Word: headless
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...team to produce the first human clone occasioned yet another wave of Brave New World anxiety. But the scariest news of all--and largely overlooked--comes from two obscure labs, at the University of Texas and at the University of Bath. During the past four years, one group created headless mice; the other, headless tadpoles...
...then create them? The Texas researchers want to learn how genes determine embryo development. But you don't have to be a genius to see the true utility of manufacturing headless creatures: for their organs--fully formed, perfectly useful, ripe for plundering...
...Alive." Never have a pair of quotation marks loomed so ominously. Take the mouse-frog technology, apply it to humans, combine it with cloning, and you are become a god: with a single cell taken from, say, your finger, you produce a headless replica of yourself, a mutant twin, arguably lifeless, that becomes your own personal, precisely tissue-matched organ farm...
There are, of course, technical hurdles along the way. Suppressing the equivalent "head" gene in man. Incubating tiny infant organs to grow into larger ones that adults could use. And creating artificial wombs (as per Aldous Huxley), given that it might be difficult to recruit sane women to carry headless fetuses to their birth/death...
...least Dolly was cuddly. The prospect of headless frogs, or even headless humans, has ethical guardians, um, up in arms. "If you create bodies without heads ? well, they're not slaves, I'm not sure they are humans," says Jeffrey Reiman, professor of philosophy at American University in Washington. Good thing he gave us a heads...