>"The genie is out of the bottle," Zavos said. "We need to make sure
>it is bottled and disseminated responsibly."
Surely a mistranslation. What Zavos really said was:
"The genome is out of the bottle," Zavos said. "We need to make sure it is
bottle-fed and inseminated responsibly."
(Funny how the Italians are carefully making it a matter of `infertile men'
with dud semen being able to clone their male offspring. Good memetics,
alas, in a buoyantly patriarchal culture. Nobody mentions that Dolly was a
grrrl sheep.)
The other night I saw loony toons Rael on the Aussie version of *60
Minutes*, with his cloning team biochem prof representative, and found him
surprisingly charming and sensible. `But isn't this... *playing GOD*...?'
asked the accusatory interviewer at the end. `There is no God,'
forthrightly noted the UFO abductee with the topknot, in his delightful
French accent. `It is playing intelligent human beings.' He also pointed
out some of the usual absurdities. `They tell us that it is a vile sin
against human dignity to create these *exact carbon copies* of other
humans,' he said wryly (I paraphrase from memory), `and at the same time
they say that it can never work because clones are no more perfectly
identical than twins are. Yes! And what's wrong with twins?' Go, Rael!
Damien
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