Biological Revolution: Human and Nonhuman Rights in a Biotech-Space Age

By Beverly D. Conley

Biological Revolution reviews biotech and other scientific developments, highlights moral, ethical and legal questions relating to both human and nonhuman rights issues, and suggests avenues for a practical response.
Besides analysis and historical perspective, this documented work contains spiritual insight, i.e, the latter part of Chapter 2 through Chapter 5 includes Bible prophecy or scripture relevant to world events.
There are 14 Chapters to this work, titled: Cutting the Cord to Earth and Heredity, The Heavens Bear Witness, Re-Creation, Roots and Rock, Following the Precedents, Value, Legacy of Violence, In This Day, Decisions, Life Patents, Reverence for Life, Born Free/Born Property, Exploitation, and Coming Together.
Biological Revolution is written to a general national/international audience, including near-future human-tailored beings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 8, 2002
• ISBN: 9781465318183

Beverly D. Conley

Beverly Conley is a Freedom Advocate. This book is her writing assignment to address the practical and spiritual challenges inherent to our Biotech-Space Age. She is a member of various national/international animal, environmental and human advocacy organizations.

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Copyright © 2001 by Beverly D. Conley.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter One

Cutting the Cord to Earth and Heredity.

Chapter Two

The Heavens Bear Witness.

Chapter Three

Re-Creation.

Chapter Four

Roots and Rock.

Chapter Five

Following the Precedents.

Chapter Six

Value.

Chapter Seven

Legacy of Violence.

Chapter Eight

In This Day.

Chapter Nine

Decisions.

Chapter Ten

Life Patents.

Chapter Eleven

Reverence for Life.

Chapter Twelve

Born Free/Born Property.

Chapter Thirteen

Exploitation.

Chapter Fourteen

Coming Together.

NOTES

Introduction

First, about the front-cover photo.

The image is the imprint of a bird that collided with a window. Symbolically, it reflects our collision with the future. The bird apparently survived. We found no body or signs of a predator.

The image on the glass also suggests the imprint of a dove, a representative figure of the Spirit of God Who is omnipresent: He exists on both sides, as well as within our time frame, to help bring human and other kind through the impacts of our BiotechSpace Age.

Accordingly, Biological Revolution has a story within a story to address both the practical and spiritual impacts of a universal transition. The spiritual parenthesis, from the latter part of Chapter 2 through Chapter 5, includes Bible prophecy relevant to world events: all noted Scriptures are from the original King James Version.

Otherwise, this documented work reviews biotech and other scientific developments, highlights moral, ethical and legal questions relating to both human and nonhuman rights issues, and suggests avenues for a practical response.

This work has 14 Chapters, titled: Cutting the Cord to Earth and Heredity, The Heavens Bear Witness, Re-Creation, Roots and Rock, Following the Precedents, Value, Legacy of Violence,

In This Day, Decisions, Life Patents, Reverence for Life, Born Free/Born Property, Exploitation, and Coming Together.

Grateful Acknowledgment is given to The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine for permission to use material from their cited works.

Chapter One

Cutting the Cord to Earth and Heredity.

Are you a missing link in the web of life? Just as your body needs all its working parts, the whole of the living kingdom needs to hear your voice during a universal transition where scientific tinkering is mixing and matching the natural heredity of life-forms, besides connecting living things to hardware.

Early-on, for instance, an international workshop on molecular electronic devices was organized by Forrest Carter of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. This agenda involved production of human-tailored proteins to self-replicate and function as computer biochips.1 Moreover, Dr. Leonard Adelman at the University of Southern California and Richard Lipton at Princeton University demonstrated that DNA can count and think2, and an Israeli research team headed by physicist Uri Sivan at the Technion Institute, Haifa, Israel, harnessed the self-assembling abilities of DNA molecules to create electronic circuits.3

In another field, a German physicist and cyberneticist supposed a futuristic cyborg (cybernetic organism) wherein the brain of an unborn child might be isolated, programmed and then connected to the electronic equipment of a spacecraft to serve as an Earth ambassador to outerspace.4

Independent of that scenario, Dr. Robert White who resides in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, acknowledged that it may be possible to keep a human brain functioning outside of its original cranial vault. In fact, he had done so with a monkey brain.5

White was also successful in transferring a monkey’s living head onto a decapitated monkey’s body that was attached to a heart/lung machine.6 Russian scientists in the former-Soviet Union used dogs in similar experiments.

The practicality question of transplanting human heads, besides the philosophical and moral implications were apparent, however. So, for the latter concern, Dr. White who is a self-described old time Catholic had several audiences with Pope John Paul II.7

Subsequently, at the conclusion of a private meeting, John Paul asked White to author guidelines for a Vatican commission that would address such issues as transplant operations and genetic engineering that rearranges nature to invent new life-forms.8 Nonetheless, White has predicted that human-head or body-transplant may be feasible before the year 2050.9

A technique that might further such a goal was made public in October 1997 when Jonathon Slack, professor of developmental biology at Bath University, England, revealed his success in producing headless frog embryos by manipulating genes in frog eggs. He used the same technique to suppress development of a tadpole’s truck and tail. This research could be used toward production of headless human clones for body (or body parts) transplant operations.

Otherwise, as of this writing, animal-to-human organ transplants have been unsuccessful, i.e, by 1997, some 30 xenotransplant operations were performed wherein hearts, livers and kidneys from chimpanzees, baboons, pigs and monkeys were given to human recipients. All the patients died.

Doctors who lose human lives in experimental research may console themselves by thinking that, at least, this patient’s death gave medical science new information and knowledge about a given procedure, whether or not that procedure ever proves to be practicable. And some research scientists also believe that the experimental use of animals for human purposes is justifiable, in the sense, that is, of survival of the fittest and that a researcher’s allegiance should be to one’s own species.

But human-tailored biology is already cutting the cord to natural heredity. So, to whom will such researchers pledge allegiance when biotechnology produces new forms of intelligent life?

Early-on, biotech gadfly Jeremy Rifkin acted on his concern over the future of humankind. In 1983, he organized a meeting of members from various religious denominations to produce a Resolution urging scientists to ban forever experiments that would lead to possible alteration of human heredity.

Signatories included leaders of Methodist, Lutheran, and Episcopal churches, 22 Roman Catholic Bishops, and a spectrum of other officials, from James Malone then-president of the National Council of Churches, to James Draper then-president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Nonetheless, 2 years later, the United States government began funding research for making major changes in animals. Some of this work, done in the private sector, as well, involves transgenic research that introduces human genes into animal species.

In May 1995, for example, a U.S. research company announced success in breeding transgenic pigs. The goal is to routinely breed and slaughter the pigs for animal-to-human organ transplants. At the time, one expert noted a potential $6 billion market for animal heart transplants, alone.

The cost of xenotransplants, however, includes possible risk of deadly diseases, such as Ebola virus and AIDS-like retroviruses, unintentionally transferred from animals to humans. Even viruses that initially appear harmless in animals may become deadly after exchanging genetic material with human DNA following a xenotransplant.

There is also concern that a life-threatening virus unintentionally transferred to a transplant patient might spread around the world to kill human populations.

Besides genetic mixing, the new biology can match selected life-forms by cloning which is the asexual reproduction of an organism from a single cell. Simple or lower life forms, such as bacteria, clone by nature. More complex organisms only clone by human manipulation.10

In the latter case, for instance, Dr. Frederick C. Steward of Cornell University cloned carrot plants in the 1950s. Two decades later, English scientist J.B. Broomhall of Oxford University cloned a rabbit embryo.

Techniques for cloning mammals or parts, thereof, include adult, embryo and cord blood methods.

Initially, cord blood work led to growth of human bone marrow, in the mid-1990s, which saved the lives of a dozen cancer patients who were treated with blood cells from newborn babies’ umbilical cords.

Immediately thereafter, a handful of laboratories around the world began further work toward growing muscles and other tissues from stem cells taken from human embryos and fetuses.

In the United States, the National Institutes of Health issued guidelines on 23 August 2000 with then-President Clinton sanctioning stem cell research that would come mostly from living human embryos. Federal funding decision remained for incoming President George W. Bush, and other possible cell sources include bone marrow, cord blood, human placentas and adult body fat.

Stem cells are immature and relatively unspecialized: they give rise to the more specialized cells in developing fetuses, besides replenishing adult tissues throughout a person’s life.

Scientists can also take a mature body cell and change it back into a stem cell for adult cloning, (e.g., a cell from your skin but not a reproductive cell, since the nucleus of the latter only carries a half-set of chromosomes.) So, the replicating nucleus of an animal-or human-body-cell may be placed in an unfertilized mammal egg and implanted in an animal or human uterus. Following gestation, the newborn would be a genetic duplicate of the original-body-cell-donor. Like traditional identical twins, though, human and nonhuman clones would have their own thoughts and emotions based on their individual life experiences.

Body cells viable for adult cloning have a limited life span, but cells can be intentionally placed in suspended animation either by mummification or by freezing at sub-zero temperatures.

So, as the late French biologist Dr. Jean Rostand has said, a viable cell from a dead person would be immortal.11

For example, through various tests made in 1963, biologists at the University of Oklahoma discovered that the several-thousand-year-old remains of Egyptian Princess Mene contain skin-cells that are capable of living, i.e., theoretically, the Princess could be cloned.

Ethical issues of cloning were raised, in October 1993, after scientists at George Washington University cloned human embryos.

In this experiment, fertility researchers Jerry Hall and Robert Stillman used an animal research technique: they divided human embryos into single cells and grew the cells into new embryos.

Hall said that the embryos were flawed and doomed to stop developing within a few days anyway. He and Stillman agreed, though, that ethical guidelines should be in place before scientists attempt cloning of normal embryos.12

The following year, in June 1994, George Washington University ordered Dr. Hall to destroy all data from his controversial research.13

But some scientists think that cloning would improve the human race. Nobel-prize-winning geneticist Joshua Lederberg, for one, has said that suitable-type-persons should be considered as candidates for cloning, thereby leaving sexual reproduction for strictly experimental gene combination purposes.14

And at a lecture on the future of man, reprinted by the Ames Aero Research Center, a doctor of the California Institute of Technology presented a futuristic scenario of genetic material removed from newborns who are then promptly sterilized. All people would be subjected to record-keeping of their lives; and, after death, a special committee would review the records to see if the deceased person(s) were worthy of procreation into other individuals, i.e., clones. If an individual was found unworthy, his or her stored genetic material would be destroyed.15

Cloning of an existing human being (would be) repugnant. . . . NIH director Dr. Harold Varmus told a U.S. House subcommittee on 26 February 1997. His statement was in response to news that Scottish scientist Ian Wilmut and colleagues at an Edinburg, Scotland, institute had succeed in cloning a sheep.

Varmus added, however, that further research into cloning might aid medical science. Such research, he said, could make it possible to grow new skin for burn patients, culture bone marrow for treatment of cancer and manipulate genes to cure serious human diseases.

The U.S. presidential National Bioethics Advisory Commission agreed with Varmus.

(Then-President Clinton had already announced a temporary moratorium, in February 1997, on the use of federal funds for human embryo research, besides appointing the 18-member Commission of specialists in science, law and theology to study the cloning issue.)

The Commission members reached a general agreement, in June 1997, that federal funds should be