On April Fools’ Day 1998, within hours of reading U.S. patent application No. 08/993,564, the Honorable Bruce Lehman did something no other commissioner of patents had done in the two-hundred-year history of America’s oldest government agency. He stepped before a cluster of microphones and announced that the patent would never be approved. No half-human “monsters” would be patented, Lehman declared angrily, or any other “immoral inventions.”

From “Gods and Monsters” by Mark Dowie, an essay published in “The Best American Science Writing 2005

Mark Dowe wrote an extremely insightful essay on the current conflict surrounding “chimeras” in modern biological research. I’m going to hit on some of the points he brought up, as well as adding in my own two cents.

Chimeras are organisms which have genes from more than one species. This can be done through various means including PCR in simpler life, and through injecting embryonic stem cells of one species into the embryo of another species in more complex life. One has to go no farther than the local grocery store to find examples of chimeras. People are generally tolerant of the idea of swapping plant and bacterial genes around, and many people are even okay with the idea of having animal genes in their tomato, but the idea of putting human genes into other organisms seems to make most people uneasy.

A chimera could look like one creature and have the genes organs and possibly even the intelligence of another creature. One common example of this is creating pigs with human organs for transplant purposes. There are currently many laboratory animals who have human genes, the patent which Bruce Lehman so vehemently opposed, and is being fought about in court to this day was about the creation of creatures that are a 50/50 human, animal mix.

We’ve had the ability to create 50/50 animal hybrids for a while now. Back in 1984 a sheep/goat chimera was created, called a “geep”. We would probably be creating 50/50 human animal mixes today if the right scientists received funding and legal permission. In Michael Crichton’s book “Next”, a chimpanzee/human chimera was secretly created. The chimpanzee had increased intelligence and a larynx.

Such possibilities bring up many ethical questions. Would such a creature be entitled to human rights? Since identical expressed qualities can be created with drastically different genes, it doesn’t make sense to base whether a being deserves rights on genes. This becomes even more apparent when you take into consideration that out genetic pool is continuously changing.

Does someone actually need to look human to qualify for rights? Or should the criteria be narrowed to judging a few features like the organisms ability to think abstractly and feel? People born in vegetative states wouldn’t be able to pass an iq test. An either or definition could be used. A being must either have the genes or certain expressed qualities. Okay, so should a creature that normally has human like intelligence, but is born in a vegetative state have human rights? That might sound silly, but I don’t think it’s far fetched.

It is rapidly becoming easier to modify genes, additionally, our knowledge of plant, microbial, and animal genomes has been increasing exponentially. We have massive public databases where we have sequenced thousands of life forms. Without requiring some sort of apocalyptic catastrophe, I have a hard time imagining this knowledge not leading to us creating chimeras with human-like intelligence.

I don’t think creating something that is a mix of human and animal is inherently unethical. Genes aren’t in and of themselves important, and we share a lot of genes with animals anyway. If a 50/50 human animal hybrid were created that was happy with its lot in life and how it‘s treated, I think that would be ethical and would more than you can say about a lot of humans.

While I don’t think creating hybrids is inherently unethical, I do think it opens doors to many ethically questionable possibilities. Most of which center around creating something human-like and then not treating it like it’s human. Such cases bring up an important question for the human race. Do characteristics such as human-like intelligence and the ability to feel automatically demand our respect, or is respect about survival only,in which case we only need to apply to our own genetic stock?

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find an on line version of the entire essay. The first part of the essay can be read in the link below.

http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/chimerapatent.htm

Nov. 6, 2008 — The largest truck in the world is about to become the largest robotic vehicle in the world. Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have teamed up with engineers from Caterpillar to automate the 700-ton trucks, which are made to haul loads up to 240 tons from mines.

That’s nearly two million pounds of metal, fuel and stone powered by a 3,550-horsepower, 24-valve engine moving at up to 42 miles per hour, with software and a robot at the wheel.

Autonomous vehicle technology is pretty much in its infancy,” said Tony Stentz, a professor at CMU involved in the project. Stentz expects that over the next five to 10 years, the technology will expand to areas beyond mining, eventually finding its way into consumer cars and trucks.

Catepillar’s soon-to-be-automated hauling trucks will be the largest but not the first. Caterpillar’s rival, Japan-based Komatsu, already runs automated trucks at the Gaby mine in Chile. Rio Tinto, a British/Australian mining company, recently announced plans to fully automate its Pilbara iron ore mines in Australia, including its Komatsu trucks, by this November.”

Does this article cause anyone else to flashbacks from every futuristic real time strategy game you’ve ever played? Now, they just need an automated constructor that builds military bases from the resources that the drones mine. Then, our automated army will be prepared to push forward, colonize the universe, and defeat the Zerg.

On a more realistic note…

It’ll be interesting to see which jobs can become automated over the next few decades. You might be able to tag down a driverless taxi. So far, we’ve yet to make a driverless vehicle that does well on complicated courses or in traffic. But, we are getting closer every year. In the DARPA competition, every year the cars have done significantly better than the previous year.

Automation isn’t going to end with cars. You may have already heard of Serendipity, a computer program that writes classical music. Our brains are material based. Theoretically, it should be possible to create robots that can accomplish every task that humans fulfill.

(Watch with better quality)

Interesting Points:

Six people would own 59% of the wealth, while 53 people would live off 2.00$(U.S.) a day or less. Thirteen people would be starving to death, and 43 people wouldn’t have basic sanitation. Most sad of all, we would spend over 100$ trying to kill a neighbor for every 1$ we spend trying to help.

If you stumbled on a village of small, blue people with these characteristics, what would you think? If you observed 6 Smurfanoids were hording most of the resources while 13 Smurfanoids were starving to death; you would probably conclude that people in this village are only worried about themselves. You would also conclude that they are irrationally violent, as 100 times more resources are spent trying to kill each other than trying to help each other.

I don’t think anyone would want to be a member of this village. In fact, you probably would want to stay far away from these villagers.

In many ways we are still an irrational world full of tribes fighting each other. We’ve definitely improved. The average person is better off than they’ve ever been. But, we still have a long ways to go.

What can be done?

Research from the human genome project suggests that genetically we are all 99.9% the same. We need to start looking at ourselves as a unified species, instead of only identifying ourselves with subgroups. I think much of the existent division exists because of political and religious organizations, which convince their members they are superior. This is done to the point where killing people who do not belong to your organization is justified. A broader and more humble view of things needs to be propagated.

We also need to be more charitable. Society idolizes the most wealthy instead of the most generous. In the world’s current condition, having an excess of frivolous wealth centered around an individual should be viewed negatively.

Improvement requires more than knowledge and sympathy. We need to provide service that improves our condition and actively oppose harmful world-views.

The Drake Equation is often used to calculate the number of civilizations in our galaxy which we might be able to communicate with. This equation takes many factors into account, including the number of planets that can sustain life. While the equation itself makes some sense, it’s hard to know which values to give to each of the factors. We have fairly good guesses for factors like R*(the rate of star formation). But the values for factors like Fi “the fraction of planets which have life that develop intelligent life” are pretty much shots in the dark.

The Drake Equation depends on the idea that life requires planets. If life can evolve outside of planets, the Drake Equation needs to be adjusted. The factors R*, fp, and ne all become irrelevant. The factor fl needs to be changed to something like: the number of lifeforms with independent origins. The remaining elements of the equation can remain untouched. Ironically, the remaining variables, fl, fi, fc, and L are the ones whose values we know the least about. It’s still not possible for us to calculate the odds, but seeing an example of self-replication in space sure makes it seem more likely.