She was eighty-three, with sparse gray hair and liver-spotted, bony hands in mid transmute to distasteful claws. Polish on her manicured nails sparkled in the light of the overhead reading lamp and matched her crimson lips. She was rich but had had a hard life in the small Louisiana Bayou town she lived in since girlhood. Her husband was dead and had been a tough man and bit of a racist--a very successful businessman but didn't like 'the colod folk' She did not miss him. She had not grieved his passing. I could relate to what she said. My compassion reared like a cowboy's mustang.
Her granddaughter was living with a man who'd raped a teenage girl and she believed he should be hanged. I don't believe in the death penalty but I didn't object. Her daughter, living in Pennsylvania, is in her sixties and raising her granddaughters, a boy and his older sister, offspring from two separate trysts. She sends clothes and money and these children love their great grandmother. The Louisiana state wanted to take them after the rape verdict and she spirited them away to Virginia. I admired that. Louisiana rearing children? My compassion intensified.
She was an avid fisher woman in her prime. Her husband had a boat. She loved to fish. She loves to eat catfish, crayfish, salmon, orange roughy, has even tried a bit of sand shark. She also loves all animals and donates to the USPCA and Humane Society. She owned dogs and cats. She had six Labradors and still grieves the loss of the last one six years ago, a yellow female that contracted cancer. I sympathized. Spice came to mind and I stopped breathing for a moment.
"My greatest trophies I have on the walls of my living room," she said.
"What did you catch?"
"Two beauties," she said in her Southern drawl. "Real beautiful. Could even be mother and baby because I caught 'em the same day and place. And I brought them in myself. I fished good."
My interest was piqued. "What sort of fish?"
"Dolphins."
"Dolphins?"
Her eyes widened like mine, though with great pride. "Caught them off the coast of Florida thirty years ago."
"Dolphins aren't fish," I said.
"Sure they are. You can't eat 'em, but they is fish all the same. Company love them when they come into my living room."
I retreated to my novel.
Showing posts with label animals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animals. Show all posts
Friday
About cloning
In the same week the USDA says that meat and dairy products from cloned animals will one day be available on our supermarket shelves because there's no difference in the animal and it's clone, we learn Stemagen Corp--a privately funded company in California--has managed to clone a human.
It was fascinating watching the interview of the scientist Dr. Samuel Wood who'd used his own skin cells as the "building blocks" of the process. He said he felt amazing and strange peering at the three cells of what would become a copy of him before he destroyed them.
I understand the whole argument that cloning should be allowed because it will advance the search for cures to disease, etc.
But I will take this a step farther. What is the real problem or dilemma in bringing a child into the world using this method? Why is it automatically unacceptable to do do? Why the knee jerk clamor for laws to prevent cloning? One expects organized religion such as the Catholic church, etc to jerk it's knee, but what about intellectuals and those who do not take the bible literally? Even Wood whom I imagine is intellectual in all aspects of his life felt duty bound to state he didn't ever wish to clone a human--whether that's really his position or not, it felt like morality creeping into the realm of science.
Isn't it intellectual bunk in today's sophisticated world to conclude we can't do this because it's a sin, against God (who's never ruled on it to my knowledge), that its immoral, that it's arrogance to create a carbon copy of oneself. The child would have the same genes as its father OR mother--maybe that's what's making people squeamish:that the genes of one sex is no longer required to produce a child--but that's all. Because it would be born in a different time period and exposed to different socio-economic situations and stimuli (the nurture side of the equation), it would NOT be the same as its parent.
In my opinion, this will happen and in time it will be no more controversial than surrogacy as is increasingly happening with couples who want a child but can't conceive for one reason or other. People throughout the world should have the right to have children whether through sexual intercourse or cutting edge methods that advances in our technology allow. Why not use other pieces of our to DNA to create another human being? We use sperm and egg. The child would be a human being no matter.
In my opinion, we should be concentrating NOT on drafting laws to ban cloning--it's going to happen somewhere in the world--but rather on drafting good laws to protect how it will be conducted and to protect the rights of children born from cloning, if necessary. (For example, one good law would be that the USDA seal of approval can't be put on them making them eligible for consumption.)
After all, once it was strange to think a child's life began inside a test tube. No more.
It was fascinating watching the interview of the scientist Dr. Samuel Wood who'd used his own skin cells as the "building blocks" of the process. He said he felt amazing and strange peering at the three cells of what would become a copy of him before he destroyed them.
I understand the whole argument that cloning should be allowed because it will advance the search for cures to disease, etc.
But I will take this a step farther. What is the real problem or dilemma in bringing a child into the world using this method? Why is it automatically unacceptable to do do? Why the knee jerk clamor for laws to prevent cloning? One expects organized religion such as the Catholic church, etc to jerk it's knee, but what about intellectuals and those who do not take the bible literally? Even Wood whom I imagine is intellectual in all aspects of his life felt duty bound to state he didn't ever wish to clone a human--whether that's really his position or not, it felt like morality creeping into the realm of science.
Isn't it intellectual bunk in today's sophisticated world to conclude we can't do this because it's a sin, against God (who's never ruled on it to my knowledge), that its immoral, that it's arrogance to create a carbon copy of oneself. The child would have the same genes as its father OR mother--maybe that's what's making people squeamish:that the genes of one sex is no longer required to produce a child--but that's all. Because it would be born in a different time period and exposed to different socio-economic situations and stimuli (the nurture side of the equation), it would NOT be the same as its parent.
In my opinion, this will happen and in time it will be no more controversial than surrogacy as is increasingly happening with couples who want a child but can't conceive for one reason or other. People throughout the world should have the right to have children whether through sexual intercourse or cutting edge methods that advances in our technology allow. Why not use other pieces of our to DNA to create another human being? We use sperm and egg. The child would be a human being no matter.
In my opinion, we should be concentrating NOT on drafting laws to ban cloning--it's going to happen somewhere in the world--but rather on drafting good laws to protect how it will be conducted and to protect the rights of children born from cloning, if necessary. (For example, one good law would be that the USDA seal of approval can't be put on them making them eligible for consumption.)
After all, once it was strange to think a child's life began inside a test tube. No more.
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