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My final point is: Would you knowingly end another human being's life to preserve your own life, that was not directly being threatened by that other human being?
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Of course. What do you think war is? Two countries disagree, so they arm people with guns and send them off to fight other people who they have not met and really have no reason to shoot at. Battlefield psychology is an amazing thing. You shoot people only because you think they will shoot at you, but they are shooting at you only because they think you are trying to shoot them. No one is directly threatened. Our insanity makes us think we are so we kill them before they can directly threaten us. There is a quote from
All Quiet on the Western Front that beautifully sums this up. I cannot do it justice.
Continuing on the war trend, that is eventually what cloning is leading toward. Everything is rooted in or eventually turns into an art of killing. The reason we stumble along with genetic research is to understand the human genome. Every little step brings us closer to understanding it. And what is the genome is but the end all API. It is a language of such utter simplicity which has had billions of years to evolve into the most complex system yet found. And the people who first discover how to write and modify it will have unimaginable power. Imagine its war implications, like custom tailored designer viruses. The point of war is not to kill, but to remove the enemies ability to retaliate. Killing usually does a good job of removing this ability, however. But, if you could create a genetic disease that, oh lets say, removes involuntary actions like breathing, heartbeat, blinking, etc, then how effective would an army be that has to stop and remember to breathe? That is the last thing on your mind in a foxhole. And that is just simple stuff. Once we learn more, we do much more interesting things. How about genetic Alzheimer's? If it could be done, we can make enemies forget why they are fighting, or better yet, make it so they forget which color uniforms they are supposed to shoot at. Unfortunately, I really do not think this is entirely impossible. The list goes on.
As for morality: They remove the forerunner of the brain when it is just a collection of cells. Modern medicine defines death by the lack of brainwaves since heartbeat can obviously be manipulated. So, if you remove the brain when it is a collection of cells, do you think those couple of dozen of cells are alive? That is the moral question. However, the fact is, the United States is the only one who follows the rules. I mean who really cared about the Geneva Convention except the US? If the US does not clone a human, other countries will. Simple as that. And if scientists go to third world countries to do research, then what keeps that information from falling into the wrong hands? Do you want the US to regulate it or would you rather see Mexico regulate it? The technology is upon us, and it will be done, if it has not been already through secret means.
Respectfully,
Demosthenes