catholic priests about trying to stop human nature, they’ll tell how well it works. 

          Some things are so desperately needed in society that commercial value becomes a non-issue, regardless of how hard the church campaigns against it.  For instance, take birth control pills.  Condoms have been around for years (and as we know now, the safest choice) but the passive woman of the early twentieth century had a harder time enforcing her will in the sexual arena, unfortunately for her the leading cause of death before birth control pills was child birth.  So many women died during child birth that the medical community thought that women didn’t succumb to heart disease or strokes.  If you could survive having eleven kids, baby, wasn’t nothing taking you out.  Still, for every woman who died while giving birth, there was a grieving husband left behind, usually with a whole lot of kids.  God himself could have came down and denounced birth control pills and it wouldn’t have meant a thing, society needed this medical advancement yesterday.  Personally, I think that God was up there shaking his head that it took us so long to figure out something so obvious but I’m not qualified to make those sort of assumptions.  The conservatives and the religious right went insane trying to stop this particular advancement; made the making and distribution of the pill punishable by law, stopped people from educating the young women about it even.  Eventually, good sense won over and women are now free to die from cancer and diabetes same as men.  But religion is nothing if not persistent and conservatives are nothing if not regressively backward looking.  The cure to some of modern America’s most lethal diseases possibly lies in stem cell research but the scientists have to fight tooth and nail to be able to legally start working on cures.  Private funding of laboratories is one answer but that would only ensure insanely expensive medicine as a product.  Watch, in twenty years or so, all of America’s devotedly religious ‘bible belt’ community is going to have a sudden epiphany; “Hey, if we would have funded this with federal money, then maybe I could afford the medicine I need to live…Wow, go figure.”

          I keep going off topic, I really want to talk about cloning.  The huge fear of cloning is that creation of life is the sole privilege of God.  Not Dr. Frankenstein, or any other mad scientist working for the government (we have all seen the movies), only God.  Even the thought of cloning a mere organ is enough to send people screaming out into the streets.  Why doesn’t anyone ever stop to think about all of those people waiting with baited breath, hoping against hope that their name will get to the top o the organ donors list before they die.  Any red-blooded American out there with half of a heart would want to fix this problem up for all those people.  It would be great, custom growing organs as needed, organs the recipient wouldn’t have to worry about their bodies immune system rejecting.  No more news broadcasters will ‘top-of-the-hour’ stories about little girls dieing on operating tables because of a life saving heart coming a little to late to be of any help to her.  Wouldn’t that be great?  The problem with this little fairy tale is that scientist will have to learn by cloning the whole enchilada first, then thy can learn how to do each individual bean.  And that, my friend, is not going to fly in God’s country, little girls or no little girls.  Still, as we already know, once an idea is out there, there it stays.  Can anyone say ‘Napster’?

          In August 2002 Michael Bishop, ex-president of Infigen had this crazy idea.  His idea was called handmade cloning, its not only cheaper and easier than today’s SOP, but it works better too.  The procedure could speed up the beginning of common place cloning in farming.  What’s even cooler is it could be used to clone endangered species in the bush in Africa.  I bet a few of you just had the opening scenes of “Jurassic Park” roll through your minds, didn’t you?  Bunch of flat-earther’s, I tell ya.  What people are genuinely afraid of is if this is so easy that it can be accomplished in less than hyper-sterile conditions, what is to keep some less than ethical types from using human eggs.  What I’m trying to say is that there is not a single, solitary thing that can be done to stop the eventual use of human eggs in cloning.  It’s going to happen, if it hasn’t already.  No amount of sticking our heads in the sand is going to make that fact any less of a reality.  All that will be accomplished from pretending that outlawing cloning will stop human experimentation is the degeneration of legitimate cloning science. 

          Over at Genetic Savings and Clone they have been doing big business plying their trade.  Little Gizmo, genetic copy of Gizmo was born in December of 2004, she is a little cutie who cost her proud parents fifty grand.  The proud papa, who is the companies second paying customer says “ There are no words to describe how happy I am”.  I ask, how can something like this be bad?  The first cat the company cloned, Little Nicky, is said to be similar to the original in personality as well as looks.  The original Nicky was with the owners for seventeen years before passing away, can you imagine how happy they are with Genetic Savings and Clone?  Although dogs are not yet on the reincarnation menu, it won’t be long before Fido can have nine lives, too.  I’m in danger of sounding like an advertisement for this company so let me just say this, it’s a wonderful company and I hope it brings the private funding needed to keep cloning research alive and well with or without the governments approval.  

          I realize that everything happens in nature for a reason, to keep the natural balance humans should not interfere, blah-blah-blah.  Sure, we all heard this line watching nature documentaries on PBS, ‘Mommie, why are the mean men letting the cheetah die?’  ‘It’s nature honey, they can’t get involved.’  They may fuck up the entire evolutionary line of the African continent if they get involved with nature beyond photographing it or shooting it.  Jurassic Park non-withstanding, we could reverse the decimation of untold numbers of species through cloning.  We could redeem ourselves, build a new ark.