At what point do you realize it is too late - in a class, work, home life. As a student, when do you realize there is no hope for a good grade. As an employee - when do you realize, or do you, that everything has gone to hell and it is the end and now you await the moment, the anticlimax. At home - what is the moment you realize that the relationship or marriage is over - is there one moment and do we know it.
In science, is there one moment we can pin it down to when we knew that everything had changed. When science took a leap without looking into the unknown and we are now playing catch up and failing miserably? Can we, is there, do we know or is it something more uneventful, it just happens and we meander on for weeks and months until the anticlimax drops ... and we never realized that specific moment.
I was thinking about families today, and the importance that societies, throughout history, have placed on the family. I was also considering those moments when the family unit was weakened as a political or authoritative unit, and the resulting political repercussions.
Whether Mussolini or the Emperor Qin - the family is something to be denied and reduced in importance in order that all may gaze upon the leader as their father, and source of sustenance. Perhaps we can trace attempts to install fascist states, to attempts at undermining the family structure and its importance, creating the extended family, where everyone raises the child and parents are simply the biological donors. Perhaps we are able to trace the rise of fascism in any state, at any time, to this social development. Perhaps.
Perhaps in science we will be able to trace our god-complex back to Dolly. We are after all Humans and we control our environment, our planet, our futures ... we are Humans. Makes sense to me that we have god-complexes, and Dolly is as good a place to begin as any. Maybe it is Korea, or maybe it is in England. Maybe it will be shown, in the future, that it all began in Newcastle and I do not mean their beer.
April 2, 2008. Time Online headline: We have created human-animal embryos already, say British team.
Embryos containing human and animal material have been created in Britain for the first time, a month before the House of Commons votes on new laws to regulate the research.
A team at Newcastle University announced yesterday that it had successfully generated “admixed embryos” by adding human DNA to empty cow eggs in the first experiment of its kind in Britain.
"experiments of Frankenstein proportion"
Written by Mark Henderson, Science Editor
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