Cloning and the Bible

¹³ And the sixth angel sounded [Sixth Trumpet], and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God,
¹⁴ Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.
¹⁵ And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.
¹⁶ And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.
¹⁷ And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.
¹⁸ By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.
¹⁹ For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt.

There will be cloning of armies, by manipulating the chromosomes to create murderers without morals.

Much experimental weaponry and creation of war machines.

Made by a small Massachusetts company, the SWORDS, short for Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems, will be the first armed robotic vehicles to see combat, years ahead of the larger Future Combat System vehicles currently under development by big defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics Corp.

Interesting that they say there are larger future combat system vehicles under development.

Chances are good the SWORDS will get even more deadly in the future. It has been tested with the larger .50 caliber machine guns as well as rocket and grenade launchers _ even an experimental weapon made by the Australian company Metal Storm LLC that packs multiple rocket rounds into a single barrel, allowing for much more rapid firing.

T63 Artemis, named after the Greek moon goddess Artemis, helped its subordinate human officers distribute fliers on traffic safety at the train station after its appointment as head of Hakata station and surrounding neighborhood in the southern city of Fukuoka. The 157cm-tall Artemis, which has two arms and weighs 100kg, can go on patrol with the help of a battery, police said.

Locally developed Artemis will enter the record books as the first robot police chief in Japan, where robots are being put to growing use for security. The World Exposition, a six-month showcase of technology in central Aichi prefecture, has eight security robots on patrol day and night.

Ms. Saya, a perky receptionist in a smart canary-yellow suit, beamed a smile from behind the May I Help You? sign on her desk, offering greetings and answering questions posed by visitors at a local university. But when she failed to welcome a workman who had just walked by, a professor stormed up to Saya and dished out a harsh reprimand. You're so stupid! said the professor, Hiroshi Kobayashi, towering over her desk. Eh? she responded, her face wrinkling into a scowl. I tell you, I am not stupid!

Truth is, Saya isn't even human. But in a country where robots are changing the way people live, work, play and even love, that doesn't stop Saya the cyber-receptionist from defending herself from men who are out of line. With voice recognition technology allowing 700 verbal responses and an almost infinite number of facial expressions from joy to despair, surprise to rage, Saya may not be biological -- but she is nobody's fool.

I almost feel like she's a real person, said Kobayashi, an associate professor at the Tokyo University of Science and Saya's inventor. Having worked at the university for almost two years now, she's an old hand at her job. She has a temper . . . and she sometimes makes mistakes, especially when she has low energy, the professor said.

Scientists and government authorities have dubbed this generation "The time of the robot," with humans set to interact with their electronic spawn as never before at the 2005 World Expo opening just outside the city of Nagoya on March 25. At the 430-acre site, 15 million visitors are expected to mingle with some of the most highly developed examples of Japanese artificial intelligence, many of which are already on sale or will be within a year.

Greeting visitors in four languages and guiding them to their desired destinations will be Mitsubishi Heavy Industries' yellow midget robot, Wakamaru. A trio of humanoid robots by Sony, Toyota and Honda will be dancing and playing musical instruments at the opening ceremony. Parents visiting the World Expo can leave their children in the care of a robotic babysitter -- NEC's PaPeRo -- which recognizes individual children's faces and can notify parents by cell phone in case of emergency. This was in 2005 !!! Imagine now.

In Western countries, humanoid robots are still not very accepted, but they are in Japan, said Norihiro Hagita, director of the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories in Keihanna Science City near Kyoto. One reason is religion. In Japanese [Shinto] religion, we believe that all things have gods within them. But in Western countries, most people believe in only one God. For us, however, a robot can have an energy all its own.

International academics and activists, they met to lay the groundwork for a society that would admit as citizens and companions intelligent robots, cyborgs made from a free mixing of human and machine parts, and fully organic, genetically engineered people who aren't necessarily human at all. But the purpose of the Yale conference was direct, with no feinting at other agendas. The crowd there wanted to shape what they see as a coming reality. From the first walking stick to bionic eyes, neural chips, and Stephen Hawking's synthesized voice, they would argue we've long been in the process of becoming cyborgs.

A "hybrot," a robot governed by neurons from a rat brain, is now drawing pictures. Dolly the sheep broke the barrier on cloning, and new transgenic organisms are routinely created. The transhumanists gathered because supercomputers are besting human chess masters, and they expect a new intelligence to pole-vault over humanity - in this century. All one has to do is read the science journals to know these issues are on the table today, says Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby.

We already have neural implants for things like Parkinson's disease, he says. By the time machines make a case for themselves in a convincing way and have all the subtle cues indicative of emotional reaction, there won't be a clear distinction between machine and human.

One operative of the Institute for Applied Autonomy, a secretive technology group that provides robots and other gear to protesters, eyes the civil rights landscape and doesn't see many friends for the newcomers. Most of the folks you'd normally go to are really suspicious of a lot of this technology, says this person, noting that much of the cutting-edge development in artificial intelligence has been for military and law-enforcement purposes. You're writing this against the backdrop of a growing police-surveillance state, so it's not surprising that many folks are a bit skittish.

Cloning of armies, by manipulating the chromosomes to create murderers without morals.

In Minnesota, pigs are being born with human blood in their veins.

In Nevada, there are sheep whose livers and hearts are largely human.

In California, mice peer from their cages with human brain cells firing inside their skulls.

They are real creations of real scientists,stretching the boundaries of stem cell research. They are the products of experiments in which human stem cells were added to developing animal fetuses. Chimeras are allowing scientists to watch, for the first time, how nascent human cells and organs mature and interact -- not in the cold isolation of laboratory dishes but inside the bodies of living creatures.

But chimerism becomes a more sensitive topic when it involves growing entire human organs inside animals. And it becomes especially sensitive when it deals in brain cells, the building blocks of the organ credited with making humans human. In experiments like those, Greely told the academy last month, There is a nontrivial risk of conferring some significant aspects of humanity on the animal. Greely and his colleagues did not conclude that such experiments should never be done. Indeed, he and many other philosophers have been wrestling with the question of why so many people believe it is wrong to breach the species barrier.

Does the repugnance reflect an understanding of an important natural law? Or is it just another cultural bias, like the once widespread rejection of interracial marriage? Many turn to the Bible's repeated invocation that animals should multiply "after their kind" as evidence that such experiments are wrong.

If two such chimeras -- say, mice -- were to mate, a human embryo might form, trapped in a mouse. Not everyone agrees that this would be a terrible result. What would be so dreadful? asked Ann McLaren, a renowned developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge in England. After all, she said, no human embryo could develop successfully in a mouse womb. It would simply die, she told the academy. No harm done. But what about experiments in which scientists add human stem cells not to an animal embryo but to an animal fetus, which has already made its eggs and sperm?

Then the only question is how human a creature one dares to make. In one ongoing set of experiments, Jeffrey L. Platt at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has created human-pig chimeras by adding human-blood-forming stem cells to pig fetuses. The resulting pigs have both pig and human blood in their vessels. And it's not just pig blood cells being swept along with human blood cells; some of the cells themselves have merged, creating hybrids. It is important to have learned that human and pig cells can fuse, Platt said, because he and others have been considering transplanting modified pig organs into people and have been wondering if that might pose a risk of pig viruses getting into patient's cells.

The Cloning of armies, by manipulating the chromosomes to create murderers without morals.

¹³ And the sixth angel sounded [Sixth Trumpet], and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God,
¹⁴ Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.
¹⁵ And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.
¹⁶ And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.
¹⁷ And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.
¹⁸ By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.
¹⁹ For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt.

Human Born to Mice Parents?

For example, an experiment that would raise concerns, he said, is genetically engineering mice to produce human sperm and eggs, then doing in vitro fertilization to produce a child whose parents are a pair of mice. Most people would find that problematic, Magnus said, but those uses are bizarre and not, to the best of my knowledge, anything that anybody is remotely contemplating. Most uses of chimeras are actually much more relevant to practical concerns.

Mice With Human Brains

Weissman has already created mice with brains that are about one percent human. Later this year he may conduct another experiment where the mice have 100 percent human brains. This would be done, he said, by injecting human neurons into the brains of embryonic mice. Before being born, the mice would be killed and dissected to see if the architecture of a human brain had formed. If it did, he'd look for traces of human cognitive behavior. Weissman said he's not a mad scientist trying to create a human in an animal body.

Here is an oldie but goodie to share in the Human Cloning System study on cloning and the Bible ...

The World's best kept secret in cloning research. The world's first human clone of an adult has now been made, by an American biotechnology company in Massachusetts, Advanced Cell Technology. They took a cell from Dr Jose Cibelli, a research scientist and combined it with a cows egg from which the genes had already been removed. (News November 1998) The genes activated and the egg began to divide in the normal way up to the 32 cell stage at which it was destroyed. If the clone had been allowed to continue beyond implantation it would have developed as Dr Cibelli's identical twin. Technically 1% of the human clone genes would have belonged to the cow.

Judging by the successful growth of the combined human-cow clone creation it appears that cow mitochondria may well be compatible with human embryonic development. However the biggest piece of news is not what they did in human cloning - sensational enough - but the fact that they kept cloning secret for three years after doing it, and presumably they were trying to do it at least a couple of years before that. Let's wind back the clock:these scientists had already carried out successful human nuclear transfer into an unfertilized egg before Dolly the sheep clone had been made.

In other words, the huge media rush about Dolly came only because the Dolly scientists in Edinburgh came clean sooner. But even they omitted to tell us anything until Dolly was seven months old, well over a year after the cloning technique was successfully carried out and a good two to three years perhaps after they began their secretive work. The lesson is this: today's headlines on human cloning tell us history. The big question is what's going on now? What experiments were completed in 1996, 1997 and 1998 that we won't know about until 1999 to 2001 - if then? I describe my own conversations with a British scientist in the 1980s who was attempting then to clone human embryos - with some success. His purpose he said was to freeze clones to be used later for spare parts. Defrost a twin, implant it into a surrogate of a humanized ape and cull it for spares.

Over a decade later he is still lying very low about his work. There could be one benefit of the human to cows egg transfers. Some people are very uneasy about creating a human embryo and then dismembering it, however early the stage, to obtain embryonic stem cells from which useful tissues might be grown. they might feel more comfortable with a hybrid solution, if it were shown that the embryonic cow-human stem cells were viable as tissue producers but not capable of becoming a baby. However there are many other ethical issues. For a start it raises the biggest question of all: how many human genes does a cow or monkey have to gain before we give it human rights?

In these human-cow clones one imagines every court in the world would agree that the child born would be capable of being prosecuted for murder, even though it would technically be 1% cow. But what about other proportions? Humonkeys are within our capability and have been for several years. Scientists have already made geep (combined sheep and goat), and camas (combined camels and lamas) simply by rolling two balls of cells together after fertilization. Monkeys and humans have 97% of genes in common so if the right 1.6% were transferred from a human to a monkey we could land up with a monkey more human than animal.

These questions within our cloning and the Bible comparison do have similarities will need facing sooner than you may think. And for the theologians another question: how many human genes does an animal have to have to need salvation? Christians, Muslims and Jews believe that humans are made in the image of God. Human life is a mystery. What does that mean in the light of these extraordinary developments?