Today I saw a story on the discovery channel website, and was a bit shocked. For me, a world traveler, and adventurer, journalist, and worldly being, to be as shocked as I am is a hard thing to accomplish.
I am usually accepting to most things and also quite open minded regarding some of the things others find odd or questionable. But today I was alarmed that there is a new form of testing that the British have embarked upon and it has me wondering if what they are doing is correct, or maybe I am just getting old.
The Brits are now doing embryonic gene splicing to have animal and human embryoes available for testing. Does this mean they are going to grow these creatures to full term to see what kind of new form of humanimality they can create ala Dr. Moreau? And yes, the word you saw in the previous sentence is what you saw, "humanimality," because I don't know what it can be called other wise, and for that matter, what their attempts are about either. I have coined the word humanimality specifically for you the reader to decide whether what the british are doing is correct or incorrect, morally or otherwise. I am all for stem cell research because it does help and will help humanity when the things being done there are finally accepted by the U.S. government and others as well, but the idea of cross-pollinating, making human animal hybrids, is a bit beyond my old mind and I wonder about this new practice.
Years ago, H.G. Wells wrote the story The Island Of Dr. Moreau, a tale of animal/human crossing for entertainment, but also as a caution that the world can go and do the wrong thing with the right tools. Moreau's world was littered with errors, both moral and physical, and it ended in madness and violence. From the beginning of Wells' story to the end, there was never the ideal world Moreau was trying to create and the creatures prior to the end suffered throughout for the sake of experimentation. I submit this commentary for your entertainment, but also for you the reader to decide about the moral implications of such experiments, when just the idea of stem cell research is still being questioned worldwide.
The story about which I have commented here is below:
April 2, 2008 -- For the first time in Britain, researchers at Newcastle University in northern England said Tuesday they had created human-animal hybrid embryos, amid a political row over a disputed embryo research bill in parliament.
According to the university, the research, which was first presented at a lecture in Tel Aviv on March 25, has yet to be published or verified, with a spokesman for the university saying that the institution "wouldn't claim it to be final at all."
The revelation comes with British MPs engaged in a fierce battle over the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill, which allows the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for medical research.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown's governing Labor Party conceded in March that its party lawmakers with moral or ethical objections would be allowed to vote against parts of the proposed legislation when it comes before parliament this year.
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READ MORE: Discovery Channel
Biography of T.P. Whorter -- by Johnson Turnbull
T.P. McWhorter was born Talbot Porter McWhorter in Jefferson City Missouri on July 23rd, 1941. He was born the fourth of seven children including two brothers and four sisters. McWhorter's father, Leopold, the first born son of Scottish immigrants, was a railroad man who travelled up and down Missouri train lines making repairs and handled upkeep for the lines throughout the state.
Leopold fought in WWI as a foot soldier for the United States from the beginning of the war to sometime in 1917. It was during that time he developed the skill of engineering to become a railroad technician. By the time T.P. was born, Leopold was not home much and McWhorter's mother mostly raised T.P. and rest of the the family and took care of their small farm. McWhorter's mother, Katerina, was born in the Ukraine and met Leopold after WWI in Philadelphia in 1925 when Leopold was working for the railroad there. Besides running the small farm where they raised a couple of cattle, chickens and some sheep for family food, Katerina worked as a washer woman who was brought the clothes of the local upper class residents of Jefferson City. She was well-loved around the town, and Leopold was the most respected train technician that ever worked on the line. Both died tragically during a weekend vacation when their climbing harness rope snapped while the two were shackled together on the sheer face of a small mountain in Colorado. They fell nearly a thousand feet before they hit the ground.
It was T.P.'s oldest sister, Griselda, who became the head of the family after news of the parents' demise reached the farm by telegram. T.P. was emotionally crushed at not being able to say goodbye to his mother whom he was always close to. He developed obsessive compulsive behavior including repetitive handwashing remeniscent of Howard Hughes, and the paranoid agoraphobic behavior that confined Jim Backus to his home for years. Writing became T.P.'s world where he lost himself in pages of unending fantasy. T.P.'s stories of imaginary worlds, characters that were riddled with obsessions and addictions, dominated the boy's life for seven years before he was forced from his home when Griselda sold the family farm out of selfishness to spend money on fancy clothes and shoes.
After the farm was sold, T.P. and his two brothers moved into a small house. His brothers supported him as he still remained an agoraphobic obsessive hand-washer, and soon developed other paranoid delusional behaviors that included a great fear of transforming into anything other than who he was already, which is symptomatic of the hand-washing compulsion, and also a hatred for odd numbers. It was only when his brother Utgrad came home drunk one night and fell asleep smoking and the house caught fire that snapped T.P. back to reality after he saved Utgrad and his other brother Remo from their imminent deaths. Like being splashed with water while in a daze, the fire was a wake-up call to T.P. and he immediately lost all of his compulsions as he embraced life to the fullest and became an adventurer, traveller, and writer. For the last several years, T.P. has been living on the island of Malta writing short stories and doing archeological digs trying to uncover the link between the Maltese people and the mythical island of Atlantis.