Robert Togores gives us a short look insight on the life of a human clone. Click link below to view.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMzGquNob1Y

My topic is cloning for the purpose of extending human life. For the Digital media project, i would like to make a video. In this video i will have someone with “tattooed” lines all over his face (incision lines), being interviewed on who he is. He will reveal his life in a “cloning factory” were he was taught to live a lie, and that his purpose was to give his organs to humans. He will also reveal that they were taught that they are worth less than humans. He will describe the factory living conditions, and how it at first looked like a prestigious school  for these clones, and that the organ removal was a privilege to serve the community.

This would serve the purpose of showing a dystopian future that could be a possible outcome of cloning humans. this is of course based off the paper thesis which would argue against cloning of Humans.

In the past week, even on the same day, i have heard 2 very different authors speak of their writing. Now the difference in there speaking was that Toibin talked about a certain book, Brooklyn, that he wrote and shared no sections of the book, while merely talking about the story behnd the book. Keret talked about his short stories, even shared some, and talked about them in context.

I found that Toibin’s Presentation was much less entertaining and much less engaging than  Keret. One thing that Toibin lacked was the comfortability that Keret seemed enjoy with his audience.  Toibin seemed not only nervous, but out of his element as he recounted his tale of how the story of how the story of brooklyn came to be, and made little effort to insert humor to entertain his audience, while Keret injected all his humor and had his audience engaged and laughing while maintaining a serious undertone of his stories.

Granted, Toibin’s audience wasn’t as mixed in age, and not everyone was as inherently excited and engaged to listen as the audience was for Keret, and that can affect the speaker greatly in terms of how much effort they needed to put in. Toibin seemed forced and seemed to be going through the motions of the story, as if it was a monotonous task.

All in all, Keret seemed much more engaging, and had the humor to keep his audience entertained even through his read of short stories, which were also seemingly long and monotonous, but he never let his audience tire.

The House of the Scorpion is a novel written by Nancy Farmer that tells the story of Matteo Alacran, a young clone who was made for the sole purpose of giving his organs to the original 148 year old Matteo Alacran (known as El Patron), a powerful drug lord who wishes to live as long as possible. A little backstory before i talk about the issue at hand. Matteo (clone) lives in the country of Opium, a strip of land between the United States and Mexico in which  El Patron rules over. The people in the country are mostly immigrants who tried and failed to cross the border, and were implanted with a chip in their brain to make them work without having any free will of their own.

There are many Bioethical issues presented in the novel, the first one being clone rights and which begets the question, are clones people and should they have rights? When you read the book and see the way that the people treat him once they found out he was a clone, it sounds brutal and disgusting. one character in the Alacran House calls him a “filthy beast” and decides that he should be treated as so, locking him in a room with sawdust to use as litter, and such abusive treatment. The Alacran all move to different wings of the house because of the fear that he can contaminate them. This treatment seems harsh to us because we think that people shouldn’t be treated like animals.

I always saw Matt as a person, as a character, and that is what the author aimed to do. Whenever we see Matt, he has emotions and the curiosity of a child, as he is one for the first part of the book. he seems like a normal person and the only difference was that he had a barcode tattoo on his foor. Other than that, there was nothing different about it.

Now the other bioethical issue at hand is the Immigrant workers. These people are forced to work with no free will because of the computer chip in their brain. they are forced to work until they die, and they don’t do anything  unless they are told to. taking someones free will away is no different from killing them in my opinion.

If you are into the idea of clones and that section of bioethics  then this is the book for you! it deals with all those things and it really shows Matteo for what he is, a clone who has ambitions and wants and emotions, just like you or me.

Now the connection to the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks lies in the idea of what can you use people for. Matteo was bred and used to be harvested for his organs to provide life for El Patron. Henrietta Lack’s cervical cancer cells where harvested to create advances for medical science. My question for you, LC13, is does it make a difference what you use the harvesting for? do the ends really justify the means?

Hello Fellow Bioethics Students,

As we progress through the semester, Bioethics is a term that we will hear numerous times, as that is the main topic of the class. What does that mean? Well we can break down the word for simplicity. Bio- as in Biology, and the studies of the human body, ethics-as in human morals and understanding of how to treat each other, simply deals with  how should we deal with morals in terms of biological experimentation on humans. Things like stem-cell research and abortion to using people as experiments for highly-dangerous clinical trials, and even down to psychological experimentations. These things become hot topic for controversial debate, and flare up the hottest arguments of todays time. With this we discuss humanity,its ability to experiment and its limitations towards experimentation. Should there be moral boundaries infringing on the our research? Or are human rights not to be impeded on? Only we can decide this ourselves.