Building new… human?

Chinese scientists have signed a deal to establish a commercial animal cloning center in the northern port city of Tianjin, edging the controversial science closer to mainstream acceptance. The plant in the Tianjin Economic and Technological Development Area (TEDA), a government-sponsored business development park, will clone animals including sniffer and pet dogs, beef cattle and racehorses. Naturally, there are talks about cloning of a deceased pet. It is expected that people, who have lost their beloved dog, for example, will gladly pay $100,000 for having its live copy. The main building of the center is already under construction and due to be put into use in the first half of 2016.

“The technology is already there,” chief executive Xu Xiaochun said. He wants to clone humans as, he said, he already can. But he won’t, for now. “If this is allowed,” he continued, “I don’t think there are other companies better than Boyalife that make better technology… Unfortunately, currently, the only way to have a child is to have it be half its mum, half its dad… Maybe in the future you have three choices instead of one. You either have fifty-fifty, or you have a choice of having the genetics 100 percent from Daddy or 100 percent from Mummy. This is only a choice.”

Interesting, isn’t it? Would you want to have many you (with some fixed “problems”, if necessary) around? Instead of having children and raising them in your image and likeness, would not it be easier just to design what you want based on who you know the best – you? No, wait, it’s getting even better.

For the first time, artificial life was created. Why bother? Because they ultimately want to intelligently design new life-forms from scratch — say, bacteria that can manufacture medical drugs, or algae that churn out biofuels. And creation requires understanding. So far, they constructed only a bacterium that has 473 genes, which is minimum necessary for the living organism to survive.

How soon, do you think, these two efforts will compliment each other in producing of many perfect clones? I think it will happen in our life time. Then we will need to answer (or just ignore, as it happened in the past) many ethical questions that today we do not dare to ask.

These jokes were generated by computers…

They were published by  Wired: What kind of animal rides a catamaran? A cat. What is the difference between leaves and a car?  One you brush and rake, the other you rush and brake.