ERRONEOUS FANTASIES

Somehow, when I formerly considered cloning, I imagined two identicals, maybe enjoying each other’s company.  Wiser now, I realize one is mother to the other, and at least sometimes (if not always) the clone gets a “surrogate mother.” I didn’t know fifteen species have been cloned; many pets also, at the request of their owners.

Even wiser now, I read that Dolly had three mothers: one ewe for the DNA, another for the egg into which the DNA was injected, and a third to carry the resulting cloned embryo.

I knew many secretly fantasized about cloning humans, but there was an ethical, maybe legal barrier.  I just discovered the basis…or at least one concern is that with each cloning there are apparently many failures, and misfires with damaged results.  Dolly, the first cloned sheep, was named after Dolly Parton and produced in Scotland by Ian Wilmut, head of the original cloning team after 434 attempts (a success rate of 0.2 percent.)  She lived from  July 5, 1996  until she was euthanized on February 14, 2002, due to an incurable lung tumor.  She had also been treated for arthritis.

Dolly led to concerns about cloning a human being — a thought that reportedly horrified Wilmut, originally. This concern spurred policy makers everywhere to action. Indeed, the United Nations (UN) spent 3 years trying to negotiate an international ban on human cloning. Bogged down by differing views on the ethical acceptability of “therapeutic cloning,” in 2005 the UN General Assembly settled on an ambiguous non-binding Declaration that calls upon countries to prohibit all forms of human cloning that are “incompatible with human dignity.”

And I just learned from David Barash’s book The Whispering Within, that human clones, even [horrors] “successful” ones are not expected to naturally be “buddy buddy,” since as he wrote, “A gene that instructed its body to ‘be nice to your clone’ probably was not very strongly favored by natural selection during our evolutionary history.”  (And haven’t you heard people complain, “I’m getting to be just like my mother”?)

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I DIDN’T KNOW THAT:  Certain groups, and particularly minoritized racial and ethnic groups, were impacted much, much, much more dramatically by COVID, although everybody had a negative experience…      https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/podcasts

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• Roles for In-Laws: Trump tapped Massad Boulos, the father-in-law of his daughter Tiffany, as a senior adviser covering Arab and Middle Eastern affairs. He also picked Charles Kushner, his daughter Ivanka’s father-in-law, as ambassador to France.

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Sign on the Christian Fellowship Church:  CHURCH PARKING. trespassers will be baptised.

Sign on the South End Baptist Church:  WHOEVER IS PRAYING FOR SNOW, PLEASE STOP

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I wouldn’t want a god who made others lose so I could win.

(At least not all the time).

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