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Technology
changes not necessarily a good thing It’s not that there’s anything wrong with technology. It’s just that sometimes, the modern way of doing things loses the magic of the old way. It’s like e-mail. I hate e-mail, even though I check mine about five times a day. Letters have such a personal quality about them, the feel of the paper, the loops and curves of the handwriting, the doodles in the margins. E-mail is too fast. You write someone, and they get it immediately, and then they write you back, and then you feel guilty if you don’t write them immediately back. But, you have nothing to say because you just wrote them, and the whole business is just too much. E-books, too, are a disappointment. You can’t curl up with a good e-book. They make obsolete the phrases, “You can’t judge a book by its cover” and it’s a real “page turner.” A real “screen scroller”? Not quite the same. It seems like I might be getting old. Age, though, is something on its way to being remedied. There’s been more cloning progress recently and, someday soon, aging itself might age and die. Under the category of improvements that might not actually be improvements is the recent creation of CC, or Carbon Copy. This process recently created a “cat” in the cloning laboratory of Texas A&M University. The idea of cloning itself is a problem. Until man can get simple paper copy machines to work, I will not trust the idea of making any other copies. The case of Carbon Copy brought two issues to my mind. The first one is the possibility that pet owners will clone their pets so as to cushion their loss. Besides, having such an intense attachment to your pet that you would want to have it cloned is weird, why the necessity? As CC proved, even exact genetic matches do not look or behave exactly like the original. CC’s coat is missing the orange color that the coat of the original cat, Rainbow, had. And there is no indicator as to what sort of personality the new cat will have. “Carbon Copy” is a misnomer. Basically, it’s like a letter and an e-mail: The contents may be exactly the same, but the package is different. The second complication that CC’s creation brings up is that it is one step closer to the possibility of human cloning. Whenever considering the thought of human cloning, the science fiction novel, “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, immediately comes to mind. A real screen-scroller, if you will. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a frightening depiction of a society of artificially created human beings that has implemented a strict caste system based on genetic makeup. I don’t want to be part of a “Brave New World”, nor do I ever want to Xerox myself. Also, I don’t want to live to be a hundred and fifty. It’s unnatural. If cloning is someday used to copy organs and prolong lives, there are too many implications to imagine. What’ll be cloned next? Angry grizzlies? Sheep and cats and bears, oh my. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. Change isn’t always good. Sometimes it’s just different.
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