July 1, 2007

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  Saw IIII MTV spoof

  Finally some content!

  Will science render males/females unnecessary?
  Recently a team of scientists announced they’ve created artificial sperm, genetic code harvested from bone marrow. You could speculate that now when a pair of lesbians get together, they no longer have to march over to the adoption center or sperm bank. The truth is, as long as sex feels good and remains relatively safe (light spanking?) for the couples involved – people will continue to use natural grown sperm. This “breakthrough” doesn’t represent a giant leap, more like another ripple effect from a small pebble thrown into a pond. I recall some ten years ago when Dolly the sheep, first mammal cloned from an adult cell was announced, males and females were declared washed up then, too.

  Experiments have created sperms and eggs, artificial gametes, from embryonic stem cells for years now with limited success. Strictly speaking, the world could keep one man alive or one woman and still continue flourishing because of science. Does this raise moral/ethical questions, of course it would – the dilemma of human experimentation. The radical advances in deducing the human genome, gene therapy, blah blah blah, where does it end. Raw material from stem cells could be used to make any other cells in the body, soon there’ll be catalogs where men and women could make a toll free call a la home shopping network! Well, maybe not.

  One of the biggest and least talked about developments is the birth control pill, so I suppose it should come as no surprise that we move onto conception methods and eventually all other aspects beyond. The ideas we’ve all come and grown fond of, what it means to be a family and to have children, will really be put to the test.

  One day, in the near future, because the technology has already been developed though in its infancy, artificial sperm and eggs created in a lab will go inside an artificial womb (it’s called exogenesis), where the baby in the bottle will gestate. Design your own baby now!

  • 6:53 am
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