Helen Alvarado

recorder: Glenn Hough

25 June 2001

THE POWER TO RE-ENGINEER THE HUMAN SPECIES

Overview: Human Genetics

Text Presented: "Unscrambling the Meaning of Life?"

Primary Objective: utopia / dystopia / ecotopia

Sources of Research:

Discussion Questions:

1. Will this new knowledge help or hurt us?
2. Is there a possibility that micro – organisms will be created to specifically harm certain ethnic backgrounds?
3. Will this cause Xenophobia?

My discussion was based on human genetics. The article I read was in a magazine called The Philadelphia Trumpet and asked if anyone was familiar with the magazine. I then introduced the pros and cons of cloning. Following are the comments made to the discussion questions I presented:

I heard that two companies are now working together. President Clinton made them work together on the sequencing of the human genome.

Well, there has always been suspicions about AIDS in Africa, that it was introduced from the west. There has been no recourse, no reason not to suspect that such things happened.

Is it our place to monkey with this – or do we discontinue large scale projects? How can they hope to be controlled?

What about the potential or mad scientists? Or aren’t there many left?

The knowledge necessary isso specialized and to specific to accumulate that much knowledge.

The Robert Devoul character from 6^th Day was in that type of situation.

I would remind the class that in the 6^th Day there were two different technologies at work. The cloning was one, the other was the downloading of the human mind from one body to another. As a futurist, I’d say the cloning isn’t the problem, it’s the downloading we need to worry about, but it’s tremendously more difficult.

But Hitler, even with the technology of the times was pursuing such things, convinced by his deluded crusade of genetic purity to do so.

Hitler had Nazi scientists working on scientific experiments using humans.

There were all types of horrible experiments done to victims of the Holocaust.

Even during the Gulf War, Iraq had biological weapons. They could get those types of scientists from Russia, since these scientists hadn’t been paid in months and would do the jobs not knowing what they were in actuality doing.

Could a corporation or government design a super virus that would key off of just a certain few genes that only one race had?

Why would they if they got clients and wanted to do business everywhere? Beside with such organizations, that’s too specific of a background. A white board, a black board, that kind of thing.

Wouldn’t that be too much to engineer, just for one corporation?

It seems that racial tensions have died off some.

Corporations can’t be so specific when it comes to who they deal with.

But then again, the very powerful might be very prejudiced.

War in general breeds great discoveries and advancements.

If we circle around to our main point: this type of technology would give us the ability to be very selective in which genes we use.

For Down Syndrome, you could fix the child or mess them up with a genetic virus, since Down itself is only an extra one chromosome.

I might support cloning if it was only for spare parts and not whole bodies.

This brings us back to ethics, whether they are human or not.

They’d be human since they are products of human genetics.

If it doesn’t have a brain, it wouldn’t be human.

Talk of just parts, there is some in the chicken industry. We all like the chicken breast, there’s talk of just cloning it and not raising the whole chicken.

KFC: Kentucky Fried Clonage!!