[extropy-chat] BIO: overtorqing the luddites

[Adrian Tymes]

--- "Robert J. Bradbury" <bradbury at aeiveos.com> wrote:
> It occurs to me (because I'm in a strange mood this
> afternoon having watched a 12 car pile-up with one
> car managing a triple flip in the Daytona 500 --
> *What*
> are these people thinking driving around at 180
> MPH???
> Lord is there material for whatever late night show
> does "stupid human tricks"...  There are days when I
> just want to throw in the towel with respect to
> humanity.)

Motivations are the same there as with any sport
(fame, prize money, et cetera) - but at least they do
not shun technological improvements, unlike many other
sports.

> Allright, rant aside, it looks as if by combining
> things
> like human cloning capabilities (coming out of
> Korea) and
> long term embryo preservation (coming out of Israel)
> that
> one would now be able to produce embryos, harvest
> stem
> cells, turn them into offspring, freeze the
> remaining
> portions of those embryos and then allow them to
> mature
> at some later date.  The net result being that the
> children
> are much older than the parents.

Two errors:

1. Reproductive cloning - taking an embryo all the
way to baby stage and possibly much beyond, to show
it has no defents - is far from what the Koreans have
demonstrated and were attempting.  Granted, it's
along the same path, but one would need to do a lot
of development to turn it into reality.

2. In a case like this, the "children" are more like
the twin siblings of the "parent" (singular), if they
come out at about the same time.  If they come out
much earlier, then socially, it would be the simple
reverse of the normal clone-child relationship to the
original: the elder is the parent; the younger, the
child.  No major disruption.