Human Cloning Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Human Cloning. Here they are! All 98 of them:

Fat’ is usually the first insult a girl throws at another girl when she wants to hurt her. I mean, is ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ‘shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’? Not to me; but then, you might retort, what do I know about the pressure to be skinny? I’m not in the business of being judged on my looks, what with being a writer and earning my living by using my brain… I went to the British Book Awards that evening. After the award ceremony I bumped into a woman I hadn’t seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!’ ‘Well,’ I said, slightly nonplussed, ‘the last time you saw me I’d just had a baby.’ What I felt like saying was, ‘I’ve produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren’t either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?’ But no – my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate! I’ve got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don’t want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I’d rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny – a thousand things, before ‘thin’. And frankly, I’d rather they didn’t give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons.
J.K. Rowling
No one can tell the difference between a clone and a human. That's because there isn't any difference. The idea of clones being inferior is a filthy lie.
Nancy Farmer (The House of the Scorpion (Matteo Alacran, #1))
Differences were what made up the human race, similarities were what made up drones and clones.
Vicktor Alexander (Inconceivable (Tate Pack, #2))
I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she—like most of us—would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.
Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)
The Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2007 (H.R. 2560) did not pass. So the Defense Department could be cloning now.
Annie Jacobsen (The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency)
As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn't accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.
Chris Bohjalian (Before You Know Kindness)
You can't put a price tag on human life. But if you could, I'd demand coupons for clones.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
Father says we are all Defects, in our way. Humans and clones. He says the word is really just a scare tactic to incite disobedient beings into subservience. He says that's all it really is—just a word.
Rachel Cohn (Beta (Annex, #1))
The clones are already there; the virtual beings are already there. We are all replicants! We are so in the sense that, as in Blade Runner, it is already almost impossible to distinguish properly human behaviour from its projection on the screen, from its double in the image and its computerized prostheses.
Jean Baudrillard (Screened Out)
[[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. Neo-China arrives from the future. Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo. Retro-disease. Nanospasm.
Nick Land (Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007)
Heartless reality does not grant humans the lifespan necessary to master every specialty of science, so no one genius in his secret lab can really bring robots, mutants, and clones into the world at his mad whim--it takes a team, masses of funds, and decades. But one man can love all sciences, even if he cannot wield them, and he can inspire children with the model of the mad genius, even if he cannot live it.
Ada Palmer (Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1))
A brick could be used as another brick, as they all look the same. So yes, I am for human cloning as a means to build the future.

Jarod Kintz (Brick and Blanket Test in Brick City (Ocala) Florida)
Get a degree in mechanical engineering, Hiro. Get a pilot’s license, Hiro. Learn meditation and hypnosis, Hiro. Slip your roommate out of prison, Hiro. Drive thousands of clones and humans around in space, Hiro. Sit on your butt for four hundred years, Hiro.’ That’s what they told me. Not once did they say, Get shot and chased and stabbed by crazed crewmates, Hiro!” “To be fair, you were one of the people doing the chasing, crazed at the time too,” Maria said. “Semantics,” he said.
Mur Lafferty (Six Wakes)
From a distance, a clone's luminous eyes are meant to draw in humans and make them feel safe. Up close, the eyes appear hollow. Because of that, humans tend not to look into our eyes too closely, which I've been told is socially preferable, as eyes without souls behind them can be frightening.
Rachel Cohn (Beta (Annex, #1))
In the meantime, I hope you will not consign her to a windowless environment populated entirely by unsocialized clones who long ago abandoned the reading and discussion of literature in favor of creating ever more restrictive and meaningless ways in which humans are intended to make themselves known to one another.
Julie Schumacher (Dear Committee Members)
Imagine that a scientist creates a human clone in a lab based on the genes of a real man called Raghu. It looks exactly like Raghu. Through virtual reality (VR), its mind is fed with experiences and memories of Raghu so that now it believes that it is Raghu. Now both of them -Raghu and the clone - behave exactly the same way. They cry on same things, laugh on same things. How would you find out which one of them has a soul?
Shunya
The suppression of ecstasy and condemnation of pleasure by patriarchal religion have left us in a deep, festering morass. The pleasures people seek in modern times are superficial, venal, and corrupt. This is deeply unfortunate, for it justifies the patriarchal condemnation of pleasure that rotted out our hedonistic capacities in the first place! Narcissism is rampant, having reached a truly global scale. It now appears to have entered the terminal phase known as “cocooning,” the ultimate state of isolation. Dissociation from the natural world verges on complete disembodiment, represented in Archontic ploys such as “transhumanism,” cloning, virtual reality, and the uploading of human consciousness into cyberspace. The computer looks due to replace the cross as the primary image of salvation. It is already the altar where millions worship daily. If the technocrats prevail, artificial intelligence and artificial life will soon overrule the natural order of the planet.
John Lamb Lash
As a simple exercise, the instructor showed us how to splice our own DNA into that of a bacterial cell. As the bacterial colony then divided and grew, our DNA would be copied ad infinitum, a basic form of cloning. Though of course we only used a tiny fragment of DNA and the results were crude, I distinctly remember thinking, “I shouldn’t be able to clone myself in a one-credit class.
Thor Hanson (The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History)
On Harlan’s World, you don’t see many mandroids. They’re expensive to build, compared to a synthetic or even a clone, and most jobs that require a human form are better done by those organic alternatives. The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions: artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazard-proof bodywork, which most cyberengineering firms designed to spec for the task at hand. The last robot I’d seen on the World was a gardening crab.
Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1))
Scientists shall clone the human embryo in their laboratories tomorrow, and they shall reprogram somatic cells, thus creating a human clone, but never will there be a scientist who will be able to create a soul, which provides humans with feelings, and we know that feelings give birth to compassion and love.
Walter William Safar
As a child, my own mother told me the human heart spun on an axis smaller than a dime. Like her father, she sold "life for love" insurance. For the price of ten years off your life, you could purchase insurance on a ten-year love affair. Plans were also available in increments of twenty-five and fifty. If your love affair failed before your insurance expired, they'd provide you with a clone of the loved one for the duration of the term. Sometimes the clone worked out even better than the original.
Miranda Mellis
Sturtevant’s rudimentary genetic map would foreshadow the vast and elaborate efforts to map genes along the human genome in the 1990s. By using linkage to establish the relative positions of genes on chromosomes, Sturtevant would also lay the groundwork for the future cloning of genes tied to complex familial diseases, such as breast cancer, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. In about twelve hours, in an undergraduate dorm room in New York, he had poured the foundation for the Human Genome Project.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
Clones, in fact, are just identical twins born at different times.
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
Why would you clone a human when you can’t even look after the humans who already exist?
Jenni Fagan (Luckenbooth)
I wish I didn’t see how her face looks when she said, “So I am a clone.” “There’s a lot of things you can call it,” I told her. “You can call it what you want. I prefer human being.
Carola Dibbell (The Only Ones)
Why do we need so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they good for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resources. Stubborn vermin, we humans are. Granted, in the past, the unwashed masses were necessary. We needed them to till our fields and fight our wars. We needed them to labor in our factories making consumer crap that we flipped back at them at a handsome profit. Alas, those days are gone. We live in a boutique economy now. Energy is abundant and cheap. Mentars and robotic labor make and manage everything. So who needs people? People are so much dead white. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing. ... The boutique economy has no need of the masses, so let's get rid of them. But how, you ask? Not with wars, surely, or disease, famine, or mass murder. Despots have tried all these methods through the millennia, and they're never a permanent solution. No, all we need to do is buy up the ground from under their feet -- and evict them. We're buying up the planet, Bishop, fair and square. We're turning it into the most exclusive gated community in history. Now, the question is, in two hundred years, will you be a member of the landowners club, or will you be living in some tin can in outer space drinking recycled piss?
David Marusek (Mind Over Ship)
Many Chinese-born scientists have returned from abroad to continue their research, not just out of patriotism but because Chinese research facilities have become so cutting-edge. The Communist revolution’s annihilation of traditional thinking has also made for an astonishingly free approach to areas such as medical research; scientists can try things that are banned in the West by strict ethics laws. (I would not be surprised if the first cloned human being is already lurking somewhere along the banks of the Yangtze River.)
Rob Gifford (China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power)
the humans on the Station wouldn’t have to think about what I was, a construct made of cloned human tissue, augments, anxiety, depression, and unfocused rage, a killing machine for whichever humans rented me, until I made a mistake and got my brain destroyed by my governor module.
Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6))
I could use it, and the humans on the Station wouldn’t have to think about what I was, a construct made of cloned human tissue, augments, anxiety, depression, and unfocused rage, a killing machine for whichever humans rented me, until I made a mistake and got my brain destroyed by my governor module.
Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6))
being a true clone, the aphids are no more ‘social’ than the cells of your body. There is a single animal feeding on the plant. It just happens to have its body divided up into physically separate aphids, some of which play a specialized defensive role just like white blood corpuscles in the human body.
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences. The parables of such scientific overreach are well-known: foreign animals, introduced to control pests, become pests in their own right; the raising of smokestacks, meant to alleviate urban pollution, releases particulate effluents higher in the air and exacerbates pollution; stimulating blood formation, meant to prevent heart attacks, thickens the blood and results in an increased risk of blood clots in the heart. But when nonscientists overestimate [italicized, sic] complexity- 'No one can possibly crack this [italicized, sic] code" - they fall into the trap of unanticipated consequences. In the early 1950s , a common trope among some biologists was that the genetic code would be so context dependent- so utterly determined by a particular cell in a particular organism and so horribly convoluted- that deciphering it would be impossible. The truth turned out to be quite the opposite: just one molecule carries the code, and just one code pervades the biological world. If we know the code, we can intentionally alter it in organisms, and ultimately in humans. Similarly, in the 1960s, many doubted that gene-cloning technologies could so easily shuttle genes between species. by 1980, making a mammalian protein in a bacterial cell, or a bacterial protein in a mammalian cell, was not just feasible, it was in Berg's words, rather "ridiculously simple." Species were specious. "Being natural" was often "just a pose.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
We concoct neologisms (quark, meme, clone, deep structure), invent slang (to spam, to diss, to flame, to surf the web, a spin doctor), borrow useful words from other languages (joie de vivre, schlemiel, angst, machismo), or coin new metaphors (waste time, vote with your feet, push the outside of the envelope).
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
… To many biologists, cloning is all sizzle and no substance, a high-tech spectacle that fails to address habitat loss, poaching, pollution, and the other human activities that put wildlife at risk in the first place… But the time for first resorts has come and gone, and safeguarding species is an all-hands-on-deck enterprise. … Cloning won’t be a cure-all, but given the state of the planet, it can’t hurt to have options.
Emily Anthes (Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts)
We are fighting the idea of the inevitability of western culture. We are fighting against a genderless, cloned, all consuming inhumane European cult where a godless people toy with humanity for fun and profit. In embracing European culture Afrikan culture progressively dies. So, we are fighting to be Afrikan. And, “Afrika can only be reborn through the cooperation between a man and a woman; not through a man and a man or a woman and a woman.”1 To
Mwalimu K. Bomani Baruti (Homosexuality and the Effeminization of Afrikan Males)
The cloning of human genes allowed scientists to manufacture proteins-and the synthesis of proteins opened the possibility of targeting the millions of biochemical reactions in the human body. Proteins made it possible for chemists to intervene on previously impenetrable aspects of our physiology. The use of recombinant DNA to produce proteins thus marked a transition not just between one gene and one medicine, but between genes and a novel universe of drugs.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
The Pyrenean ibex, an extinct form of wild mountain goat, was brought back to life in 2009 through cloning of dna taken from skin samples. This was followed in June of 2010 by researchers at Jeju National University in Korea cloning a bull that had been dead for two years. Cloning methods are also being studied for use in bringing back Tasmanian tigers, woolly mammoths, and other extinct creatures, and in the March/April 2010 edition of the respected Archaeology magazine, a feature article by Zah Zorich (“Should We Clone Neanderthals?”) called for the resurrection via cloning of what some consider to be man’s closest extinct relative, the Neanderthals. National Geographic confirmed this possibility in its May 2009 special report, “Recipe for a Resurrection,” quoting Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University, an authority on ancient dna who served as a scientific consultant for the movie Jurassic Park, saying: “I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I’m not laughing anymore.… This is going to happen.
Thomas Horn (Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald The Dawn Of TechnoDimensional Spiritual Warfare)
Huxley’s Brave New World is set in an indefinitely distant future: it will not be possible for many years to say that Huxley’s apprehensions have not proved justified. It is unlikely that populations will undergo genetic and environmental manipulation in the exact way that Huxley foresaw: there will never be a fixed number of predetermined strata, from Alpha Plus to Epsilon Minus Semi-Morons. But as an Italian scientist prepares to clone humans, and as reproduction grows as divorced from sex as sex is from reproduction, it is increasingly hard to regard Huxley’s vision as entirely far-fetched.
Theodore Dalrymple (Our Culture, What's Left Of It)
using a virus that could glue cells together, they fused the B cell with a cancer cell. I am still awestruck by the idea. How did they even think of using the undead to resuscitate the dying? The result was one of the strangest cells in biology. The plasma cell retained its antibody-secreting property, while the cancer cell conferred its immortality. They called their peculiar cell a hybridoma—a, well, hybrid of hybrid and oma, the suffix of carcinoma. The immortal plasma cell was now capable of perpetually secreting only one kind of antibody. We call this antibody of a single type (in other words, a clone), a monoclonal antibody. Milstein and Köhler’s paper was published in Nature in 1975.
Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human)
Because the scientific understanding of manic-depressive illness is so ultimately beholden to the field of molecular biology, it is a world in which I have spent an increasing amount of time. It is an exotic world, one developed around an odd assortment of plants and animals—maize, fruit flies, yeast, worms, mice, humans, puffer fish—and it contains a somewhat strange, rapidly evolving, and occasionally quite poetic language system filled with marvelous terms like “orphan clones,” “plasmids,” and “high-density cosmids”; “triple helices,” “untethered DNA,” and “kamikaze reagents”; “chromosome walking,” “gene hunters,” and “gene mappers.” It is a field clearly in pursuit of the most fundamental of understandings, a search for the biological equivalent of quarks and leptons.
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind)
Life, a miracle of nature, an evolved molecule of matter, blossomed in the vast expanse of oceans. Methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor When joined under the radio-active sun, The molecules of non living matter underwent massive changes and became live. It's this accident that made the molecule of protein, Which even Stanley Miller reproduced in lab. Evolution went on, and on and changed , from amoeba to dinosaurs, from ape to man, It was an amazing architecture of nature , Which still continue improving human brain. The amazing creation nature, the man, kept on exploring the mysteries of nature, and succeeded in duplicating nature's marvel through his latest invention - the cloning, and succeeded in decoding even the genetic code. Still we have to salute the mother nature, which has many more mysteries in store!.
V.A. Menon
Cold, oxygen-free conditions do somewhat slow DNA’s inexorable decline to illegibility. Currently, the oldest genome on record is from a 700,000-year-old horse bone preserved in Canadian permafrost. Even above freezing, a cool and stable environment can preserve DNA for hundreds of thousands of years. Bones retrieved from excavations in cool caves have provided various quantities of human DNA, most spectacularly the entire genome of a 50,000-year-old incest-spawned Neanderthal (as we shall see). Imagine the kerfuffle if somebody managed to clone her. But long though these timespans are in human terms, they correspond to only a tiny fraction of our journey into the past. Alas, chemistry suggests that the upper limit for retaining recognisable ancient DNA is only a few million years—certainly not enough to reach back to the time of the dinosaurs.
Richard Dawkins (The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution)
Many of these fears were also stoked by Aldous Huxley’s prophetic 1931 novel Brave New World. In this dystopia, there are large test-tube-baby factories that produce clones. By selectively depriving oxygen from these fetuses, it is possible to produce children of different levels of brain damage. At the top are the alphas, who suffer no brain damage and are bred to rule society. At the bottom are the epsilons, who suffer significant brain damage and are used as disposable, obedient workers. In between are additional levels made up of other workers and the bureaucracy. The elite then control society by flooding it with mind-altering drugs, free love, and constant brainwashing. In this way, peace, tranquility, and harmony are maintained, but the novel asked a disturbing question that resonates even today: How much of our freedom and basic humanity do we want to sacrifice in the name of peace and social order?
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
It was discussed and decided that fear would be perpetuated globally in order that focus would stay on the negative rather than allow for soul expression to positively emerge. As people became more fearful and compliant, capacity for free thought and soul expression would diminish. There is a distinct inability to exert soul expression under mind control, and evolution of the human spirit would diminish along with freedom of thought when bombarded with constant negative terrors. Whether Bush and Cheney deliberately planned to raise a collective fear over collective conscious love is doubtful. They did not think, speak, or act in those terms. Instead, they knew that information control gave them power over people, and they were hell-bent to perpetuate it at all costs. Cheney, Bush, and other global elite ushering in the New World Order totally believed in the plan mapped out by artificial intelligence. They were allowing technology to dictate global control. “Life is like a video game,” Bush once told me at the rural multi-million dollar Lampe, Missouri CIA mind control training camp complex designed for Black Ops Special Forces where torture and virtual reality technologies were used. “Since I have access to the technological source of the plans, I dictate the rules of the game.” The rules of the game demanded instantaneous response with no time to consciously think and critically analyze. Constant conscious disruption of thought through television’s burst of light flashes, harmonics, and subconscious subliminals diminished continuity of conscious thought anyway, creating a deficit of attention that could easily be refocused into video game format. DARPA’s artificial intelligence was reliant on secrecy, and a terrifying cover for reality was chosen to divert people from the simple truth. Since people perceive aliens as being physical like them, it was decided that the technological reality could be disguised according to preconceptions. Through generations of genetic encoding dating back to the beginning of man, serpents incite an innate autogenic response system in humans to “freeze” in terror. George Bush was excited at the prospects of diverting people from truth by fear through perpetuating lizard-like serpent alien misconceptions. “People fear what they don’t know anyway. By compounding that fear with autogenic fear response, they won’t want to look into Pandora’s Box.” Through deliberate generation of fear; suppression of facts under the 1947 National Security Act; Bush’s stint as CIA director during Ford’s Administration; the Warren Commission’s whitewash of the Kennedy Assassination; secrecy artificially ensured by mind control particularly concerning DARPA, HAARP, Roswell, Montauk, etc; and with people’s fluidity of conscious thought rapidly diminishing; the secret government embraced the proverbial ‘absolute power that corrupts absolutely.’ According to New World Order plans being discussed at the Grove, plans for reducing the earth’s population was a high priority. Mass genocide of so-called “undesirables” through the proliferation of AIDS4 was high on Bush’s agenda. “We’ll annihilate the niggers at their source, beginning in South and East Africa and Haiti5.” Having heard Bush say those words is by far one of the most torturous things I ever endured. Equally as torturous to my being were the discussions on genetic engineering, human cloning, and depletion of earth’s natural resources for profit. Cheney remarked that no one would be able to think to stop technology’s plan. “I’ll destroy the planet first,” Bush had vowed.
Cathy O'Brien (ACCESS DENIED For Reasons Of National Security: Documented Journey From CIA Mind Control Slave To U.S. Government Whistleblower)
TOTALITARIANISM: People are interested in ants because they think they have managed to create a successful totalitarian system. Certainly, the impression we get from the outside is that everyone in the anthill works, everyone is obedient, everyone is ready to sacrifice themselves and everyone is the same. And for the time being, all human totalitarian systems have failed. That is why we thought of copying social insects (like Napoleon, whose emblem was the bee). The pheromones that flood the anthill with global information have an equivalent in the planetary television of today. There is a widespread belief that if the best is made available to all, one day we will end up with a perfect human race. That is not the way of things. Nature, with all due respect to Mr Darwin, does not evolve in the direction of the supremacy of the best (according to which criteria, anyway?). Nature draws its strength from diversity. It needs all kinds of people, good, bad, mad, desperate, sporty, bed-ridden, hunchbacked, hare-lipped, happy, sad, intelligent, stupid, selfish, generous, small, tall, black, yellow, red and white. It needs all religions, philosophies, fanaticisms and wisdom. The only danger is that any one species may be eliminated by another. In the past, fields of maize artificially designed by men and made up of clones of the best heads (the ones that need least water, are most frost-resistant or produce the best grains) have suddenly succumbed to trivial infections while fields of wild maize made up of several different strains, each with its own peculiar strengths and weaknesses, have always managed to survive epidemics. Nature hates uniformity and loves diversity. It is in this perhaps that its essential genius lies. Edmond Wells Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge
Bernard Werber (Empire of the Ants (La Saga des Fourmis, #1))
The triumph of the transsexual and of transvestitism casts a strange light, retrospectively, upon the sexual liberation espoused by an earlier generation. It now appears that this liberation - which, according to its own discourse, meant the bursting forth of the body's full erotic force, a process especially favorable to the principles of femininity and of sexual pleasure - may actually have been no more than an intermediate phase on the way to the confusion of categories that we have been discussing. The sexual revolution may thus turn out to have been just a stage in the genesis of transsexuality. What is at issue here, fundamentally, is the problematic fate of all revolutions. The cybernetic revolution, in view of the equivalence of brain and computer, places humanity before the crucial question 'Am I a man or a machine? ' The genetic revolution that is taking place at the moment raises the question 'Am I a man or just a potential clone? ' The sexual revolution, by liberating all the potentialities of desire, raises another fundamental question, 'Am I a man or a woman?' (If it has done nothing else, psychoanalysis has certainly added its weight to this principle of sexual uncertainty.) As for the political and social revolution, the prototype for all the others, it will turn out to have led man by an implacable logic - having offered him his own freedom, his own free will - to ask himself where his own will lies, what he wants in his heart of hearts, and what he is entitled to expect from himself. To these questions there are no answers. Such is the paradoxical outcome of every revolution: revolution opens the door to indeterminacy, anxiety and confusion. Once the orgy was over, liberation was seen to have left everyone looking for their generic and sexual identity - and with fewer and fewer answers available, in view of the traffic in signs and the multiplicity of pleasures on offer. That is how we became transsexuals - just as we became transpoliticals: in other words, politically indifferent and undifferentiated beings, androgynous and hermaphroditic - for by this time we had embraced, digested and rejected the most contradictory ideologies, and were left wearing only their masks: we had become, in our own heads - and perhaps unbeknownst to ourselves - transvestites of the political realm.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
If the curtain is indeed about to drop on Sapiens history, we members of one of its final generations should devote some time to answering one last question: what do we want to become? This question, sometimes known as the Human Enhancement question, dwarfs the debates that currently preoccupy politicians, philosophers, scholars and ordinary people. After all, today's debate between today's religions, ideologies, nations and classes will in all likelihood disappear along with Homo sapiens. If our successors indeed function on a different level of consciousness (or perhaps possess something beyond consciousness that we cannot even conceive), it seems doubtful that Christianity or Islam will be of interest to them, that their social organizations could be Communist or capitalist or that their genders could be male or female. And yet the great debates of history are more important because at least the first generation of these gods would be shaped by the cultural ideas of their human designers. Would they be created in the image of capitalism, of Islam, or of feminism? The answer to this question might send them careening in entirely different directions. Most people prefer not to think about it. Even the field of bioethics prefers to address another question: 'What is it forbidden to do?' Is it acceptable to carry out genetic experiments on living human beings? On aborted fetuses? On stem cells? Is it ethical to clone sheep? And chimpanzees? And what about humans? All of these are important questions, but it is naive to imagine that we might simply hit the brakes and stop the scientific projects that are upgrading Homo sapiens into a different kind of being. For these projects are inextricably meshed together with the Gilgamesh Project. Ask scientists why they study the genome, or try to connect a brain to a computer, or try to create a mind inside a computer. Nine out of ten times you'll get the same standard answer: we are doing it to cure diseases and save human lives. Even though the implications of creating a mind inside a computer are far more dramatic than curing psychiatric illnesses, this is the standard justification given, because nobody can argue with it. This is why the Gilgamesh Project is the flagship of science. It serves to justify everything science does. Dr Frankenstein piggybacks on the shoulders of Gilgamesh. Since it is impossible to stop Gilgamesh, it is also impossible to stop Dr Frankenstein. The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?, but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
When I started researching this book, I thought that the Internet was a metaphor for life; now I think life is a metaphor for the Internet. I’m not trying to be cute. Just as it is impossible to point to a single spark within the human brain that proves life, so it is impossible to disprove that the Internet is a living thing. It is massive. It never sleeps. And more and more, it’s talking about us behind our backs.
Douglas Coupland (Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent)
In the movie Star Wars, the malign aspect of technology is the Death Star. It is an object huge and disconnected from humanness that reduces its clients to clones-recognizably human, but all identically in thrall to the machine, all drained of color and drained of will. Its protagonist, Darth Vader, is not a full human being either. He is constructed-part technology, part human body. The heroes, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, by contrast are fully human. They have individuality, they have will, and they hang with creatures in a haunt called the Mos Eisley Cantina-creatures that are strange, distorted, and perverse, but that brim with messy vitality. If you look at the heroes, they have technology as well. But their technology is different. It is not hidden and dehumanizing; their starships are rickety and organic and have to be kicked to get running. This is crucial. Their technology is human. It is an extension of their natures, fallible, human, individual, and therefore beneficent. They have not traded their humanness for technology, nor surrendered their will to technology. Technology has surrendered to them. And in doing so it extends their naturalness.
W. Brian Arthur (The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves)
What we have learned about genes has allowed us to understand that we are not so much things merely existing in the world as beings in constant interaction with the world. If you took this idea to an extreme and imagined that you grew up on another planet, the essentially dynamic nature of animal building by genes and environment might mean you'd look very different. Cloned plants that have exactly the same genome can look like very different specimens if planted at different altitudes. In the same way, if you had grown up on a planet with lower gravity or one that was more distant from the sun and had a lower oxygen concentration, you might be incredibly tall, or short, or weedy, or blind...or maybe you'd have a supersized brain. If you took your African ape genome and cultured it on yet another planet, maybe the resulting you would have translucent skin. The point is that although we experience ourselves in some sense as finished or perfected, we are not in any way intended. There is no blueprint for what humans are meant to be. And as this moment is merely one moment in the past and future history of our evolutionary lineage, your life right now is merely an instant in the past and future history of the interaction between your genome and your environment.
Christine Kenneally (The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language)
Any person created through cloning would be a new person-a body, mind and soul with experiences unique to themselves. Biologically, a clone is no different to an identical twin-albeit an identical twin born into another time and place. However, we should look not only at the biology but at the question of intention. What is intended when a child is created in this way? He or she is intended to be a copy of a person who has already lived. Therefore, I'm concerned about how such a child would be able to establish his or her own identity and whether those responsible for creating this child would recognise and respect that identity. My worry about cloning is to do with how such people will be treated. The cloned child would, after all, still be God's creature, deserving of compassion, of course he would, but if he were to be treated as a commodity or as a freak, a sub-human...
Alison Allen-Gray (Unique)
Science fiction is full of stories about harvesting humans and clones for their parts.
Edward James (The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction)
Our earliest ancestors were created by mixing DNA from other advanced extraterrestrial (ET) races. These highly evolved beings who used their DNA to create our ancestors are our creators. The way they create life is not the same as the way our scientists clone animals and plants. Our scientists exploit and work against nature, while our creators work with nature. Our creators' way of combining DNA is more of a harmonious design similar to how the Universe first created life. It is done by an intelligent design that works in harmony with the laws of the Universe. Once they created life, it was nurtured and left alone so nature could take its course. However, our creators will always keep an eye on their creations and help them as much as possible without infringing upon their free will. The first human race was created for
Pao Chang (Staradigm: A Blueprint for Spiritual Growth, Happiness, Success and Well-Being)
People easily believe in the transition of energy, image and voice through the air, and into their laptops and smartphones, but not in the transition of thought. And they easily accept the possibility of cloning animals and humans, or transforming them genetically, and even making hybrids with different species, but refuse to accept that we may be a hybrid of two or more alien species as well.
Daniel Marques (The 88 Secret Codes of the Power Elite: The Complete Truth about Making Money with the Law of Attraction and Creating Miracles in Life that is Being Hidden from You with Mind Programming)
Linux has a forking process to create new processes by cloning the parent process. Windows lacks fork, so the multiprocessing module imposes some Windows-specific restrictions that we urge you to review if you’re using that platform.
Micha Gorelick (High Performance Python: Practical Performant Programming for Humans)
The Catholic Church proclaims that human life is sacred and that the dignity of the human person is the foundation of a moral vision for society. This belief is the foundation of all the principles of our social teaching. In our society, human life is under direct attack from abortion and euthanasia. The value of human life is being threatened by cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and the use of the death penalty. The intentional targeting of civilians in war or terrorist attacks is always wrong. Catholic teaching also calls on us to work to avoid war. Nations must protect the right to life by finding increasingly effective ways to prevent conflicts and resolve them by peaceful means. We believe that every person is precious, that people are more important than things, and that the measure of every institution is whether it threatens or enhances the life and dignity of the human person.
Brandon Vogt (Saints and Social Justice: A Guide to Changing the World)
They say other species have stopped short, and that only the human species, the humanoid branch, has made its definitive breakthrough. In fact while all the others persevered in their specific forms and ended up disappearing genetically, thus leaving evolution to run its course, only the human species succeeded in surpassing itself in the simulacrum of itself - in disappearing genetically to resuscitate artificially. By perpetuating itself in a world of clones and electronic prostheses (perfect in so far as they will have eliminated every potential species, including humanity), man will thus, in a definitive act, have wiped out the natural genesis of things. Contact with the men who wield power and authority still leaves an intang ible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to faecal matter, the faecal embodiment of something unmentionable and you wonder what it is made of and where it acquired its historically sacred character. Why this feeling of loathing for the politician? Is it the impression of being artificially subjected to a will that is even more stupid than your own and which, by its very function, has to be crude? How can the decision-making function be performed without simplifying the mechanisms of thought? Political charisma is precisely not that gracious charisma which emanates from the irresistible power of a pure object, such as the power of a woman, but an ungracious will which derives its power and its glory from voluntary servitude. This is true of all institutions, the military, the clerical, the medical, and more recently the psychoanalytic, but it is particularly so in politics which remains the most striking hallucination of all the weaknesses of the will.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)
It still amazes me how little we really knew. We had rockets and satellites and nanotechnology. We had robot arms and robot hands, robots for roving the surface of Mars. Our unmanned planes, controlled remotely, could hear human voices from three miles away. We could manufacture skin, clone sheep. We could make a dead man’s heart pump blood through the body of a stranger. We were making great strides in the realms of love and sadness—we had drugs to spur desire, drugs for melting pain. We performed all sorts of miracles: We could make the blind see and the deaf hear, and doctors daily conjured babies from the wombs of infertile women. At the time of the slowing, stem cell researchers were on the verge of healing paralysis—surely the lame soon would have walked. And yet, the unknown still outweighed the known.
Karen Thompson Walker (The Age of Miracles)
Glowing technology was also used to track success while engineering the first transgenic dog, Ruppy, short for Ruby Puppy. Ruppy was born in South Korea in 2009, one of a litter of four cloned beagles engineered by scientists at Seoul National University to express a red fluorescent protein gene. The experiment was a proof of concept; the team only intended to show that transgenic dogs could be cloned. Ruppy and her genetically identical littermates looked like perfectly normal beagles under natural light. But under ultraviolet light, they all glowed a charming, bright, ruby red. When Ruppy was mated to a non-transgenic dog, half her puppies inherited the red protein gene, indicating that the transgene had incorporated successfully into her germ line.
Beth Shapiro (Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature)
Recognition of the existence of a sex drive in female birds set the stage for Darwinian feminism, as the American biologist Patricia Gowaty dubbed it in 1997. This label may sound like an oxymoron because many feminists consider humans to be far removed from the birds and the bees. They don’t see evolutionary science and its emphasis on genetics as particularly friendly to their cause. But for biological scientists, including the feminists among us, feminism can’t escape a connection with biology. After all, there wouldn’t be any need for feminism if we didn’t have two sexes to begin with. And why do we have two sexes? Because sexual reproduction works better than its alternative, which is cloning.
Frans de Waal (Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist)
If God made man in His image, and man made me in the image of man, am I in possession of the Imago Hominis? Am I, for the lack of a more precise term, a human being like you? - Troy Salcedo
Malcolm F. Cross (Mouse Cage)
Would that filthy little imposter dare swive Quinn? But what human being of any of the three sexes could possibly resist an invitation to cavort between the sheets with the brilliant and beautiful . . . ? Miles’s imagination curdled with detailed pictures of the clone, out there, Doing Things to his Quinn, most of which Miles hadn’t even had time to try yet himself. He found his hands writhing in a white-knuckled grip on the edge of the bench, in danger of snapping his finger bones.
Lois McMaster Bujold (Brothers in Arms (Vorkosigan Saga, #5))
Excuse me? Who here had the bright idea of healing a gunshot wound with the bullet still in it?” All eyes turned to another doctor that had stepped into the hallway. Toriel narrowed her eyes. “That was my doing. You must be Doctor Akron. Doctor Ross mentioned you might stop by.” “I'll bet. Listen to me. What you did put that girl's life in danger. You left contaminated shrapnel in an open wound and sealed it up without even trying to sterilize it.” “I... I am not familiar with the details of human medical treatment-” “Exactly! You have no business making those kinds of calls! All you did was make things worse! Even with the X-Rays we had to perform exploratory surgery to find all of those bullet fragm-” Hal Greene suddenly pushed past the queen and stood face to face with Dr. Akron. “Hi there doctor! You sound cranky, you could use some fresh air!” Before anyone could respond, Hal grabbed the doctor's shoulder, knelt down, pulled, and twisted in one seamless movement that left the doctor in a fireman's carry across his shoulders. “What in the- PUT ME DOWN THIS INSTANT!” “I can't put you down here, you silly billy! The fresh air is outside the building! Let's go! DAH NAH NAAAAAH DAH NAH NAHHHH....” Every person in the hallway watched in confusion as Hal carried the angry doctor on his shoulders, running down the hallway, into the lobby, and presumably outside the building. “...WAS THAT THE ROCKY THEME HE WAS TRYING TO SING?” Papyrus scratched his skull in confusion. “Yeah.” Justin shrugged. “Hal loves underdog stories.
TimeCloneMike (Ebott's Wake (We're Not Weird, We're Eccentric, #1))
But the real weak point in all of these arguments is simply that, for every reason people can come up with to dislike and reject monsters, there are an equal number of reasons to tolerate and accept them. And we know all of them by heart because we've heard them all before, as Frisk Dreemurr said earlier, when they were used against other human beings. Though having said that, there are also other reasons to like monsters, and I have a few of them right here.” The host on the screen reached down and started pulling objects out from underneath the news desk and placing them on top of it, while the audience started to laugh. “We have vanilla, chocolate, chocolate chip, fudge, caramel, butterscotch, cherry, wild mango, lava cake, actual lava not sure how that works, strawberry kiwi, watermelon, and pistachio.” The host picked up one of the items and showed it on screen, so that the logo of the smiling blue monster was easily visible. “And don't forget, when you're done eating the Nice Cream, you also have a message on the wrapper telling you something positive and reassuring. So if I could give a little advice to the anti-monster crowd out there, if you're still watching? Your competition has all these different flavors, and please note that 'Salty' is not one of them. Cornering that market is not the brilliant strategy you seem to think it is.
TimeCloneMike (Ebott's Wake (We're Not Weird, We're Eccentric, #1))
Thanks to our new biotechnologies, we now have the power to change the evolutionary trajectories of species that seem destined to disappear, to rescue and revitalize ecosystems that are threatened by the ever-expanding human footprint or that are struggling to adapt to our planet’s changing climate. We could, for example, transfer the domestic ferret’s resistance to Sylvatic plague to black-footed ferrets that are facing extinction across their native range because of the introduced disease. Or we could transfer heat-tolerance between coral populations that are suffering as the oceans warm, or immunize white-footed mice against Lyme disease so that they can no longer pass the disease to humans. We may even eventually bring something back. Not a mammoth or a passenger pigeon, but instead some trait or function or aspect of an extinct species that can, in its re-establishment, restore some missing ecosystem function and allow other species to thrive in today’s altered world.
Beth Shapiro (How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (Princeton Science Library))
11:23 AM LadyDeathwish: Hey that skeleton in the video with you and the cop 11:23 AM LadyDeathwish: Is he single 11:23 AM: r u talking abt papyrus or sans 11:24 AM: papyrus is the tall 11:24 AM: WAIT WAT 11:24 AM LadyDeathwish: DON'T YOU START 11:24 AM LadyDeathwish: Being demi is a chore 11:24 AM LadyDeathwish: Who am I attracted to? and why?! 11:24 AM: fuck I know Matt was an asshole 11:24 AM: but I didn't realize he was bad enough to get you to give up on human men entirely
TimeCloneMike (Terra Incognita (We're Not Weird, We're Eccentric, #2))
Human-rights activists are afraid that genetic engineering might be used to create supermen who will make serfs of the rest of us. Jeremiahs offer apocalyptic visions of bio-dictatorships that will clone fearless soldiers and obedient workers. The prevailing feeling is that too many opportunities are opening too quickly and that our ability to modify genes is outpacing our capacity for making wise and farsighted use of the skill.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
If the meaning of the mountain range overlooking the home’s peace is called the Quteniqua Mountains, which is rally made up of the Langeberg Range (northeast of Worcester) and the Tsitsikamma Mountains (east-west along The Garden Route), and if the collective name of the mountain range references the idea of honey, the honey that can be found at Amanda and Lena’s home starts with kindness, a type of kindness the touches the world’s core understanding of compassion. “I want to give you a used copy of my favorite book that I think helps to explain what exactly I love about this area. Out of all of her books, this is probably one of the least favorite books based off readers’ choice, yet it is my favorite book because I think it truly understands the spirit of this area.” Amanda handed me the book. “Da-lene Mat-thee,” I said. “Is that correct…” Before I could finish, she had already answered my question. “Yes, the author that I had spoken about earlier today. Although she is an Afrikaans author, this book is in English. The Mulberry Forest. My favorite character is Silas Miggel, the headstrong Afrikaans man who didn’t want to have the Italian immigrants encroaching onto his part of the forest.” She paused for a second before resuming, “Yet, he’s the one who came to their rescue when the government turned a blind eye on the hardships of the Italian immigrants. He’s the one who showed kindness toward them even when he didn’t feel that way in his heart. That’s what kindness is all about, making time for our follow neighbors because it’s the right thing to do, full stop. Silas is the embodiment of what I love about the people of this area. It is also what I love about my childhood home growing up in the shantytown. The same thread of tenacity can be found in both places. So, when you read about Silas, think of me because he represents the heart of both Knysna and the Storms River Valley. This area contains a lot of clones just like him, the heartbeat of why this area still stands today.” That’s the kind of hope that lights up the sky. The Portuguese called the same mountain range Serra de Estrellla or Mountain of the Star… If we want to change the world, we should follow in the Quteniqua Mountain’s success, and be a reminder that human benevolence is a star that lights up the sky of any galaxy, the birthplace of caring. As we drove away, for a second, I thought I heard the quiet whispers from Dalene Matthee’s words when she wrote in Fiela’s Child: “If he had to wish, what would he wish for, he asked himself. What was there to wish for…a wish asked for the unattainable. The impossible.” And that’s what makes this area so special, a space grounded in the impossibility held together through single acts of human kindness, the heart of the Garden Route’s greatest accomplishment. A story for all times…simply called, Hospitality, the Garden Route way…
hlbalcomb
What, if not a death drive, would impel sexual beings towards a pre sexual form of reproduction (in the depths of our imagination, moreover, is it not precisely this scissiparous form of reproduction and proliferation based solely on contiguity that for us is death and the death drive?). And what, if not a death drive, would further impel us at the same time, on the metaphysical plane, to deny all otherness, to shun any alteration in the Same, and to seek nothing beyond the perpetuation of an identity, nothing but the transparency of a genetic inscription no longer subject even to the vicissitudes of procreation? But enough of the death drive. Are we faced here with a phantasy of selfgenesis? No, because such phantasies always involve the figures of the mother and the father - sexed parental figures whom the subject may indeed yearn to eliminate, the better to usurp their positions, but this in no sense implies contesting the symbolic structure of procreation: if you become your own child, you are still the child of someone. Cloning, on the other hand, radically eliminates not only the mother but also the father, for it eliminates the interaction between his genes and the mother's, the imbrication of the parents' differences, and above all the joint act of procreation. The cloner does not beget himself: he sprouts from each of his genes' segments. One may well speculate about the value of such plant-like shoots, which in effect resolve all Oedipal sexuality in favour of a 'non-human' sex, a sex based on contiguity and unmediated propagation. But at all events the phantasy of self-genesis is definitively out of the picture. Father and mother are gone, but their disappearance, far from widening an aleatory freedom for the subject, instead leaves the way clear for a matrix known as a code. No more mother, no more father: just a matrix. And it is this matrix, this genetic code, which is destined to 'give birth', from now till eternity, in an operational mode from which all chance sexual elements have been expunged.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
Now you get the mom talk.” “The mom talk?” She nods. “The way I look at it, everything in space and time happens for a reason. There are billions of planets and billions of years of time. Millions of creatures have gone extinct before the first mammal ever existed. Out of all the creatures on Earth, out of all the people on Earth, your ancestors were born. I won’t even get started on the billions of sperm that had to lose in order for the one that fertilized the egg that Librarian Rosalind was created from, and then you were picked from billions of humans on Earth and cloned specifically from. You landed here, at this tiny spot in the vast universe at this specific time. You immediately resonated to R’jaal, who has been lonely and longing for a mate. That’s a lot of very, very specific things to happen all at once—a convergence of happenstance—to create you and him and bring you both together at the right time. You think that’s not by a greater design? Maybe this is exactly where you’re supposed to be.” Jesus. She’s making my head hurt with how big she’s thinking. “You think I’m special enough to warrant all that?” “You tell me. Do you think R’jaal is?” She gestures at her sleeping son. “Because I look at my mate, and I look at my son, and I think that they’re so incredible and unique and that I feel very blessed to end up where I am right now. Maybe this planet didn’t need a paleobiologist, but N’dek absolutely needed Devi in his life. So chew on that for a bit the next time you feel like you don’t belong.
Ruby Dixon (R'jaal's Resonance (Ice Planet Clones, #1))
It’s me that’s not communicating my needs. For all that he looks and acts very human sometimes, I forget that he doesn’t think like us. When the crowd is turning against you, you lay low.
Ruby Dixon (Surviving Skarr (Ice Planet Clones, #2))
Literary agent John Brockman points out another angle on the news from science: Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out. Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for space travel. Nobody ever voted for nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, the Web, Google, cloning, the sequencing of the entire human genome
Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary)
Jason, are human cocks puny?” Jason sputters. Ashtar immediately turns to human again, discarding the large slab of rock and letting it land with a heavy THUD on the beach. His face is wreathed in an amused grin. “Sorry, I’ve got to hear this. What’s this now?
Ruby Dixon (Surviving Skarr (Ice Planet Clones, #2))
You are large enough. I know I am large enough. I am curious if Jason’s cock is tiny. If all human males are under-equipped.” “What the fuck, bro.” Jason puts his hands on his hips. “Are you asking me to pull my dick out and compare with you?” I shrug and start to undo my belt. “I would not mind that.
Ruby Dixon (Surviving Skarr (Ice Planet Clones, #2))
It is common today to hear techno-futurists and billionaire trans-humanists muse about the potential of technology to help mankind—or least the extremely wealthy—slip the surly bonds of aging and even death by “uploading” memories to a digital cloud and using AI to recreate consciousness. Billionaire investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, who sees “the vector of our civilization” in terms of a choice between “anarcho-primitivism or optimalism/transhumanism,” has talked about “life extension” technologies that could make possible what he calls “genomic reincarnation,” in which a person’s sequenced DNA could in theory be synthesized and printed out into a new body, “like a clone, but it is you in a different time.”23 And of course there are the billionaire enthusiasts like Elon Musk who see a future in which technology is fused with human biology in some kind of brain-machine interface, or Mark Zuckerberg, who dreams of replacing physical society with a virtual “Metaverse.
John Daniel Davidson (Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come)
what we are and what it means to be a human being. They want us turned around, scrambled in our thinking, and confused. They want us to accept the human and animal cloning and the babies
Alex Jones (The Great Awakening: Defeating the Globalists and Launching the Next Great Renaissance)
Human cloning: Will it be a lifesaving scientific advance, like penicillin? Or will it prove to be a horrible mistake that unleashes untold devastation upon humanity, like the accordion?
Dave Barry (Boogers Are My Beat: More Lies, but Some Actual Journalism)
If you have a preimplantation embryo in the early stages of development and split it, let us say into four clumps of cells, each one of these four clumps constitutes a new embryo which is viable and could be implanted with the reasonable expectation of successful development into adulthood (given the dramatic wastage rate of embryos in all human reproduction, see below). Each clump is the clone or identical “twin” of any of the others and comes into being not through conception but because of the division of the early cell mass. Moreover, these four clumps can be recombined into one embryo again. This creates a situation where, without the destruction of a single human cell, one human life, if that is what it is, can be split into four and can be recombined again into one. Did “life” in such a case begin as an individual, become four individuals and then turn into a singleton again? We should note that whatever our answer to this question, all this occurs without the creation of extra matter and without the destruction of a single cell.
John Harris (Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People)
I'm sweating. Is it hot in here? Are the environmentals on? I tug at my collar as Ruthie gazes at me with expectant eyes. "You want me to pierce your breast?" "The nipple, actually. It's a fairly common piercing for humans and it's supposed to be really appealing. I like the thought of doing it but I didn't want to go to Sakkar. Do you mind helping me?" "Of course not." Just the thought of Sakkar seeing her naked breasts and touching them makes me want to punch something. "I'm glad you came to me." "I wouldn't approach anyone else with this." There's a strange little smile on her face. "I trust you.
Ruby Dixon (Only the Clonely (Sunrise Cantina, #1))
I think about humans and how they like to touch constantly, and I take Ruthie’s hand in mine. If she says anything—noodle, piercing, or even no—I will drop it and apologize. But she looks over at me, smiles, and tightens her grip on my hand. My heart soars. “I love you,” I blurt again. “I love you, Ruthie.” She blushes and her expression turns shy. She doesn’t answer, just squeezes my hand tightly.
Ruby Dixon (Only the Clonely (Sunrise Cantina, #1))
If society becomes comfortable with cloning and sees value in true human diversity, then the whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimp—or by an extremely adventurous female human.
Britt Wray (Rise of the Necrofauna: The Science, Ethics, and Risks of De-Extinction)
Human Cloning: The Least Interesting Application of Cloning Technology One of the most powerful methods of applying life’s machinery involves harnessing biology’s own reproductive mechanisms in the form of cloning. Cloning will be a key technology—not for cloning actual humans but for life-extension purposes, in the form of “therapeutic cloning.” This process creates new tissues with “young” telomere-extended and DNA-corrected cells to replace without surgery defective tissues or organs. All responsible ethicists, including myself, consider human cloning at the present time to be unethical. The reasons, however, for me have little to do with the slippery-slope issues of manipulating human life. Rather, the technology today simply does not yet work reliably. The current technique of fusing a cell nucleus from a donor to an egg cell using an electric spark simply causes a high level of genetic errors.57 This is the primary reason that most of the fetuses created by this method do not make it to term. Even those that do make it have genetic defects. Dolly the Sheep developed an obesity problem in adulthood, and the majority of cloned animals produced thus far have had unpredictable health problems.58
Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology)
For some time, an arbitrary line in the sand was drawn at the end of the first trimester as the demarcation marking the beginning of "life". Of course, advances in medical technology continued to force those who stood on that line to retreat further and further toward the beginning of gestation. For instance, it has been established that a fetus has brain waves which can be measured by EEG only 40 days after conception, and merely 18 days after conception, the fetus has a measurable heart beat. In fact, they were getting so close to the beginning of gestation, i.e., conception, that the PC pro-abortion genderists then had to adopt the more ephemeral "viability" position. Of course, according to their definition of "viability", comatose patients would not be considered human being because, in some ways, a fetus is actually more "viable" than someone who is comatose. As obstetrical and gynecological medicine continued its inevitable advance, revealing more and more about the nature of a human fetus, the pro-abortion forces continued their retreat until now they do not even discuss the fetus at all. As with all politically correct positions, if a fact gets in the way, it is simply changed or ignored. Unfortunately for the pro-abortion genderists, the fetus is a fact, a fact which is itself usually the result of "choices". Furthermore, the simple scientific fact is that at the moment of conception, the embryo is not a part of the mother's body. At that point and forever more it is a genetically distinct being with its own genetic code that is completely and totally different from every other human being who has ever lived or ever will live, including the mother. So here is the first instance of PC genderism crashing into scientific fact. It also seems ironic that while more and more law enforcement agencies in this country are now turning to DNA identification in criminal investigations and our courts are now admitting such identification as evidence in criminal prosecution, the rights of a fetus, which has its own, distinct DNA code at the moment of conception, are still not legally recognized in all cases. Now they are recognized in some cases, for there have been instances of people being prosecuted for two murders when they have killed pregnant women. There are also cases where mothers who have given birth to babies who are addicted to illegal drugs have been prosecuted, but there are no consistent standards or guidelines. It is also a macabre irony that in this country it is illegal to destroy the egg of an American bald eagle, but the government uses our tax dollars to destroy human embryos and fetuses.
David Thibodaux (Political Correctness: The Cloning of the American Mind)
You can clone human brains but not what is stored inside them
Matt Haig (The Humans)
In the throne room, he had tried to puzzle out which among the Emperor's cabal of advisers, human or otherwise, were aware that Palpatine was a Sith Lord who had manipulated the entire war and eradicated his sworn enemies, the Jedi, as part of a plan to assume absolute power over the galaxy.
James Luceno (Inside the Worlds of 'Star Wars - Attack of the Clones)
When you are alone in the wilderness, opinions or beliefs of any kind are dropped as the absurd accoutrements they are. But after being in the wilderness for a while, you may come around to feeling sociable. Maybe you could try living in a community of “like-minded” social deviants. However, they had better be so alike that they are clones of one another or the day will come when someone steps over the line and factions begin to teem. Our brains will always discriminate—that is their nature. They fix on superficial differences we spy in one another, redundantly speaking, since all differences among us are superficial.
Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race)
The very question of who counts as a human being is now being debated in a way our grandparents could not imagine. Is a cloned human being a member of the human community? What about the socially unproductive and the inconvenient, the gravely handicapped, the elderly, the unborn? If the question, “What are these putative people good for?” is the only question our cultures and our laws recognize, then we really are living in Aldous Huxley’s brave new world, and tyranny cannot be far around the corner.
George Weigel (Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II)
The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in the opening weeks of the 20th century sparked a scientific quest to understand the nature and content of genetic information that has propelled biology for the last hundred years. The scientific progress made [since that time] falls naturally into four main phases, corresponding roughly to the four quarters of the century." "The first established the cellular basis of heredity: the chromosomes. The second defined the molecular basis of heredity: the DNA double helix. The third unlocked the informational basis of heredity [i.e. the genetic code], with the discovery of the biological mechanism by which cells read the information contained in genes, and with the invention of the recombinant DNA technologies of cloning and sequencing by which scientists can do the same." The sequence of the human genome, the project asserted, marked the starting point of the "fourth phase" of genetics. This was the era of "genomics" - the assessment of the entire genomes of organisms, including humans. There is an old conundrum in philosophy that asks if an intelligent machine can ever decipher its own instruction manual. For humans, the manual was now complete. Deciphering it, reading it, and understanding it would be quite another matter.
Siddharta Mukherjee
True immortality is the immortality of childhood and adolescence, where you never think you will have to die one day. The phantasm of immortality is merely the price paid for the certainty of dying. And it is ready to pay any price, including that of annihilating itself to achieve immortality. In the past, some were prepared to lose their souls (their hope of eternal life) in a pact with the Devil to enjoy the privileges of mortal existence. Today we are ready to sacrifice any idea of a future immortality for a present corporeal immortality, a perpetual renewal in cloning. Immortality is no longer a metaphor. We want a real immortality, we want a technical incarnation of it here and now. This is the new pact with the Devil, sealed and signed in blood by the human race, which prefers to be cryogenized alive rather than await some hypothetical resurrection of bodies.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004)
Thirty thousand years ago there lived 'another human species' - the Neanderthals. Tremendous. If it is true, it is symbolically more important than the fact that man is descended from the apes. The shadow of this vanished human species weighs heavy on all our anthropology, since our entire concept of evolution privileges the exclusive universality of a single humanity, ours, the one that survived. And what if it were not the only one? Then that's the end of our privilege. If we had to eliminate this twin, this prehistoric double, to ensure our hegemony, if this other species had to disappear, then the rules of the game of being human are no longer the same. And where does this passion for universality come from, this lust to eliminate every other race? (It is a good bet that if any other race emerged from space, our first aim would be to subjugate or destroy it.) Why is it that in twin forms there always has to be one that dies? Why do we always have to wipe out duality everywhere to establish the monopoly of a species, a race, a subject? Having said this, it is not certain that we really did win out. What if we were carrying that double within us like a dead twin? And perhaps many others, in a kind of Unconscious, the stubborn heir to all the previous murders. Having achieved the unity of the species, for the greater glory of Homo sapiens, are we not now duplicating ourselves for the worse - in that artificial twinness of the clone, in which the species, denying its origins once and for all, prolongs itself as spectre in an infinite repetition? Over the screen of our consciousness and our Unconscious hovers the shadow of this original crime, the traces of which we shall doubtless never recover.
Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004)
Atomic manipulation, cloning, studies of the human aura, advanced mind control applications, animal/human crossbreeding, visual and audio wiretapping, the list goes on.
B. Branton (The Dulce Wars: Underground Alien Bases and the Battle for Planet Earth)
In the thousands of years before European colonists landed in the West, the area that would come to be occupied by the United States and Canada produced only a handful of lasting foods---strawberries, pecans, blueberries, and some squashes---that had the durability to survive millennia. Mexico and South America had a respectable collection, including corn, peppers, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, pineapples, and peanuts. But the list is quaint when compared to what the other side of the world was up to. Early civilizations in Asia and Africa yielded an incalculable bounty: rice, sugar, apples, soy, onions, bananas, wheat, citrus, coconuts, mangoes, and thousands more that endure today. If domesticating crops was an earth-changing advance, figuring out how to reproduce them came a close second. Edible plants tend to reproduce sexually. A seed produces a plant. The plant produces flowers. The flowers find some form of sperm (i.e., pollen) from other plants. This is nature beautifully at work. But it was inconvenient for long-ago humans who wanted to replicate a specific food they liked. The stroke of genius from early farmers was to realize they could bypass the sexual dance and produce plants vegetatively instead, which is to say, without seeds. Take a small cutting from a mature apple tree, graft it onto mature rootstock, and it'll produce perfectly identical apples. Millenia before humans learned how to clone a sheep, they discovered how to clone plants, and every Granny Smith apple, Bartlett pear, and Cavendish banana you've ever eaten leaves you further indebted to the people who figured that out. Still, even on the same planet, there were two worlds for almost all of human time. People are believed to have dug the first roots of agriculture in the Middle East, in the so-called Fertile Crescent, which had all the qualities of a farmer's dream: warm climate; rich, airy soil; and two flowing rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Around ten thousand years before Jesus walked the earth, humans taught themselves how to grow grains like barley and wheat, and soon after, dates, figs, and pomegranates.
Daniel Stone (The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats)
My view is that diversity is the breath of life, and we must not abandon that for any single form which happens to catch our fancy – even our genetic fancy. Cloning is the stabilisation of one form, and that runs against the whole current of creation – of human creation above all. Evolution is founded in variety and creates diversity; and of all animals, man is most creative because he carries and expresses the largest store of variety. Every attempt to make us uniform, biologically, emotionally, or intellectually, is a betrayal of the evolutionary thrust that has made man its apex. Yet
Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent Of Man)
Maybe he's my clone. Are they cloning humans yet? Eli, I don't know. He's living my life. He's walking in my shoes on his way to my job, living my life. Did he steal my life? Maybe I'm sitting somewhere in a padded room right now. "Careful there, honey," the kind nurse is saying to my slack jawed, vacant expression. "You're drooling all over your straitjacket ..
Robin Parrish (Relentless (Dominion, #1))
Sex thus represents a defending mechanism of long-term biodiversity, versus cloning that would trend strongly toward competition. Although competitive traits never go away, their intensity and distribution are moderated, and sexuality powerfully lowers the curve of increasing aggressive tendency within any species. Sex as a key principle of biotic intimacy is a safety valve in nature against an ultimate, self-destructive integrity of aggressive replicators that would diminish life's complexity and turn evolutionary expression toward a brutish simplicity. In the long run, sex may protect against the threat of bottlenecking gene pools with populations envisioned by Tennyson-"red in tooth and claw"-having impoverished endowment for survival in a world of change on many fronts.
John L. Culliney (The Fractal Self: Science, Philosophy, and the Evolution of Human Cooperation)
Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” ― Marry Shelley, Frankenstein
Barton Ludwig (Blitzball: A Clone of Hitler Battles Nazi's in Sci-Fi Young Adult Novel)
Human bodies, exhausted rocks, gray sacks on the seashore, you always understand that life never ends-it just inherits itself. You endlessly repeated bodies roll out every morning like a slow and disenchanted wave. Human flesh forever, no light! Always rolled from over there, from a sourceless ocean that sends out wave on wave, the swells, the tired bodies, the borders of a sea that never quits, that gasps on its shores, forever. All of you, innumerable, cloned, over and over, heaping up your flesh, your lives, without hope, all monotonously the same under the sullen skies that feel nothing and repeat. That sea never ceases pouring out the bodies, and they break here, roundly, and lie dying on the beaches. And no one sees that swift ship; no one sees it, the quick sail whose steel bow could slant and slice and open up the luminous blood and then race off into the deep horizon, toward the last source of life, the boundary of the eternal sea that pours out these gray human corpses. Toward the light, toward that rising ladder of bright things that climbs from a loving breast to a mouth, ascending, to some huge, full eyes that watch us, to some silent, bounded hands that make a prison where we’re still being born, charged with energy, always tired.
Vicente Aleixandre (A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems)
It seems to be characteristic of the human mind that when it sees a black box in action, it imagines that the contents of the box are simple. A happy example is seen in the comic strip <>. Calvin is always jumping in a box with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, and travelling back in time, or <> himself into animal shapes, or using it as a <> and making clones of him-self. A little boy like Calvin easily imagines that a box can fly like an airplane (or something), because Calvin doesn't know how airplanes work. In some ways, grown-up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys like Calvin. For example, centuries ago it was thought that insects and other small animals arose directly fom spoiled food. This was easy to believe, because small animals were thought to be very simple (before the invention of the microscope, naturalists thought that insects had no internal organs). But as biology progressed and careful experiments showed that protected food did not breed life, the theory of spontaneous generation retreated to the limits beyond which science detect what was really happening. (...) The key to persuading people was the portrayal of the cells as <>. One of the chief advocates of the spontaneous generation during the middle of the nineteenth century was Ernst Haeckel, a great admirer of Darwin and an eager popularizer of Darwin's theory. From the limited view of cells that microscope provided, Haeckel believed that a cell was a <> not much different from a piece of microscopic Jell-O. So it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life, with no internal organs, could be produced easily from inanimate material. Now, of course, we know better.
Michael J. Behe (Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution)
It seems to be characteristic of the human mind that when it sees a black box in action, it imagines that the contents of the box are simple. A happy example is seen in the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes". Calvin is always jumping in a box with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, and travelling back in time, or "transmogrifying" himself into animal shapes, or using it as a "duplicator" and making clones of him-self. A little boy like Calvin easily imagines that a box can fly like an airplane (or something), because Calvin doesn't know how airplanes work. In some ways, grown-up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys like Calvin. For example, centuries ago it was thought that insects and other small animals arose directly fom spoiled food. This was easy to believe, because small animals were thought to be very simple (before the invention of the microscope, naturalists thought that insects had no internal organs). But as biology progressed and careful experiments showed that protected food did not breed life, the theory of spontaneous generation retreated to the limits beyond which science detect what was really happening. (...) The key to persuading people was the portrayal of the cells as "simple". One of the chief advocates of the spontaneous generation during the middle of the nineteenth century was Ernst Haeckel, a great admirer of Darwin and an eager popularizer of Darwin's theory. From the limited view of cells that microscope provided, Haeckel believed that a cell was a "simple lump of albuminous combination of carbon" not much different from a piece of microscopic Jell-O. So it seemed to Haeckel that such simple life, with no internal organs, could be produced easily from inanimate material. Now, of course, we know better.
Michael J. Behe (Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution)