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"Home? I have no home. Hunted... despised... living like an animal... the jungle is my home! But I will show the world that I can be its master. I will perfect my own race of people--a race of atomic supermen that will conquer the world!"
-Dr. Eric Vornoff Bride of the Monster
Bela Lugosi himself, in what I believe to be one of his finest and most memorable roles, uttered these immortal words in the Ed Wood masterpiece that was originally to be called Bride of the Atom. True, Ed Wood's movies were terrible, but still they have their charm and, I am convinced, their merit. It's really the acting, the writing, and the production values that bring them down; the stories of at least a couple of them, the ideas behind them, were of a much higher caliber. To my mind, Bride of the Monster is the pinnacle; ridiculous, dreadfully acted, littered with moronic dialogue--and yet... Bela Lugosi is the quintessential mad scientist, the many grabs for the title by John Carradine and Peter Cushing notwithstanding, and he puts on display that which lurks within all of us. In a very real sense, Bride of the Monster is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness transformed into 1950's science fiction, with Bela playing Kurtz. It just so happens that as I write this, the Raelians (a religious cult fixated on extraterrestrials) are claiming to have cloned a human. http://www.cnn.com/2002/HEALTH/12/27/clo... To hear them tell it, humankind was the product of an extraterrestrial adventure in genetic engineering, and human cloning is simply a way of carrying on the family business, in pursuit of eternal life. Their claim to having birthed the first human baby clone has yet to be verified, but I'm sure something will come out in the wash soon. Either they've done it, or they haven't done it, or they've sort of done it and a lot of people will take that to mean that they haven't done it. I take serious issue with human cloning on ethical grounds, but that's pretty much beside the point for what's on my mind at the moment. What's on my mind is simply this: if they've succeeded, what have they wrought? Even if they haven't--when somebody does, what will they have wrought? The Raelians hope that we can eventually keep cloning ourselves new bodies and just transplant from one to another indefinitely, on into eternity. Frankly, I have my doubts. But even a morsel of reading in the world of cautionary science fiction literature leads one to speculate about a clone underclass, a clone master race, clone astronauts venturing where the rest of us don't want to go and where robots are little use (often at great risk to life and limb), clones annihilating "real" humanity, clones being harvested for organs (or for more diabolical purposes), and the list goes on. Even without ethical questions, the sheer number of possible outcomes (many of a character that is potentially highly distasteful to many people) is enough to send the mind reeling. Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article A Digression on Cloning in Outer Space is owned by Robert Davis. Permission to republish A Digression on Cloning in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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