Cloning

I am wondering, even it may not be directly related to your post, what your father was thinking and you&others in the list are thinking about the cloning, in terms of both biological and cultural anthropology. On the ethical side, if successful, an authority with all the means at hand, could produce uniform individuals to gradually replace the diversity at large, as one point. The other is whether physiologically cloned individual (i) will have the ability to cope with the requirements of higher more and more complex realms such as biological, neurological (including all brain functions), passional, intuitional, spiritual; (ii) if so will they develop in line with the abilities of the original from which they sprung out or split in the process ???

I discussed issues like cloning and genetically modifying organisms with him often. Regarding cloning in particular and genetic modification in general, he felt that science which is proceeding from the limited theoretical premise of mechanism would naturally generate endless side effects. Even a Rosennean theoretic premise would not be able to eliminate side effects, but the scientists would be able to do some complexity analysis going IN (in preparation), and the results of that analysis might be enough to scare the hell out of them enough to scrap the whole idea. At least they would see the dangers.

The kind of tinkering they are doing with complex systems, when they really don't understand complexity at all, is extremely dangerous and I think they mostly don't see the danger. But when we break apart a complex system like an atom, we are unleashing forces that are otherwise stabilized in our environment and that is obviously going to have side effects. Can you imagine what would be some of the results if science figures out how to "genetically modify" atoms? Would some new form of matter be compatible with this universe? This is the kind of thing I write fiction about!

In cloning, we have already discussed the fact that the mitochondria in the donor egg are not replaced with the mitochondria of the organism to be cloned, so there is a chimerical element introduced, right there, from day one. There are going to be consequences from that. Side effects. It may be that every single cell in the body of the cloned individual has subtle immune consequences due to the fact that there are really two separate individuals present in every single cell of the body. Cells apparently have certain immuno-capabilities within the cell walls to regulate internal activity in limited ways, according to the preliminary research I did on the subject.

However, my father's views on genetically modified organisms were very mixed. He thought that certain types of genetic engineering were extremely useful: engineering an inoffensive bacterium to produce some needed antibiotic or engineering human cell lines (in a lab setting) to produce a vaccine, for example rather than using animal based production techniques as is currently done. But he also felt that knowing when it is safe to tinker with genetic modifications required wisdom and science is notorious for its lack of wisdom. The "test-planting" of GM crops in open fields, for example, is just plain stupid in my opinion. These organisms are not naturally designed to "stay where we put them" an no one has addressed genetically engineering that out! Pollen is airborne and the side effects are already being detected, even with the limited amount of such GM crop testing currently in progress in this country. Certified organic crops, in several cases, are already showing the presence of genetic material that can only have come from airborne pollen released by GM crops in another location. This is worse than second hand smoke inhalation, by far. Deliberately implanting food crops with genes for artificial pesticides? Sheesh! It's a guarantee that natural ecosystems are going to incorporate all of this stuff into wild and other "unintended" gene pools, at which point the interactions are off the scale into infinity. That's just plain common sense, methinks.

I'm hearing all sorts of ominous reports that using these GM crops as feed in raising food animals is causing nasty side effects, including unexplained miscarriages and deaths; that most species of farm animals can detect (!)(How???) which feed is genetically modified and when given a choice, they avoid the GM feed completely; and that some of these transgenic genes are finding their way into fetuses of pregnant animals, etc, etc... I'm not sure as yet how solid such reports are scientifically, so I'm looking into that, but the sheer volume of such reports from so many different sources tends to add weight to the reports' veracity, in my eyes.

It was all of this that made my father stop short of writing down what he had developed, conceptually, on the notion of creating a living system artificially. He was sure such information would be misused and abused. Given all of what science does not know about these systems that we are tinkering with in various ways, it certainly seems that we ought to err on the side of caution. I personally believe laws ought to prevent these kinds of open tests in farm fields, among other things. But the laws haven't caught up with the technologies yet. This is one reason why I've chosen to work to get my father's theoretical ideas "out there" and accessible-- the relational quality of an organization-based theoretical foundation, which is one description of Rosennean Complexity Theory, would automatically guarantee these genetic engineers that what they're doing is going to have unforeseeable side effects in unforeseeable directions.

Judith