On April Fools’ Day 1998, within hours of reading U.S. patent application No. 08/993,564, the Honorable Bruce Lehman did something no other commissioner of patents had done in the two-hundred-year history of America’s oldest government agency. He stepped before a cluster of microphones and announced that the patent would never be approved. No half-human “monsters” would be patented, Lehman declared angrily, or any other “immoral inventions.”

From “Gods and Monsters” by Mark Dowie, an essay published in “The Best American Science Writing 2005

Mark Dowe wrote an extremely insightful essay on the current conflict surrounding “chimeras” in modern biological research. I’m going to hit on some of the points he brought up, as well as adding in my own two cents.

Chimeras are organisms which have genes from more than one species. This can be done through various means including PCR in simpler life, and through injecting embryonic stem cells of one species into the embryo of another species in more complex life. One has to go no farther than the local grocery store to find examples of chimeras. People are generally tolerant of the idea of swapping plant and bacterial genes around, and many people are even okay with the idea of having animal genes in their tomato, but the idea of putting human genes into other organisms seems to make most people uneasy.

A chimera could look like one creature and have the genes organs and possibly even the intelligence of another creature. One common example of this is creating pigs with human organs for transplant purposes. There are currently many laboratory animals who have human genes, the patent which Bruce Lehman so vehemently opposed, and is being fought about in court to this day was about the creation of creatures that are a 50/50 human, animal mix.

We’ve had the ability to create 50/50 animal hybrids for a while now. Back in 1984 a sheep/goat chimera was created, called a “geep”. We would probably be creating 50/50 human animal mixes today if the right scientists received funding and legal permission. In Michael Crichton’s book “Next”, a chimpanzee/human chimera was secretly created. The chimpanzee had increased intelligence and a larynx.

Such possibilities bring up many ethical questions. Would such a creature be entitled to human rights? Since identical expressed qualities can be created with drastically different genes, it doesn’t make sense to base whether a being deserves rights on genes. This becomes even more apparent when you take into consideration that out genetic pool is continuously changing.

Does someone actually need to look human to qualify for rights? Or should the criteria be narrowed to judging a few features like the organisms ability to think abstractly and feel? People born in vegetative states wouldn’t be able to pass an iq test. An either or definition could be used. A being must either have the genes or certain expressed qualities. Okay, so should a creature that normally has human like intelligence, but is born in a vegetative state have human rights? That might sound silly, but I don’t think it’s far fetched.

It is rapidly becoming easier to modify genes, additionally, our knowledge of plant, microbial, and animal genomes has been increasing exponentially. We have massive public databases where we have sequenced thousands of life forms. Without requiring some sort of apocalyptic catastrophe, I have a hard time imagining this knowledge not leading to us creating chimeras with human-like intelligence.

I don’t think creating something that is a mix of human and animal is inherently unethical. Genes aren’t in and of themselves important, and we share a lot of genes with animals anyway. If a 50/50 human animal hybrid were created that was happy with its lot in life and how it‘s treated, I think that would be ethical and would more than you can say about a lot of humans.

While I don’t think creating hybrids is inherently unethical, I do think it opens doors to many ethically questionable possibilities. Most of which center around creating something human-like and then not treating it like it’s human. Such cases bring up an important question for the human race. Do characteristics such as human-like intelligence and the ability to feel automatically demand our respect, or is respect about survival only,in which case we only need to apply to our own genetic stock?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find an on line version of the entire essay. The first part of the essay can be read in the link below.

http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/chimerapatent.htm

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve redone the site’s layout. If anything isn’t working, please let me know. Since I’m still fiddling with it, this is also a good time to throw in any suggestions you might have about what you would like to see in the layout. I’ve moved the blog from boldlygo.org/blog to boldlygo.org. This was done because having my main page be at a subdomain was causing the page rank to be split between both urls.

I’m going to be shifting the focus of my posts. From now on, most of my posts are going to be both based around and reference science fiction stories. My first post is an example of this. I originally intended for this site to be focused on science fiction rather than items in the news. I think the former is a better idea. Pulling ideas from science fiction stories and discussing them should make it easier to find ideas to post about, and also should make my posts more unique. Although, I’m still withholding the right to write the occasional rant about current events.

Write! I would love for this to be a community blog. Posts need to be on topic, but they do not need to specifically reference science fiction literature. On that note, I know I haven’t been posting very often. I’m going to be trying very hard to return to posting at least once a week.

This article was linked to on slashdot recently.

Nov. 6, 2008 — The largest truck in the world is about to become the largest robotic vehicle in the world. Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up with engineers from Caterpillar to automate the 700-ton trucks, which are made to haul loads up to 240 tons from mines.

That’s nearly two million pounds of metal, fuel and stone powered by a 3,550-horsepower, 24-valve engine moving at up to 42 miles per hour, with software and a robot at the wheel.

Autonomous vehicle technology is pretty much in its infancy,” said Tony Stentz, a professor at CMU involved in the project. Stentz expects that over the next five to 10 years, the technology will expand to areas beyond mining, eventually finding its way into consumer cars and trucks.

Catepillar’s soon-to-be-automated hauling trucks will be the largest but not the first. Caterpillar’s rival, Japan-based Komatsu, already runs automated trucks at the Gaby mine in Chile. Rio Tinto, a British/Australian mining company, recently announced plans to fully automate its Pilbara iron ore mines in Australia, including its Komatsu trucks, by this November.”

Does this article cause anyone else to flashbacks from every futuristic real time strategy game you’ve ever played? Now, they just need an automated constructor that builds military bases from the resources that the drones mine. Then, our automated army will be prepared to push forward, colonize the universe, and defeat the Zerg.

On a more realistic note…

It’ll be interesting to see which jobs can become automated over the next few decades. You might be able to tag down a driverless taxi. So far, we’ve yet to make a driverless vehicle that does well on complicated courses or in traffic. But, we are getting closer every year. In the DARPA competition, every year the cars have done significantly better than the previous year.

Automation isn’t going to end with cars. You may have already heard of Serendipity, a computer program that writes classical music. Our brains are material based. Theoretically, it should be possible to create robots that can accomplish every task that humans fulfill.

We depend on plastic for computers, food, health-care, and just about anything else you can think of. All of this plastic is created nearly exclusively using oil. You can’t watch a news program without hearing someone talk about about the need to invest in energy alternatives such as solar, wind, and nuclear power.

Yet, bioplastics are rarely mentioned. I think the reason politicians don’t talk about this, is because most people aren’t aware this is an issue. (72% of Americans don’t know plastic is made from oil) Scarce oil without a cheap bioplastic alternative means expensive plastic, and expensive plastic would drastically change society.

What is stopping us from switching over to bioplastic?

1. Bioplastic is more expensive than regular plastic.

2. Currently, for a product to legally be a bioplastic, it must meet high standards for biodegradability. For example, the European Union mandates that bioplastic undergo 90% degradation in 90 days(EN13432). The U.S. requires 60% degradation in 180 days(ASTM6400).

3. The belief that the components of bioplastic need to be used for feeding people, by both direct consumption and to aide in growing plants as compost.

4. Plastic is easier to recycle.

Overcoming these hurdles:

1. This hurdle will be overcome whether we like it or not. Oil based plastic will stop being cheap due to oil scarcity. At some point in the near future, the scarcity of oil will raise the price of plastic above the price of bioplastic. The price of producing bioplastic needs to be lowered through research before this happens, so that the negative effects of the transition are minimized.

2. Bioplastic production needs to be deregulated. Bioplastics could degrade 10 times slower than what the regulations require, and still be a significant improvement over regular plastic. It doesn’t make sense to have laws under the guise of being environmentally friendly, when these laws discourage research into creating long lasting plastic from renewable sources instead of nonrenewable sources.

3. We currently have the resources to feed everyone. If the starving had the ability to buy the food, the market would provide them with food. Evidence of this includes how wasteful rich countries are with food, the vast amount of relatively unused land that could be converted to farming, and the wide spread practice of growing plants for meat animals instead of feeding more people by directly growing the plants for people. The market could change to accommodate an increased demand for plants and food. In fact, since roughly 75% of malnourished people live in rural areas, an increased demand for argicultural development in poor countries probably would reduce starvation by creating jobs in these areas.

4. Having a variety of bioplastics with a wide range of degradation rates, would make directly converting old bioplastic into new bioplastic complicated. The solution is to turn all of the plastic into compost, and to use the compost to provide nutrients to new plastic producing plants. According to the EPA, less than 6 percent of plastic is recylced . Since current plastic is only recycled to a minor degree, and since bioplastic can be recycled as compost, I do not think the possible inability to directly reuse biolastic is a significant con.

Society has become dependent on plastic. And the problems hindering the development of bioplastic can be overcome. Widespread awareness of this issue will aid in overcoming it.

Sean A. Spence wrote an article in the Journal of British Psychiatry, about whether we should use drugs to make people behave ethically. Among other points, the paper gives a few examples of ways that drugs are already being used to make people behave ethically.

There are drugs that make you happy, drugs that help you pay attention, and even drugs that make you smarter. What about drugs that increase empathy? There are many potential applications for such a drug.

These drugs might be able to help sociopaths, who have no ability, or a significantly lessened ability to sympathize with other human beings. It could “cure” a sociopath in the same way that an anti-depressant can cure someone with clinical depression.

What if an entire group of people artificially upped their empathy? Would this group of people be happier or sadder, more productive or less productive?

I’m not even willing to guess. This is an area where much more research needs to be conducted. Vast amounts of money are spent on both promoting behavior enhancing drugs, and studying the effects of these drugs on individuals. But, little is being done to research the effects of wide use on a population

The current trend is towards it being okay for everyone to use drugs that “improve” behavior. Is this trend for better or worse?