Professor Ronald Munson, bioethics expert and Columbia/Harvard consultant, debates human cloning with Art Bell after Advanced Cell Technology’s claims of therapeutic embryo cloning for diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes. Munson argues life begins at birth, not conception, supporting embryo destruction for medical progress but warns against eugenics risks—like creating subhuman laborers or genetically altered beings—while Bell speculates on designer humans or cloned historical figures. Stem cells could save 100,000 annually via off-the-shelf organs, though Munson doubts consciousness transfer from deceased brains into clones. Raelian commercial cloning services undermine public trust, raising ethical and scientific red flags amid rapid genetic advancements. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good afternoon, good morning, wherever you are in all of Chris' 24-time zones.
Called Krump, Nevada.
I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
And you know, I was just sitting here thinking, this has nothing to do with anything that is going to be done on the show tonight.
But just as I was listening to some bumper music, you know, I do that before the show begins because it gets blood going, because I love music.
And I looked at my board and my equipment, and I thought, you know, how come I'm not in stereo?
Now, I know.
The response to that might be, well, you have a talk show.
This is an interesting place because we're on so many affiliates now, you know, well above 500, that sometimes it's easier to look and try and see where you aren't rather than where you are.
You know, we used to put little pins in a map for everywhere we were.
And I finally said, let's do that again.
And then when you look at a map with all the little pins, you can see where you aren't.
And a place that I saw that we weren't was Corpus Christi, Texas.
Well, guess what?
We're there now.
Welcome to KKTX 1360 on the dial, 1,000 big ones.
Kent Cooper, the GM, Scott Johnson, the PD, thanks for getting us on in Corpus Christi.
I mean, that's actually, guys, how we got you.
I looked at a map and I said, where are we not?
And I looked at Corpus Christi and I thought, hey, you know, that's a pretty good size sound.
And I thought, well, you know, I can send this to Keith now and we can put it up.
But then I thought, no, selfishly, I'd much rather wait until airtime tomorrow night and spring it on you all.
So, about five minutes before airtime, I had Keith embargo it until then.
Somebody sent this to me, and I don't know what to make of it.
It is a video.
You're going to enjoy it.
It comes quite apparently from Japan.
And let me read you what was sent to me with this incredible video.
Kim from Lake Worth, Florida writes, and we've got his email address here, I found this incredible video that deals with a paranormal phenomenon.
It is described as coming from Japan and was filmed in a parking garage by a security camera.
Watch it closely.
Toward the end of the video, you will see a human figure in white walking along a very black wall.
It's quite distinct, folks.
It walks behind a parked car along the back wall.
And then the figure, which to me does not look solid in the first place, almost solid, I would say.
Almost solid.
Anyway, the figure then walks straight into the wall.
It disappears suddenly right into the garage wall.
Zoom in if you wish and look closely.
If it's genuine, it is indeed incredible.
It was aired apparently on Japanese TV.
Hence the various tags that appear on it.
I'm sure if you can find someone who can read Japanese, you can trace the video back to where it came from.
Oh, and there is a very good point.
Some of my listeners who are fluent in kanji, which is a lifelong pursuit, really, you know, there are labels in kanji.
Please translate for me and send me an email at artbell at mindspring.com or fast blast me the translation.
We would obviously like to know where this has come from, but I'm telling you, oh my God, folks.
This goes down as one of the best ones we've ever had.
A parking garage video, and there is no question about, in my mind, what I'm seeing.
In fact, let me watch it again myself.
Just to remind myself, when you first, you're going to have to watch this, by the way, more than once.
Once will not do.
The first time you're going to see exactly what it is you're looking for, just sort of at the last minute.
I mean, this is a static surveillance.
By God, there goes the ghost.
And there she goes, I'm saying, and right in walking right into the wall.
Right into the wall.
And as suggested, you can zoom in on this, and it's a mind-blower, an absolute mind-blower.
So selfishly, okay, now how to get to it?
Go to artbell.com, artbell.com, and then under what's new, that's up there at the top on the left-hand corner, what's new.
You click on it, and the very first option is going to say parking garage ghost in Japan.
Click on that, and then of course click on the video and watch it.
And I would like to get your comments, please.
Both blasted to me and sent in email.
And particularly if we can get a translation, I would certainly appreciate it.
But this is one of the top, maybe, certainly in the top five, and maybe the top three of any ghost anythings I've seen.
And this just happens to be a full motion video.
I'm telling you, this one will rock you back a little bit in your seat, my friend, so prepare for it.
I kind of held on to that.
Stereo?
Wouldn't it be neat to be in stereo?
I wonder how many millions of dollars in equipment they would have to change to put me in stereo.
And even the thunder is wonderful in stereo as you hear it going back and forth.
So somebody at the network needs to answer this question for me.
Is it possible?
Number one.
Number two, is it feasible?
I have mostly stereo stuff here.
My uplink would have to become stereo, I think.
I don't know how many other uplinks are in stereo or...
And of course, I'm exaggerating, but like up, down, up, down, up, down.
That's how many hops it takes to get to your radio station.
So I wonder how much of that chain, I would think most of the chain would be in stereo.
So it might be that a couple of simple uplink modifications, and I could be in stereo.
If that's all it's going to be, guys, I hope you're listening to me up there, then we have a project we're about to engage in.
unidentified
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Looking for the truth?
You'll find it on Coast2Coast AM with George Norrie.
When you look at what's going on around this planet, it's almost as if someone has got a playbook to try to control all these countries all of a sudden.
I've always said that not everything is a conspiracy, but a lot of it is.
You know, when you start looking into things, there's only a certain set of conclusions you can reach.
And unfortunately, this is one of them.
You know, it's very, very hard not to see things like that when you start looking at things in a larger picture.
Now we take you back to the night of January 3rd, 2002 on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
It will open your eyes, drop your jaw, and after you've watched it for about the third or fourth time, you're going, oh my God.
So any help with this would be appreciated.
Obviously, we want to know the original source and as much about it as is printed out on the screen.
But I could read some katagani when I lived in Japan, when I lived on Okinawa, and I got fairly good.
But kanji, I had only begun to even think of digesting that before I left the island, and that was a decade.
What's in the news?
Let's see, a deep freeze, bad weather, really bad weather, killing weather.
It's killed 10 people in the southern part of the U.S. And I'm sorry to say, none of this is going to be any sort of surprise.
The weather is going to get worse and worse and worse and worse and more violent.
And more of what happens is going to kill people all across America, all across the world.
And that is happening now in the South.
Tom Daschell thought he might have had another one, the majority leader.
Another anthrax letter, but they tested and it was no.
No, it wasn't.
Now they're not going to rebuild the World Trade Center towers, folks.
How do you feel about that?
The chairman of the group charged with rebuilding at the World Trade Center said Thursday it's unlikely, very unlikely the 110-story skyscrapers will replace the Twin Towers.
It just isn't going to happen again, and there are lots of reasons.
You know, safety concerns, the current economic slowdown, the fact that people might not want to work in skyscrapers anymore, particularly those.
I mean, just a lot of reasons.
They're not going to rebuild.
We are close to getting his nastiness in Afghanistan, not his true nastiness, but 1,500 Taliban fighters led by Mullah Mohammed Omar are kind of cornered right now, and apparently there are some negotiations going on right now for his surrender.
We'll just have to wait and see what happens.
Many in our nation's intelligence community are in great doubt that he will be taken alive.
Okay, I've got some more for you, but I think we should take some calls and begin open lines.
Anybody who can make it to the website and see this video, you need to do that and get comments to me quickly.
I like this video.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Oh, good evening, Art.
It's Larry from Fort Lauderdale.
Hello, Larry.
Usually the last call of the night, but tonight I got in early.
Well, I'm involved a little bit in video production, and I know that we're told absolutely never to segregate the two sides.
Why not?
Well, there's a reason for that.
It's a good idea because even when they start to talk over each other, you'd be able to hear them.
It's because you have to assume that the majority of the people have setups where they might be missing a channel.
People that channel it into, for instance, restaurants sometimes are notorious for hooking up just the left channel.
If you hear oldie stations, sometimes you'll hear just the words of the music.
Let them improve it.
Well, there's a way around it.
What you do is you mix it, like the pan knobs, you would put left channel instead of all the way over, maybe just over to like 11 o'clock, and the right side would be over until like 2 o'clock.
You know, if I happen to be, if I were in stereo and somebody is too lazy to hook up two channels and too bad, when they realize they're hearing half a debate, then they can go down and hook up the other channel.
Well, you know, people have an idea of what living on an island is like, and it's really not...
Yeah, because, you know, people have an idea that living here is, you know, what it's like when you come on vacation, but the reality of it is you deal with a lot of, like, getting a phone installed, you know what I mean, takes weeks.
Standing at the post office waiting for a package.
Are the Virgin Islands expensive, for example, as expensive as Hawaii to live in?
unidentified
You know, I was in Hawaii a few years ago, and that's a beautiful place, too.
I would say comparable.
I mean, St. John, for example, you're looking, if you wanted to rent a house for a year and you wanted to get something that was relatively nice, you're looking at, you know, $2,000 a month, you know.
And that's really not going to get you, you know, that's really not going to get you the top of the line.
But somebody like you are, you could just buy the whole island.
People have such inflated ideas of, believe me, so inflated it's ridiculous.
Yeah, but you know, I never have focused on money in any of my talks with this network, and that's probably my own fault.
I never have I've just never been interested.
So you would be really shocked.
unidentified
That's why we love you All right.
Well keep the beach warm for me will you well before I go I just wanted to mention one quick thing I wanted to I wanted to I wanted to actually challenge a decision you've made go ahead I I really think that you know and I'm obviously not trying to tell you what to do but which means you probably are but well I'm going to use my I'm going to use sort of a backdoor way of doing it but I want you to really think twice about your decision about not doing these mass consciousness experiments.
I think let me just get this out.
I think that you're assuming that what you the position that you have been sort of put in throughout your entire life could possibly be something that could revolutionize just the way people perceive how.
Have you guys any idea how good this song sounds in stereo?
Well, you see, I have stereo in my headphones.
I'm hearing it in stereo.
And it seems to me that you perhaps could be too.
Wouldn't make any difference to those who don't broadcast the stereo, which is all combined, right?
But the people who could broadcast the stereo, they'd get, well, for example, this song.
You hear the phasing in it?
You ought to hear what that does across channels.
Really slick stuff.
Well, we're going back to our friend in Paradise about the mass consciousness experiments.
In a moment.
unidentified
In a moment.
now we take you back to the night of january third two thousand two on art bell somewhere in time Well, we're beginning to get some comments I see on the ghost video.
Paul says, hey, I'm a security camera system guy, Art.
The image is spooky.
Not image burn-in.
Not a faint passerby.
Love it.
Let's see.
Who else have we got here?
Sweet Jenny just says, wow.
And so forth and so on.
These look like pretty good comments generally.
this is a one of the one of the better ghost videos i've ever seen so if you get an opportunity Counting it down until I can tell you about it.
This is a good ghost video.
I've been on a real ghost kick, you know, life after death thing lately.
Oh, by the way, coming up in this next hour, we have a real serious, credentialed expert on the subject of cloning and the ethics of cloning and all the rest of it.
So now, you think I'm making some kind of tragic mistake by not continuing these experiments, and you were about to say why.
unidentified
Well, I wouldn't say it's a tragic mistake.
I think you are smart in not doing it the way it has been done.
But I have been sitting here trying to rack my brain and thinking about the gentleman you had on from who did the experiments at Princeton.
But anyway, it just seems to me, Art, and you don't need me to tell you this, but you're in a position that few people are.
Not only are you in that position, but you're in a position where you could literally, if it's done the right way scientifically, by teaming up with somebody like him or somebody who has science's, you know, a wink or whatever.
Could actually do something to change the way people perceive reality.
Could change the way people are locked into their little worlds of perceiving the world strictly in terms of a material, tactically manipulated universe.
I mean, you could be right, but the expert that you referred to also agreed with me that I was wise to be especially cautious about proceeding with this.
He felt exactly the same way that I feel.
And he is the expert.
Now, what do you say to that?
unidentified
I say you're absolutely right.
And he's absolutely right.
The way it was currently doing it, you're right.
It's like taking a buckshot and trying to hit a feather.
You're absolutely right.
The way it was done, it proved not only to whoever was in the science community listening, but it proved to yourself that there's something there.
So you're right.
You've taken the first step to actually say, yeah, this is a phenomenon that can be manipulated.
Proceeding with this at all, under any circumstances, seems to me to be a really dicey, chancy thing to do.
Because I have no idea what we're doing.
And no matter what you say, you don't really either.
And maybe it is a matter for science.
And maybe it's a matter that should be discovered more cautiously and proceeded with more cautiously at this level where we're participating with millions of people, millions of people and minds concentrating on a single thing, or enough of them, so that if this is a force, it's obviously an exceptionally strong force.
And anything at this, it just seems to me scientifically, you don't begin at this level.
You begin with smaller groups if you're smart.
Because you could just make all kinds of great big tragic errors.
And I was just wondering if anyone else out there, you know, who's in the arts or with high into creativity and working on that, if they've had the same thing.
Well, it demands a great deal of frontal lobe work.
unidentified
Yeah, I've also noticed that while playing on the classical musician, while playing the music, that I actually feel the connection in the front with when I'm playing.
I mean, I've had so many that I believe it's going on.
Why are they doing it?
What are the real motivations?
I don't know, because when you talk to abductees, you're probably talking to somebody who, you know, I don't want to say brainwashed in the negative and make it a negative connotation, but there's every possibility that their present attitude about their abduction is affected by something done to them during that abduction.
Well, if you view the end of the Mayan calendar as the end of time, the end of everything that is, then I would say less time to get our affairs in order.
There are many people who dispute dates, you know, dating, the dating that has gone on with regard to what year this is even right now.
We're going to talk about cloning and a lot of other things.
The ethics of cloning and stem cells will certainly touch on that.
And we've got a real expert coming up for you.
It was irresistible after stories like this began popping up.
American scientists claimed yesterday, now this was dated 25 November.
American scientists claimed yesterday to have cloned the first human embryo, spreading deep alarm among pro-life groups.
If the experiments carried out by the Advanced Cell Technology, bioadvanced cell technology, one of America's leading biotechnology companies, are confirmed.
It marks a major development in genetic research.
The breakthrough came during research aimed at finding new treatments for diseases like Parkinson's and diabetes.
The company has no plans to use cloned embryos to actually create babies.
Instead, it wants to exploit the unspecialized stem cells found in newly conceived embryos for a host of new medical treatments.
Now, that's of course one side of it.
The other side is there have been announcements, you may have heard them already, of scientists in this country who are saying if the U.S. outlaws cloning, they will immediately transfer their operations to Europe.
Moreover, they will be willing to, for a price, clone people in the United States over there and then have the babies sent here.
So we have been searching for somebody to speak on the subject of cloning and more, and we found a Professor Ronald Munson.
I'll tell you more about him in a moment.
unidentified
he's coming right up well Weird stories on the radio.
Must be Coast to Coast A.M. with George Norrie.
You know, when I started doing this radio program, Jesse, half of the subjects I was really into, the paranormal, the unusual, the ghosts, and things like that.
The conspiracy stories, you know, I was a little weary about these, other than the Kennedy assassination.
And all of a sudden, I woke up.
I simply woke up.
Is that what happened with you two?
Yeah, that's when I really started to say, what is going on here?
And I started to truly then investigate 9-11.
And today, I don't believe the government story of 9-11.
Here's the three options.
Either we knew about it and allowed it to happen, or we knew about it and participated in it, or these were the dumbest buffoons that could have ever been in charge of our country who could have all this pre-information.
And I started to think they knew it was going to happen.
They either are part of it or they allowed it to.
There's no doubt in my mind.
Now we take you back to the night of January 3rd, 2002 on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Ronald Munson is a professor of the Philosophy of Science and Medicine at University of Missouri St. Louis.
He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, was a postdoctoral fellow in biology at Harvard, taught at Columbia, has been a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, Harvard Medical School, John Hopkins Medical School, my my.
His expertise is in bioethics.
His most recent book, you're going to love these titles, is Raising the Dead, Social and Ethical Issues in Organ Transplantation, published or by Oxford University Press now available at bookstores and at Amazon.com of course at a deep discount no doubt raising the dead let's see his book intervention and reflection basic issues in medical ethics
now in its sixth edition, is the most widely used medical ethics text in the United States.
Wow!
His other technical books include Reasoning in Medicine, The Way of Words, Man and Nature, Philosophical Issues in Biology, Elements of Reasoning, Third Edition, and Basics of Reasoning.
Holy moly!
He is medical ethicist for the National Institutes of Health,
washington university medical school's human subject committee a consultant medical ethicist to the national cancer institute has acted as a source on bioethics has been quoted in among others the new york times washington post u.s news and world report st. Louis Post-Dispatch Science Digest Smithsonian Magazine consulted on the ethical aspects of gene therapy for Japanese national television he's also written
novels.
One called Nothing Human, Fan Mail, and Night Vision.
Well, I try to bring the same techniques of fiction to writing of nonfiction, which makes things a little easier for the reader and more interesting for the writer.
I read a little bit of the story that slammed me and a lot of other people here recently, the first cloned human embryo.
I guess people have a sort of a sense, you know, not an educated medical sense, but they have a sense that this is big news, you know, perhaps really big news in the beginning of a big change in the world.
And if I am asked why, I would focus for one thing on the kind of cloning that you referred to, the therapeutic aspect of cloning, not the reproductive aspect of cloning.
In other words, if, and this is obviously more of a social ethical question, but if it's possible for rich people, people with great resources and usually great egos to go with those resources, if they want a clone of themselves, it would be a pretty big ego item.
And there will be people who will be willing to pay for that and will, in fact, do so.
In fact, they're lining up right now.
So if there's money and buyers, there's going to be sellers.
And I have to say that in favor of what you say is that cloning is not like atomic energy.
It's not necessary to have big machines, lots of equipment in order to do cloning.
What's most important is the know-how, the technological know-how, so that if we could assume that that technology was understood, then I think you are right.
Cloning is inevitable in that sense.
It is inevitable.
But let me tell you what I worry about.
What I worry about is not cloning for reproductive purposes.
I think that down the road that may happen.
But what I'm afraid of is that people will be so worried about the downside of reproductive cloning that they will deprive us of the opportunities afforded by therapeutic cloning.
there if you don't even go to full cloning there are certainly there's a question There's a basic question there which I think rarely gets discussed despite all of the discussion of all the publicity of the many articles about stem cells.
I think very rarely do people come down to what is the single most important issue and it is the sticking place for those who object to creating embryos for stem cells.
All right, let me be a professor for just a moment.
We all know that when reproduction takes place with humans, there's a sperm that meets an egg, and as soon as that happened, this triggers a series of events in which after a few days, a ball of cells is formed, 300 to 500 cells.
Well, on the inside of that little ball of cells is a little bump.
And that little bump consists of embryonic stem cells.
And those embryonic stem cells have the capacity to produce all the cells in our body.
Once the cells, once the stem cells begin to not only divide, but to develop, they develop into certain other specialized cells, the cells that make up the brain, the cells that make up the eye.
Well, is this material instructed to become these individual things, or within a human embryo stem cell stash, are there specialized stem cells that do become the brain, that then become the heart?
They're very complicated chemical messages that we don't know.
We don't know this orchestrated symphony of chemical messages that directs the stem cells to form this tissue and that tissue and to go forward from that point.
That's what is so important about stem cell research.
It's to put us on the road to understanding what these stem cells can do and how they do it.
That's why I said I'm so worried that we will not be going down that road because of the fears of going down another road, which actually I don't think that anyone seriously wants to go down, although I don't deny that you're right to be concerned that indeed that you're right, that there are people whose ego is so great...
In fact, one question I meant to ask you, if you were to guess, I mean, after all, Professor, there are private labs all over the world, I'm sure, well financed in some parts of the world, and it's possible, could it be possible it's already been done?
Now, if you say, is it possible someone has tried it, it could be.
It could be that someone has tried it.
But I think that our best scientists don't know how to do it.
So I think it's very unlikely that someone who is stuck away in some, say, very remote, imaginary South American country with a well-equipped lab is going to be able to pull off what our best scientists say they can't do.
Right, but I'm just asking, generally, you are certainly familiar with scientists and how they proceed.
If they began to get these divisions, and that could be just down the road, would you think the majority of them, maybe I can rephrase it and get an answer, majority of them would stop realizing what they're doing, or would they proceed with the experiment?
This might surprise you, but I think they would stop.
I am always impressed by how seriously responsible medical scientists are.
I think that it's possible to think of scientists quite often in this kind of wild science fiction way in which they are so crazed with it, are so ego-driven that they will do virtually anything to satisfy their curiosity.
I know what you're talking about, and there's still some great speculation.
There's speculation about whether the cells in a cloned organism are going to have, as it were, the memory of their original organism, and they're going to be that old too.
I saw you from my window My heart seems to be Gonna sit by your doorstep Your heart listening to Arc Bell somewhere in time on Premiere Radio Networks.
Tonight, an oncore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 3rd, 2002.
I think that we're now faced with a big problem with stem cell research.
It's such a hot political issue that we really don't know whether it's going to be adequately funded.
As I think you and all your listeners know, this is a topic that has broken the ranks of those who are politically conservative on the abortion topic, because there are those who favor stem cell research who would otherwise oppose abortion or destroying embryos because they see what it promises.
And I think that we can, in the very near future, have to settle this issue as to whether we are going to get on the stem cell bus or whether we're going to be left behind.
So far as we know now, the only way we can get stem cells is from the destruction of human embryos.
And by human embryos, I mean cell that has been fertilized and has begun to divide in the way that I talked earlier, with the stem cells being that little group on the inside.
Now the only way we can get those out is to destroy that embryo.
Well my question then would be, ideally, if you were able to do it, how far would you let the embryo develop to get the, to harvest the best stem cells?
In fact if you go too far then the stem cells themselves begin to differentiate.
They begin to lose their plasticity.
They begin to have their fate determined and they cannot be used then in the same way that we imagine stem cell engineering developing, taking these cells and allowing them, guiding them to develop along various pathways to form any sorts of tissue whatsoever.
And I tell you not only this, not only could you grow a new heart, for example, but you could grow a replacement of your own heart.
You would not have to, if, again, if stem cell technology were perfected, you could make use of your own genetic material to grow a heart that would replace your heart.
This some have suggested, and this is where it becomes extremely speculative, no one knows how long we could last if we made use of stem cells to continue renew organs, to make the kinds of replacements, not just replacements that removing one and substituting another, but a kind of continuous renewal.
What if indeed we could improve our heart's performance by injections of stem cells that would repair damaged tissues and take the place of tissues that have worn out through use or through abuse of some sort?
We don't know then what the limits of life might be.
So longevity research would be very much affected by stem cell technology.
This would be another aspect of regenerative medicine.
But that, of course, is one that's even in the more distant future.
Again, returning to this for a second, what would the most strident critics of stem cell research tend to screech and scream about why we ought not be doing it?
Everything is there if you mean all the information is there.
That's certainly true.
But that doesn't mean that all the stages of development have taken place.
Now, the reason I think it's easier to separate this issue from the abortion issue for most people is this.
A 300-cell group clump is, I think, in no one's view, at least, well, I won't say no one's view, is clearly distinct, in my view at least, from a developing fetus, even one that's, say, two weeks old.
Consequently, what's the difference between a fertilized egg that's developed for five days and the fetus that's developed into a human-like being?
Well, I think that there's a significant difference in those that most people would recognize.
Now, when I say most people, I'm well aware of the fact that there are large groups of people who are socially religious conservative, and they do regard life as beginning at birth, and I don't disagree that life begins at birth.
Where I disagree is to regard that fertilized egg as having the same status as a human being.
If you take your right hand and you put it on your front of your head and then you move it to the back of your head, I don't think you'll have any trouble.
But if I say, okay, now where does the back of your head end and the front of your head begin, I think you're going to get into trouble there.
Now, all I'm saying in this particular case, and I wouldn't say I know how to resolve all these questions, but all I'm saying here is fertilized egg, I think, is sufficiently different from a fetus that even those who can oppose abortion can see that there is a significant difference here.
And even though I don't know where to draw the line when it gets to be obscure, I at least know both ends of the line.
But I do think that for those who are not completely committed to the notion that at the moment of conception an embryo is the equivalent of any other human being in the world, I think for anyone who is not committed to that position, that it's reasonable to believe that they will see that the embryo could be destroyed for a serious reason.
And that serious reason is to do good, to treat diseases that are now untreatable, to save lives which are otherwise going to be lost, to help people who otherwise are helpless.
This is potentially a tool of such power that if we refuse to employ it, we will, I think, be regarded by future generations as having made a very serious moral mistake that we will have turned our backs on something that will allow us to prevent and
They will move in the direction of developing stem cell technology.
It will not develop there as fast as it would if we were participants.
Because remember, this country, a powerhouse scientifically.
We have the money, we have the physical resources, and more than that, we have the intellectual resources to turn and focus on problems and solve those problems faster than any other nation in the world can.
I think that it's a good sign that the strong traditional coalition opposed to abortion has divided on this topic.
I think that that's a positive sign.
I think that in the future, it's a question as to whether the message can be adequately conveyed to the American people what the issues are and the advantages of developing stem cell technology is.
And I think that discussions such as this are crucial for providing that kind of information.
Now, I know that there will be people who will forever disagree with this because they will see what lies at the base of it is, in their view, an evil.
And they will not endorse something that exploits what they consider to be evil.
And I respect that point of view.
But my respect for that point of view doesn't mean that I have to either accept it myself, nor, I think, does it mean that we have to make it into public policy.
We can respect people's views without using those views as the foundation for our laws.
We're talking about cloning and stem cells, stem cell research and the direction everything is going to go and what the possibilities are.
And there are so many questions.
I'm going to get to a few more of them in just a moment.
Stay right where you are.
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Looking for the truth?
You'll find it on Coast2Coast AM with George Norrie.
When you look at what's going on around this planet, it's almost as if someone has got a playbook to try to control all these countries all of a sudden.
I've always said that not everything is a conspiracy, but a lot of it is.
You know, when you start looking into things, there's only a certain set of conclusions you can reach.
And unfortunately, this is one of them.
You know, it's very, very hard not to see things like that when you start looking at things in a larger picture.
Now we take you back to the night of January 3rd, 2002, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
And, okay, Professor, what about the concept of a better human being?
In other words, as we learn more, I guess we've mapped the genome now, and here we are about to, or beginning to fiddle with stem cells and all sorts of interesting things that we're doing.
A lot of them certainly would lead to the possibility of actually improving the breed.
There are people who believe that, and believe it or not, really they believe this, that disease is part of the troubled aspect of life that God intended for man to live.
Well, that sort of line of reasoning, I think, is one of those dangerous lines of reasoning that leads us to the conclusion that whatever happens is something that we should accept.
No, I think those people, if they hold this view, they themselves act against it.
They wash their hands, they take medicines when they're sick, they take care of themselves to avoid diseases.
They don't really accept whatever comes along.
They accept responsibility.
Now, responsibility, I think, is a crucial concept whenever you talk about what we are going to do genetically.
Let me tell you why that is.
We don't hold people responsible for things they can't help.
We don't condemn people for having brown hair.
We shouldn't condemn them for having brown skin because these are things that people can't change.
Similarly, we don't hold anybody responsible for earthquakes.
The Northridge earthquake took place.
Who was responsible?
The answer is nobody was responsible because we have responsibility only if we can exercise control.
Now, when it comes to genetics, we can now exercise control.
Now, what that means is here is an area in which before we had no responsibilities, and now we've acquired them.
So it's not a question any longer of do we have responsibilities.
The question now becomes, what are we going to do?
It is a two-edged sword, but I think if we don't take advantage, if we don't develop those powers that we have, once again, here is a case in which we lose the opportunity to cure diseases that are life-destroying, even if they are not themselves fatal.
Or at least yourself and neighbors in 250,000 years of contamination.
But at least genetics has this going for it.
First of all, we have animals.
We can perfect techniques on animals.
And yes, it's true that humans are not identical with animals and so on.
But at least we can know, you know, as you point out, the dangers of cloning.
One of the dangers of cloning, we already know why we don't want to try it with humans right now.
We know how many disasters were associated with producing cloned animals, and we're not willing to take the risk of producing that many dead or deformed babies in order to perhaps get one cloned.
But I mean, it would be possible, for example, to design humans that could live, designer humans that could live in other environments, maybe even underwater, maybe in climates like the one that exists on Mars right now or some other planet.
In other words, create a human being with different It is possible to do that.
But you know, we could also produce ones that are not so good.
We could go around and using genetic technology, we could systematically alter the brains of newly born children so that the result would be that we would create a race of subhumans, which we could then use to do the labors of the world.
That's a potential.
That's a possibility.
So to talk about genetics is to talk about this whole range of possibilities.
To create a human being who would be, or let's not even use the word human, to create a creature similar to a human, but who would be pleased and happy to be nothing but a slave.
I know that when people who can't afford it get a fatal disease, they go to Mexico, they go to Switzerland, they go to various countries where procedures are being done that are far from approval by our FDA process.
They will spend whatever they have to go wherever they have to go to get whatever might have some chance of curing them of rather imminent demise.
And so if people will do that, then I suppose if these things cannot be done here and they can be done elsewhere, they'll be done, period.
All right, so then when you see a headline that says that this scientist or that scientist is saying publicly that if it's outlawed here, they're just going to take it overseas, they're going to allow designer babies, they're going to take orders, they're going to do this whether we like it or not, whether it's done here or elsewhere.
When you see those kinds of headlines, you must go, oh my God, we're dead.
We're never going to get anywhere with this, not with this kind of thing.
It does worry me when I see these kinds of threats.
And it worries me, too, that we will be cut out of this, in effect, race, a race for a technology that is so new and is so promising that if we don't have it, we are going to suffer from it.
You know, we as individuals, it's a technology that we as individuals probably, we're not going to get benefits from it, but our children will get benefits from it.
Well, if it's within our range to create, let us say, a human with an IQ three times what yours is right now, then there will be certain groups that will inevitably proceed with that sort of thing.
And I'm thinking, for example, of our government, a bunch of people running around with those kinds of IQs.
My gosh, they could just do all kinds of things that would keep the United States at the forefront of all technology.
But let's remember to keep in perspective the fact that this is still the most science fiction-laden scenario we could come up with.
Because keep in mind, we really don't know what the genetic basis for intelligence is.
And indeed, we're not even sure what intelligence is.
So it's going a bit far to say, what if there were someone three or four times as intelligent as someone else?
We know that there are certain traits, that those traits are associated with intelligence.
Perhaps linguistic skill is one of them.
And maybe in the not-too-distant future, if we are out to improve human beings, we might take a chance on, say, trying to produce a child with this extra linguistic capacity or this extra musical ability.
Here again, perfect pitch is a gene that seems to run in families.
It seems then that it probably has a genetic basis, and maybe we could find that.
Many of you have heard me interview some of our nation's best theoretical physicists.
They're working on all kinds of interesting things, but Einstein didn't quite get done like the theory of everything.
Well, somebody you know with an IQ, say three or four times or five or ten times that of the professor, might knock off that one-inch equation in about ten minutes.
What would that mean to the human race?
uh...
unidentified
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Now we take you back to the night of January 3rd, 2002, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Art Bell Economically, in America, for the most part, we live in a land of supply and demand, supply and demand, supply and demand.
If there is a demand for something, there's going to be a supply for it, no matter what, right?
Drugs, things that make you feel better, things that make you that alter your reality, supply and demand, supply and demand.
That rules just about everything.
And Ramona in Fort Worth, Texas, not my Ramona, but another one, fast blessed me, America does not believe in slaves' art.
Then America would not be free.
But I'll tell you an interesting story, Professor.
One night, just for the fun of it, I asked this exact question, and that was that if you could purchase a being who was designer-made to do life's difficult work, wash dishes, clean the house, do whatever, the jobs that we don't want to do anymore.
You know, like Dow, for example, we allow a lot of people to come up to the southern border of our country in order to do jobs we really don't want to do, like go out to the field and pick corn, that kind of thing.
I asked these people, would you buy such a being?
Would you own such a being?
And easily, 80% of them said, you betcha.
When I pinned them down and they were honest, they said, you bet.
I think that there are people, though, when they would get beyond the immediate appeal of that, would see that what they were doing was something that deep down they would object to.
They would be taking someone who would be a human and creating them in a way that would be less than human, condemning such a person to a kind of life that was indeed subhuman.
Do you think that we have the power now to do this?
Do you think that it would be right for someone who said, you know, I would really like to have a child, but I'm afraid my child is going to be not sufficiently dependent on me?
And so we make use of the rather crude technology that it takes to produce a child that is, say, physically deficient in some fashion.
So this child is not going to go away and leave us.
We could do that, but what would be the objection?
The objection to that is, I think, that we would not be, it's not a question of happiness, we would not be according that child a status as a human being of equal worth.
Now, I've talked before, and you know the views on embryos, that I don't think they're people, but at the same time, I think it's a moral mistake to create creatures who are less than human.
Now, I don't think the example you gave is a good one.
You said to make the child more dependent by giving it some sort of physical abnormality.
That's not quite the same moral argument as creating a creature who would not have the same wants and needs and cares and desires and all the rest of it as a normal human being minus a physical disability.
These creatures would live and be happy to do what they're doing.
The mistake, I believe, would be that we would have someone who would be basically a human being, who would not be treated as a human being.
And it doesn't really matter that the person would be happy being that.
Some people are quite happy because they are ignorant of possibilities, and we can exploit those possibilities, but we consider it wrong to take advantage of ignorance.
So too, I think it would be wrong to create sub-humans, even if they were happy in their work and they were completely devoted to us, because we would have done what was not necessary.
We, instead of guaranteeing them an equal life, a life equal to ours, we would have created them in a way in which they were definitely not equal.
I'm not exactly sure that it's the same argument as taking somebody who is inherently equal, given the opportunity, and not allowing them to be equal by law or social pressure or whatever.
That's one argument, but another is actually having a creature that is not equal, period.
Now, if we happened upon another science fiction scenario, if we happened on the hidden valley in which there was a group of creatures that resembled this, then I think that our obligations to them would be quite different.
But if we deliberately set out to create such a group, there I think that's what the difference is, because in that case, we are making use of our powers to produce something that is human and yet is not of equal worth.
It's equal moral worth, but we have arranged the world so that these creatures have built in handicaps.
Lisa in Seattle, I get these neat computer questions while I'm doing the program, does bring up something I'd like to ask about.
She says she heard that a man has recently patented a process involving taking animal DNA and interfacing it with human, thus creating a whole new race in effect.
I don't know that anyone has created another race.
But it's not at all unusual to produce what are known as transgenic animals.
The most prominent one of those, I suppose, are the, and it may be that this is what she has in mind, is the attempt to breed pigs that have had their DNA altered so that their organs will be compatible with human organs.
But the pig case is a very interesting case, because you know, despite the fact that there's been a lot of talk about transgenic animals, pigs in particular, this really hasn't worked.
People have worked very hard to get transplantable organs out of pigs by tinkering with the genetic code of the pig, and it has not worked.
And Lisa is right.
There are dangers there, but they're not the dangers, I think, that she's worried about, about blurring about the species boundary.
The dangers are more real than that because pigs have got viruses that are intertwined in their DNA.
And all of a sudden, some new DNA combination might suddenly, when it never would do it before, cause one of those nasty little things to species jump and just be real comfortable with a human as a host suddenly, right?
We may be quite unintentionally taking a risk of creating a disease like AIDS.
AIDS apparently originated, the HIV virus apparently jumped the species at one time and then mutated and spread in the human population.
It just may happen that if we make use of animal organs, that the kind of viruses that are intertwined in the pig DNA may mix up with human DNA and recombine in a way that will produce some entirely new virus that is lethal to us.
And I don't want to sound as though I'm completely pessimistic about this, but at least it's potentially possible it could be a devastating plague.
It's happened before in the history of the world.
It's happened in the last few decades of our world.
If stem cell research is really, really controversial right now in America, then with the danger you just outlined, why isn't this research as controversial and as in danger?
I think in part because we have only recently realized the potential danger.
And for so long now, there has been great excitement about the potential for using animal organs that I can think myself, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, there was a similar excitement.
It seemed as though the use of animal organs for transplants was right around the corner.
Now we've crossed several, or we've gone around several corners since that time, and we don't have them yet, because this has turned out to be an extremely difficult problem that scientists have not been successful to overcome, succeeded in overcoming.
Let me tell you something interesting about this, and I think everybody would find this interesting.
It's a very tiny scientific point, but it makes the whole pig organ transplant question very interesting.
There is a little cell marker, a little bit of protein on the surface of pig cells, and once an organ is put into a human being, that marker is recognized by our immune system and attacked.
And it will reduce that organ to a blackened, pulpy mass, typically in a matter of minutes or an hour.
I don't know that it's pretty high, but it's one of those things in which you have to say the probability is very low, but if it happens, it's very important.
As you say, the oops factor is not highly probable, But it's such a big oops that maybe we don't want to take that risk.
Even in the creation, even in stem cell research and the creation of organs, we don't know, since we haven't done it yet, we don't know the full downside to doing it, right?
Well, this is a fascinating new science, and it's a rare opportunity for you to ask a man with the credentials of Professor Munson a question about it.
That's exactly what we're going to do through this next hour.
Stay right where you are.
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Weird stories on the radio?
Must be Coast of Coast AM with George Norrie.
You know, when I started doing this radio program, Jesse, half of the subjects I was really into, the paranormal, the unusual, ghosts, and things like that.
The conspiracy stories, you know, I was a little weary about these, other than the Kennedy assassination.
And all of a sudden, I woke up.
I simply woke up.
Is that what happened with you two?
Yeah, that's when I really started to say, what is going on here?
And I started to truly then investigate 9-11.
And today, I don't believe the government story of 9-11.
Here's the three options.
Either we knew about it and allowed it to happen, or we knew about it and participated in it, or these were the dumbest buffoons that could have ever been in charge of our country who could have all this free information.
And I started to think they knew it was going to happen.
They either are part of it or they allowed it to.
There's no doubt in my mind.
You're listening to Arc Bell somewhere in time on Premiere Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 3, 2002.
Coast to Coast AM Professor Munson, I may have some news for you.
I've got this from several sources now, all of them sent from different places.
Christine in Sorrento, B.C., British Columbia, says, on the news tonight, the same scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep Has now cloned five piglets that they want to use for human implantation experiments.
And the dangers we talked about, whether there are viruses there that we can't get rid of and how much risk they pose, is still a possibility to be discussed.
And I, quite frankly, think that we ought to discuss it as a society.
Well, let me ask about your literal title before we go to the phones here.
Yes, Raising the Dead.
Well, Gee Wiz, it seems like if you could clone, and we may not be many years away from cloning for sure, or it may be here now, just about now, you could take cells from the dead, could you not?
If in fact that is true, then would it not, again, benefit somebody with the ego to do it, to have their cells preserved as you would hamburger meat in the freezer?
That's only an assumption because we don't know what produces intelligence.
Surely it must have something to do with the genetic inheritance, but we don't know exactly what that is.
So he may just be an ordinary bright guy.
But he may not be the kind of world-class genius that we associate with the name.
We just don't know.
As I tell people, look, imagine that you could, imagine you're a tape, and you erase yourself, all your memories, back to your babyhood, and then the tape begins to unwind again.
It begins to pick up all those noises and sounds, and it begins to reform your personality.
Well, it'd be very unlikely you're going to end up the same person.
Why?
Because all the factors in the environment are going to be different.
And we don't even know what those factors are.
I mean, we can imagine some of them, but we don't know exactly what shapes people's personality, provides their motivation, provides them with an emotional motivation.
Okay, okay, but still, all that said, there is a pretty fair chance, isn't there, that if Einstein were cloned, you would very possibly end up with a world-class thinker.
Well, first I have to preface what I say by saying I'm not a scientist, so anything I should say, you have to take with a grain of salt.
But you're right that the DNA that is in the mitochondria, which provides cells with energy, the maternal, I assume you're asking about the maternal mitochondria, that's a little bit of genetic information that is not carried in the nuclear DNA.
The result of that is that even a cloned organism, if it involves replacing the nucleus by taking the nucleus from another cell and putting it in the egg, is still going to have that additional mitochondrial DNA there.
So there will be that little bit of information that is not the same.
So what happens to that?
Well, so far as I know, no one knows the answer to that question.
But you're right.
It's not exactly the same.
unidentified
Wouldn't a cloned person without the mitochondria have a drastic difference in personality?
We can see right now that there are scientific establishments all over the world that are working in the whole area of genetics in general and of stem cells in particular and with cloning as in the middle.
But that question is a very good question, and it's one that is, as I say, so far as I know, not yet answered.
Well, let me say that, just as I just said I'm not a scientist, I have to say I'm not a theologian either.
So I really don't know how to answer a theological question along those lines.
My version of my answer would be my answer, and I don't speak with any particular authority.
But my general view of that is that in these matters, we don't know what God wants us to do or doesn't want us to do.
I think that we have to guide ourselves by principles, and our principles are ones that say basically don't do anything that causes harm to people.
That single principle is one I think that all religions accept, and it's one that I think that you would find is a principle that's almost itself enough to guide scientific inquiry and preserve us from some of its worst, the nightmare scenarios.
Isn't there also another danger in proceeding with, for example, a better human being one way or the other, perhaps even in many, many, many ways of creating a superhuman?
My goodness, we could almost have, we could have eyes that would look in spectrums that go beyond what we can see right now.
And there might be many advantages in seeing in higher spectrums, all kinds of things.
But, you know, if we created a better human, then there's always a danger that they would regard us as, perhaps we would regard the slaves we were talking about a little while ago.
Regarding the 80% of the people of your listeners that are dreaming of clones to hold a lawn and do the laundry, do you not think, Professor, that in North America anyway, we're sufficiently evolved that something like that could never happen?
I mean, if you do make a class of unequal people and they don't have the necessary intelligence themselves to request that their intelligence be upped in the same way that it was downed in the first place, then you'd have a whole bunch of clone advocates running around doing it for them?
I agree with you, but I hope that we have the kind of acknowledgments of basic moral principles that would assure us that this is not the sort of thing that would happen, that it would be wrong, that we would recognize that it was wrong, that we would discourage it in every way possible, and that we would, were anyone to try it, we would take steps to prevent it.
So I agree with you on that, certainly.
Not every possibility that can be exploited is one that ought to be exploited.
Well, the clones themselves wouldn't object at all, but she was saying the human movement, the clone advocate society or whatever would be born to stop all of this would be a strong one, just like the right-to-life people.
They'd be every bit as passionate, if not more so.
well all my gosh in favor of it i can i can tell you to have a being who would go uh...
not be interested in furthering itself or what its rights are it would simply be made happy at center of happiness would be pleasing human beings doing dishes doing laundry doing Is that an argument?
Well, I'm afraid that we would then have to talk about what would they be.
I'm not sure they wouldn't be human beings.
I think that we would recognize that if they were not human beings, they were sufficiently close that we would, as a sign moral philosophy, they have an interest, namely, their interest is not to be treated in ways that we would treat subhumans that we have created in ways to be subservient, which is to say, we would want to give them the same rights that we have.
Well, at what percentage of human, full human DNA, do your moral objections begin, considering that there's a 2% difference between the highest primate and humans?
And indeed, I would say that we still haven't dealt with the problems of our neighboring species, which some people say are sibling species, like the chimps.
You know, of course, they're valuable because simply because they are so close to us, so experiments done on them yield the best sort of information that would be short of experimenting on human beings.
The subject is cloning and stem cells and where all of this science is going and what we're doing with it and what we might do with it and what we shouldn't do with it.
Absolutely fascinating stuff.
We'll get right back to it.
And it is a wonderful world, isn't it?
Isn't it?
Is it?
unidentified
Now we take you back to the night of January 3rd, 2002, on Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
open lines and I am as always open to suggestions of any special line that you think would be particularly interesting informative and or entertaining to do.
And we have ever so many possibilities.
So, if you would like to suggest one, as always, you are welcome to do it.
I have a couple of thoughts which I'm not sure I should carry through with.
But I will accept suggestions by email at artbell at mindspring.com.
That's artbell at mindspring.com or artbell at aol.com.
Professor Ronald Munson's book is Raising the Dead, Social and Ethical Issues in Organ Transplantation.
And if your interest has been peaked tonight with all of this, and I can't imagine it has not, then you surely might want to read this book.
You can get it at amazon.com.
Raising the Dead.
Interesting title.
Did you pick the title, Professor, or did your publisher?
People who need organ transplant, I admit it's a bit of a hyperbole, but people who need organ transplants often describe themselves as feeling that they have been reborn, that they have literally been raised from the dead.
This is one of the great miracles of a secular kind that was brought to us by the last half of the last century.
As I say, I'm not a theologian, but I think that the will of God has often been understood in perhaps a deeper or at least a different fashion depending on what we have been able to accomplish.
Because we often don't know in advance of what we can do and what we can't do.
Well, before we had flight, when Orville and his friend were out fooling around there in North Carolina, everybody was saying, well, if God had meant us to fly, he'd have given us wings for sure.
It's just possible that this kind of technology actually might give us wings, huh?
And, you know, talking about this topic, I think it's worth noting about what we are, just in this one area, we've been talking a lot about stem cells, but in this one area, we could save as many as 100,000 people a year if this stem cell technology worked and we could produce off-the-shelf organs for people.
Because right now, there are about 75,000 people in this country at any given time who are waiting for an organ.
Well, we don't know the answer to that question because we're very far from that.
We know that those stem cells can be, as the scientists say, eternalized, which is to say, they can be gotten to reproduce.
And so the recent policy of, by the President's endorsement of 60 or so, 60 to 70 stem cell lines, is going in the right direction because we don't have to have always be destroying embryos to get stem cells, but we don't know yet how many stem cell lines we have to have.
It would be as if I said to you, well, now how many color swatches do you have to have to match everybody's color, hair color?
Well, I don't know the answer to that question, and no one knows the answer to the question either about how many stem cells we need.
You take a human embryo, you grow it up until it is about a few days old, five days old.
You take out the stem cells, and that's a stem cell line.
Ideally, if we had a perfect technology here, those stem cells would then be used with a bath of chemicals of the right sort, and we would, in effect, grow a new kidney for you.
And I had a feeling had we gone on, he's the sort who would have said, I would never, never take anything like that because it's not what God would have me do, and I would rather die.
It's just, you know, my objection is not that people should make such decisions for themselves, but it's that they should make such decisions for others.
It's all right for them to say, I would die, but I don't like it if they tell me, I want you to die because I don't think that you should use stem cells.
First of all, I can speak of this only in the most general terms.
As I said, I'm not a theologian, I'm not a scientist, and I'm not a physician.
But what's involved here scientifically is taking the adult stem cells, namely those that are in the bone marrow, that are responsible for producing, in effect, the immune system.
So someone who is suffering from a disease, a particular form of leukemia, can, by radiation or by drugs, have the bone marrow cells simply wiped out and then replenished by using the stem cells taken from a donor.
It's something that I think that your caller should have a discussion with the physicians involved and make sure that every question is answered, including the questions of how much pain is this, what are the risks going to be, and get all the information before giving consent.
I believe that typically this is bone marrow is drawn out of a big hollow needle from the hip bone.
It's not something that anyone would choose to do for anything less than a serious reason.
But on the other hand, it's not something considering that a life is at stake and presumably in this case the life of someone who is a serious reason, obviously.
And my question is about it combining a couple technologies.
The technology that you can is maybe here or not here, that you can download information from the brain.
Saying for somehow you're able to download an entire, all the experiences, all thoughts, everything from a grown human onto a hard drive.
Clone this human and do some sort of quick growth.
That's science fiction I know right now, but say in the future, some quick growth to where in a couple of weeks you have a full grown human of the person when he died.
Upload all that information onto a blank frame, and would you not in effect have the exact same person?
but for that moment, you have individual people who are virtually the same.
Now notice that they then go their separate ways, and after that, everybody changes because everybody has new experiences, and they process things differently, even if they're genetic twins.
But the question that you can't quite answer is, in that transference of everything that for that instant, at least, as you point out, makes them absolutely the same in every thought and everything, every cellular memory, all the rest of it, then how are we not to know that the consciousness is not at that instant transferred as well?
If somebody's dying of some truly incurable something or another, then why not take the chance to download everything you are mentally into a new, fit, younger body, and away you go?
It's an urban legend, I can tell you, because I know what you're going to say.
unidentified
I know that.
Okay.
I was going to ask, I heard that a couple years ago I heard that the first successful flora-fauna hybrid was made and that they crossed a gene from codfish, which lived in cold water, with corn to make corn that can grow in the snow.
I didn't think that was the question you were going to ask.
But certainly there are hybrids that have been produced, ones that involve putting genes into fish, for example, that allow them to forage in environments that are artificial.
Again, though, isn't there, Connor, hold on a second, isn't there a big oops factor here too?
And in fact, I think, and I can't cite the specific examples, but it was something about some kind of change to some sort of agricultural product and an effect on butterflies or some such, something where they went, ooh.
I mean, initially it was thought to be very straightforward, and the answer was yes.
But scientists who have looked at it since have at least raised some question about whether there's something that happens to the monarch that render them infertile.
It's just not known.
But even though it's not known, though, I think everybody is well aware of the fact that we're dealing here with dangerous issues.
If it didn't happen, it perhaps could have happened.
Well, I think you're wrong that everybody understands that.
They seem to understand dangerous issues with stem cell research, or maybe not as dangerous as controversial and cloning for sure.
But not too many people have been considering what we're talking about tonight, the pigs, through even the discussion right now, as a really dangerous area that we all ought to look at real hard.
I'm saying that we should look at it, that we should talk about it, that we should learn more about it, that we should insist that scientists take their duties seriously toward us as a society and help educate us on these issues so that we can discuss them among ourselves.