Cloning surprise sparks raging controversy Am I surprised? Obviously not.
Upset, annoyed, distressed, anxious? No.
But I'm not particularly overjoyed, either. Apathetic, perhaps. So there are cloned human embryos. So what. We all knew this was coming, sooner rather than later. Humans are naturally curious things and we will do any-damn-thing to satisfy our curiosity, often to disastrous results. Did we really expect scientists all over to just sit back and twiddle their thumbs and not play with the shiny new technology that's been developed in the past few decades? Ladies and gentlemen, let me remind you that we are talking about scientists here. The principles of Good Taste and Common Sense do not apply to scientists. Yours truly should know because yours truly is being trained up to be one.
If you're still unconvinced, perhaps The Ig Nobel Prizes might help you get an inkling of the things which go through a typical scientists' head. We're scientists. If there's anything--anything at all-- that fails to satisfy our curiosity, most likely we'll grab it, poke it, prod it, and see how many different ways we can make it explode. Scientists, after all, are merely the people who fortuitously never learnt in childhood that Some Things Should Just Be Well Left Alone and will go around pushing big red buttons labeled "DO NOT PUSH" to see what they do.
The bottom line being: it's unrealistic to expect the scientific world to step away from the frontiers of science just because a few namby-pamby conservative high-ups tell them not to. I mean, like, ha ha.
For goodness' sakes, people. Stop kicking up such a fuss. It's only a bunch of cloned human embryos, alright? They're not even fetuses, they're only embryos. A barely-differentiated mass of cells not capable of surviving outside of a carefully controlled medium. There's no more life in them than there is in the nematode worm C. elegans, and I don't see people giving a fuck about what we do to nematode worms. If parents are given the legal right to control the lives of living breathing thinking sentient children until they're 21, why the fuck can't scientists do the same with 21-day-old fetuses that they've created with their own blood, sweat and tears?
And, oh, don't give me all that bullshit about "oh but it's a potential human life and human lives are sacred!" Let's see you stop your terrorist-terrorist-terrorist-war-mongering and start campaigning for the rights of stem cells first.
Asshats.
The Speaker For The Dead
2004-02-15
11:20 a.m.
