Down To Seeds And Stem Cell Research

So how did you spend your $300 voter bribe, sorry, tax rebate? What, you didn't get one? That's a shame! You must not have paid enough to get one. Dubya wouldn't want to give out money to someone who doesn't need it, now, would he? Maybe he'll have Congress come up with a poverty tax, then you could get a rebate!

Did you hear that it cost $20,000,000 just to send out the notices that the rebate checks were coming? It sounds like a lot, but in a nation of 250 million that's really not that outlandish. When you consider postage and printing, it's actually damn cheap. Anyway the rebate money will get frittered away on consumer items now. It helped pay off the cost of my summer vacation for me. I tried to be altruistic and give it to charity but I needed to pay down my credit card debt. The funny thing is, with the economy doing lazy donuts in the parking lot so to speak, suddenly we have no money to pay down the National Debt anymore. Surplus? What surplus?

Hey, I've got a great idea! Let's get everyone to chip in a little, say the cost of a super size combo at Mickey D's. No, make it a deluxe footlong Subway sandwich combo, maybe $6.00 or so each week to help pay down the national debt, think we could handle that? Multiplied out it would be billions! Well guess what, that's what that rebate check works out to. $6 a week, $25 per month, a real hefty change in lifestyle for us. Those idiots in Washington would rather give us a check that doesn't change our lives a bit but runs up plenty more national debt doing it. And makes the banks fatter on more interest. Gee, you think Resident Bush has a few banker friends that are all aquiver now over a rise in these eternal payments on our national debt?

Enough of that. It's time to get down to my real topic this month, but what to write about? Not much has been happening in the dog days of the Bush Vacation Month. You know things are actually going very well when the biggest story all summer long has been about a single missing intern. We wouldn't want to cover anything serious like the New Intefada in Israel, would we? Maybe it's just faded to a dull roar after eleven months of violence from both sides. The dull roar of helicopter gunships and car bombs. About all I can say on that is that I think the Israeli Jews have become too much like the people who were beating up on them a few decades ago. There, I said it, but I hate to say it. Yes, yes, they are not in the same league as the Nazis, and I hope it won't get near that, but I have to say they are behaving abysmally toward the Palestinians. Sure the Jews have an historic claim to the area, but up until the late 40's the Palestinians had lived on that land for oh, only about 1900 years or so. I'd say their claim is pretty good too. A lot of them even had legal deeds back in the 40's, but they moved off the land in the original 1948 war and have never been allowed back. When Palestinians do try to squat on some of that area, for years Israelis have been bulldozing their paltry settlements to build shiny new sub- divisions for the Jewish elite. On top of that they cut off the Palestinians' rights, and herd them like cattle into shitty little desert tent farms. And the Israelis wonder why they have a steady stream of suicide bombers coming at them. Why can't they see they'll always be at war if they continue acting like this?

Hell, what am I thinking? Even the best Rusty Rant I could ever write wouldn't make a difference to those fanatics. No compromise on both sides, damn! And they were so close to a peace agreement last summer but Ariel Sharon just HAD to stir things up. I can wring my hands but I couldn't begin to unravel all their hatred with this puny column. One thing's for sure, God ain't telling us who are his Chosen People in this fight. I hate to say this even more -- Maybe for some things you just have to let 'em burn out.

There must be something less depressing to write about. Something I can turn into the clever philosophical repartee you've come to expect from me, right? Oh I know, there's an interesting question that's been in the news this summer that's a rare opportunity to have a genuine philosophical debate. The question is: how many souls can dance on the tip of a stem cell?

Or something like that. Maybe the question should be: Who gets to play God? But the answer to that is easy -- we all do. Every time a couple has a baby we are creating a new soul, something only gods can do, or so the common wisdom says. But what is a soul anyway? Robert Pirsig, who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mechanics, spent a whole book trying to define "quality." Do you need to go a bit crazy like him trying to define "soul?" By the way, did you know our word for person comes from "persona," the old Greek name for the mask actors used in plays? So does this mean a person is a mask the soul puts on? Does the soul exist apart from a body? Maybe we aren't playing God and making a new soul, we're only making the mask when we make a baby. Who knows? Greater minds than mine have smashed like surf on that question's shore but have never washed it away with a meaningful answer. So if you can't define it, how do you know it exists? Oh well, I think we can agree there's SOMETHING going on inside these bodies of ours. I guess we'll have leave that unanswered for now.

For the sake of argument, let's call this bio-metaphysical matrix in each of our heads that keeps talking to itself all the time "a soul" for the moment. It comes with bodies, with life, whether by attachment or creation. Now science has further extended the power to give life by letting more people create a new person, but not in the old fashioned way. But this proto-person, an embryo, can be used for spare parts or repair too. At least we hope so. It begs the question, does that fertilized egg have a soul? Is it there right at the start? Well, maybe a little. But certainly we don't have to give it tax rebate checks yet.

Did you know you have a complete new body every seven years or so? You have individual cells living and dying all the time. Maybe it's like Osmosis Jones, with a city of cells inside you. Actually there is some level of truth to that. We do tend to think about it in anthropomorphic terms, but there is a lot of intelligence at the cellular level. How do you think those little chemical factories work anyway? Could you tell the difference between an amino acid and a carbohydrate as it floats by in a capillary? Who's to say that it isn't intelligence that decides things like that? Imagine, every little cell has its own life. Just by scratching our epidermis you lose hundreds of thousands of them, but that's what happens when you put on this persona.

So if a single stem cell can have a soul, is there a special place in heaven for them? And what about all the specialized cells, the non-stem cells? They must have a soul too, are we going to discriminate against them? Do the pro-lifers want us to hold a funeral for every one of our cells as they pass away or something? We'd be in a constant state of mourning because we have TRILLIONS of cells and as an organism the average time we're on this planet is a little less than 30,000 days. (Think about it 365 times 75 = 27,375. Even with leap years figured in it's only 27,393.75. Pretty small number isn't it?) Every funeral would have to last about a millisecond to keep up. Let's cut the service down to a nanosecond so we can have some time for other things, sound good?

Anyway, who's to say a soul isn't a synergy created by all the individual lives of all those cells? One cell may not be enough to have a soul as we know it, but added together they reach that critical point where you have a soul. Only there's no definite line you can point to when that happens. And we've already got these 60 lines of human stem cells in petrie-dish-limbo over here, as Resident Bush pointed out in last month's speech between skeet shooting sessions at his ranch. We might as well go ahead and do something with them.

Maybe we can turn this to some medical advantage; it remains to be seen. I know there're lots of paralyzed people that would give most anything to repair spinal cord injury and this might be it. Just don't expect to clone a new body for yourself that you can beam your soul over into and cheat death for an extra lifetime. Someone's already going to be in there.

If someone does successfully clone a human being, that new person will be genetically identical, but it will never ever be the same person. It might be pretty close in some ways but it will be a second person guaranteed. Not only will the clone grow up in different times than the original, ensuring a different set of memories, there is a physics problem in that the two bodies cannot share the space exact space. Every point in the universe is unique. Their points of reference may be NEARLY identical only, but never one.

It could be what the theologians are really worried about is designer genes. Well there's good and bad about that too, just like anything. There will be mistakes, for sure, but I think we can get a lot of good out of it. Maybe in the future when we call a hot babe a tomato, she'll really be part tomato! Maybe they can find a way to re-grow eardrums after a really loud concert, too. Maybe they can design a person who will survive football practice better. (There were EIGHT deaths from heat exhaustion and other things in the last four weeks, eleven since the start of the year, woof!) Better yet, maybe we can find a way to turn off the Fanatic Gene that seems so dominant in some groups. But no, we need soldiers to fight for all these VERY IMPORTANT CAUSES that we keep inventing. Maybe I'll just settle for a reliable communications channel between men and women.

Maybe we are really contributing to one Big Soul and we need to design people to fit in society better, sort of like specialized cells in a super body. But better looking than Osmosis Jones. Or maybe the future isn't biological at all. It could be we are headed towards a new kind of intelligence, a machine intelligence, more tolerant of the cold of space and the corrosive effects of pollution. As long as we don't make it look like Haley Joel Osment. But certainly artificial intelligence requires another column.

I think I set a new record for questions asked this time out! And aren't you glad I didn't call this piece Send in The Clones? Anyway, I've got to go back into the Closet now to find my keys because I promised to drive the wife to the mall so she can spend her tax rebate. Hopefully not on designer jeans! I think I'll have a foot long sub combo while she's shopping. Thanks for reading and until next month the Closet is closed.



(C) 2001 - Rusty Pipes


Official Disclaimer: Every living creature has a right to life. From the (OW! I'M SAYIN' IT! GET THAT GUN OUTTA MY RIBS!!) From the smallest cell to the tallest deer. And them's good eatin'. The deer, not the cells. And... and... OW!!! OKAY! George W. Bush has been a... really... okeydoke resiOWWW!! PRESIDENT! Thank you and good night.