19AR24-16

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AR 24:16 - What happens when you cross a pig with a human?

In this issue:

GENETIC ENGINEERING - what happens when you "create human-animal hybrids that we can harvest for parts"?

GENDER CHAOS - what happens when you tell feminists that gender distinction is a myth?

SOCIAL MEDIA - what happens when online advertising aims to unsettle a religion's faithful?

Apologia Report 24:16 (1,424)

April 17, 2019

GENETIC ENGINEERING

"Building a Trojan Pig" by Erika Hayasaki (WIRED, Apr '19, pp58-60) -- subtitled: "Scientist Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte wants to use gene editing to create human-animal hybrids that we can harvest for parts. What could go wrong? ...

"Using Crispr, [Belmonte] and his team deleted the genes that allowed the animals to grow several organs, including eyes, a heart, or a pancreas. Rather than let these maimed mouse embryos develop on their own, the Salk researchers injected some rat stem cells into the mix. Lo and behold, the rat cells replaced the missing organs, and the animals lived a normal murine [i.e., rodent] lifespan." And what comes next: "people-pig chimeras." Yep. It's a whole new world out there. <www.bit.ly/2VSrIjQ>

"Belmonte plans to use Crispr to switch off a pig's propensity to create its own organs, then fill the gap with human cells. But the second step - getting the human cells to take root in pigs at higher rates - has proved devilishly hard. 'The mouse-rat efficiency is quite good,' Belmonte says. ...

"In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush ranked the creation of such hybrids as among 'the most egregious abuses of medical research.' In 2015 ... the NIH suspended federal funding for any studies that introduce human stem cells into animal embryos, saying it needed time to think through the ethical issues. A year later, the agency announced plans to lift the moratorium and opened the idea to public comment; 22,000 responses flooded in. ...

"John De Vos, director of the Department of Cell and Tissue Engineering at Montpellier University Hospital and Medical School <www.bit.ly/2VN02Nm> in France, has no trouble envisioning worst-case scenarios involving pig chimeras. If too many human cells make it into a pig's brain, for instance, the animal could theoretically develop new kinds of awareness and intelligence. (In 2013, scientists in Rochester, New York, injected mice with human brain cells, and the mice turned out smarter than their peers.) ... What if scientists inadvertently created a pig able to intellectualize its own suffering, one with a sense of moral injustice? ...

"Using gene editing, he says, researchers can prevent a human cell from colonizing the brain of a pig. ...

"'What we are talking about is not like taking an aspirin,' he says. 'It could change our own evolution, our own species.'" Again: What could go wrong? <www.bit.ly/2X6P0mo>

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GENDER CHAOS

"The Nature of Sex" by Andrew Sullivan (New York Magazine, Feb '19) -- reports on how "four feminist activists — three from a self-described radical feminist organization Women's Liberation Front <www.womensliberationfront.org> - appeared on a panel <www.herit.ag/2Gr0Fqw> at the Heritage Foundation. Together they argued that sex was fundamentally biological, and not socially constructed, and that there is a difference between women and trans women that needs to be respected."

At the source of this movement are "trans-exclusionary radical feminists or TERFs, as they are known, [and] are one minority that is actively not tolerated by the LGBTQ establishment, and often demonized by the gay community. ...

"The TERF argument is that viewing 'gender identity' as interchangeable with sex, and abolishing clear biological distinctions between men and women, is actually a threat to lesbian identity and even existence — because it calls into question who is actually a woman, and includes in that category human beings who have been or are biologically male, and remain attracted to women. ...

"What the radical feminists are arguing is that the [Equality Act] doesn't only blur the distinction between men and women (thereby minimizing what they see as the oppression of patriarchy and misogyny), but that its definition of gender identity must rely on stereotypical ideas of what gender expression means. ...

"The Equality Act <www.bit.ly/2XbWAfE> also proposes to expand the concept of public accommodations to include 'exhibitions, recreation, exercise, amusement, gatherings, or displays'; it bars any religious exceptions invoked under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993; and it bans single-sex facilities like changing, dressing, or locker rooms, if sex is not redefined to include 'gender identity.'"

Sullivan acknowledges that this can be a "deeply confusing and incoherent" debate. "Contemporary transgender ideology is not a complement to gay rights; in some ways it is in active opposition to them. ...

"[T]ransgenderist ideology — including postmodern conceptions of sex and gender — is indeed a threat to homosexuality, because it is a threat to biological sex as a concept."

In conclusion, Sullivan proposes "a solution to this knotted paradox. ...

"We just have to abandon the faddish notion that sex is socially constructed or entirely in the brain, that sex and gender are unconnected, that biology is irrelevant, and that there is something called an LGBTQ identity, when, in fact, the acronym contains extreme internal tensions and even outright contradictions. And we can allow this conversation to unfold civilly, with nuance and care, in order to maximize human dignity without erasing human difference. That requires a certain amount of courage, and one thing I can safely say about that Heritage panel is that the women who spoke had plenty of it." <www.nym.ag/2UA0l1H>

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SOCIAL MEDIA

"Inside the Secret Facebook War For Mormon Hearts and Minds" by Kevin Poulsen (Daily Beast, Feb 9 '19) -- reports on a social media giant's campaign targeting accounts that were "secretly hand-picked by a friend or loved one who had walked away from the LDS church, and ... turned to Facebook's precision ad system in a desperate attempt to explain their spiritual crisis to those they'd left behind.

"The project was called MormonAds, and it was a brief but perhaps unprecedented experiment in targeted religious dissuasion. In four months at the end of 2017, the project targeted more than 5,000 practicing Mormons with messages painstakingly crafted to serve as gentle introductions to the messier elements of #LDS history that were glossed over within the church. All the names and email addresses for the campaign came from disillusioned ex-Mormons."

In the ad series the project's creator cleverly "adopted the voice of someone eager to clear up misunderstandings about topics like [Mormonism] and polygamy, or early Mormons marrying pre-teens, or what those Egyptologists said about the papyrus from which [Joseph] Smith supposedly transcribed the Book of Abraham. One sentence provoked, the next implicitly promised a cure for the unsettled feeling left by the first."

(Imagine exchanging all of the LDS identity above with that of another belief system and playing out those results. Imagine the new marketing potential waiting to be monetized.) <www.bit.ly/2XgsKXx>

Interesting user commentary on Reddit here: <www.bit.ly/2IBZjLq>

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