The Celestial Perspective Discussion Board Archives

To all: I know this scrolling down is kinda irritating but Larry showed me a trick today. Just put your finger on the Page Down button on the keyboard and you are were you want to be in literal seconds!

In the meantime, I would love to have a discussion about the Net, on all levels. To my way of thinking, it's impact on our world is profound in ways we have yet to even discover.

What does everyone think? I myself like to read all of the messages, and have found the page down key to be a blessing. We do want to make this place comfortable (given obvious technological limitations, which are endemic to each system) for everyone though so I am most willing to try this method. I will now post another messages to see how this works.

For those of you that may not have checked them recently, we have updated the following areas on Celestial Perspective:

The Featured Article for the month of July has been posted. 'The Splendor of Love' was written by Kristina Strom and originally appeared in the publication 'Silent Messages'

The Calendar Of events has been updated since it's original posting. There are events listed from July to November but we are still looking for more to add to the list. If you know of an event that may be of interest to the readers here at Celestial Perspective, please e-mail the information to TheNewCP@aol.com.

Favorite Links has been updated to include a new section called Healing Ourselves. There is also a form on that page where you may submit any additional links that may be of interest to others.

I wrote the HTML for this site, but the CGI script is an AOL 'canned' script. Subscribers to AOL do not have the ability to run their own CGI scripts or to modify AOL's script. It might be possible to use Java script to perform the same thing, but not all browsers support Java script and some have Java script turned off. Still, I am working on a few things that, if successful, will make it easier for those that have Java Script while still supporting those that don't.

I heartily recommend that we should use this time to go within deeply and implement whatever shifts and changes we discover or uncover. If we do that, we will be well prepared for the significant Grand Cross and Eclipse which will occur in the skies on August 11th. This is also a key period for the people born in 1976, 1977 and 1978, whose sense of structure and security is being deeply challenged this summer.

Secondly, I have been struggling with writing an article about Spiritual Gardening for longer than I would care to admit. Something is missing, and I can't quite yet figure out what it is, but on the edges of my mind I think it has something to do with nothing less than genetic engineering, which for me brings up HUGE ethical and moral issues. How? Well, I have been wondering how genetic engineering of mammals is different from the hybridization of plants, for starters. In our Post-Industrial Revolution world we have all become reliant upon such manipulation (I use this word neutrally here) for survival. In Nature, plants naturally hybridize in a random matter. And, I suppose, that is so with the propogation of the human/general mammalian species as well. Such "generativity", in a physical sense, has produced some pretty wild and bizarre results, to say the least. In the plant world, humans taking control of this is fo most people a non-issue, but not so with animals and people. Where do we draw the line?

Thoughts, anyone?

While it's not my area of expertise and I may be wrong in my thinking, but I think some of the confusion may be from your use of terms. Hybrids are not genetically engineered and hybrid animals have been around long before the field of genetic engineering ever began.

For example, you might take the pollen from a red rose bush and use it to fertilize a white rose bush in an effort to create a pink hybrid. You may even take two completely different species of plants and cross fertilize them to form a new species. But this is not genetic engineering.

In both cases, the fertilization process still depends entirely on nature. You are taking the complete and unaltered genetic material from one living organism and giving it the opportunity to fertilize another organism. This will only take place if the two organisms are already very closely related.

You wouldn't be able to perform this procedure on a palm tree and a daisy.

In the animal kingdom, I think it's the horse being mated to a mule that produces a donkey. When dealing with hybrids such as this, they are closely related enough to produce offspring, but are usually too different for that offspring to be able to reproduce. The resulting hybrid is sterile.

Hybrids require that the two organisms share enough genetic information for a successful mating. An organism that has twenty four base gene pairs could never be bred to an organism with sixteen base gene pairs.

In genetic engineering, there is no such restriction. Instead of taking the complete gene code of one organism and mating it to the complete gene code of another, you literally split the gene apart, remove whatever you want, and insert the genetic code you want. That code can come from whatever organism you choose regardless of how closely related they may be.

That doesn't mean that the result will be a viable organism, but it is certainly possible where standard hybrid techniques wouldn't have a chance.

You can also combine genetic material from several different organisms in ways that they have never been combined before in nature.

Again I may be wrong, but I believe you can get a patent on a genetically engineered organism where you can't on a hybrid.

There are dangers regardless of which technique you use. For instance, I believe the Africanized killer bees were created through standard hybrid techniques. But standard hybrid techniques have the advantage of dealing with many more known quantities.

When cross breeding a horse and a mule, you know the result will have the characteristics of one or both of the parent animals but it won't sprout wings and fly away! True hybrids still carry the traits that evolution has built in to the parent organisms. Evolution has provided for their survival (or their lack of ability to survive) as well as providing the rest of it's creatures a defense against these traits.

In the case of the Africanized killer bees, they are no more dangerous than the original African bees that the honey bees were bred with.

With genetic engineering, there is no such test of time.

Mapping the complete gene code of even a simple organism could take a life time. While we are learning a great deal about the genetic makeup of humans, we are still a very long way off from knowing the purpose of every gene that makes us who and what we are.

Gene splicing requires taking a known gene sequence from one organism and inserting it into the proper place in another organism. But not all gene structures are known or fully understood. The result could be a new organism with totally unknown and never before seen traits.

And the technology for gene splicing is not that complicated. It only requires a little knowledge and some simple chemicals. A college kid fooling around in his basement could very easily create the next plague.

But there is also the possibility for tremendous benefit from genetic engineering. Gene therapy could prove to be the next big breakthrough in medicine. Not the least of which could be the eradication of cancer.

Like most things in life, genetic engineering is neither good or evil. It is simply knowledge. If we choose to use that knowledge and/or how we use that knowledge will ultimately be a reflection on us and not on the technology itself.

Thanks for jump-starting my brain! Yes, terms clarification on my part was definitely called for here so I consulted my trusty Encarta Encyclopedia and this is what I found:

The field of Genetic Engineering is divided into 3 sections: selective breeding; cross breeding (hybridization; and cloning (gene splicing which allows the direct altering of genetic material, aka recombinant DNA). So, I should have said that my concern was about category three because I agree with you that the first two are more limited in scope and potential just by definition.

It's the cloning aspect of Genetic Engineering that has me reeling because, as you said, this "breakthrough" holds the potential for "combining different organisms in ways they have never been before in nature."

And the patent thing has me a little more than bothered, too. In 1980 the FDA approved a patent for genetically engineered insulin from humans rather than extracting this hormone from hogs as this had been formerly done. In 1988, a patent for the cloning of mice was granted. Thing is, these were mice cloned to be predisposed to cancer for the purpose of testing anticancer therapies. This development disturbed me--wonder if someone will clone defective humans for testing someday. Or I suppose whole colonies of humans could be cloned for some nefarious purpose.

In addition, like Lou said, money is a major concern. I don't know about fraud existing as a result, but I sure now that greed for a profit might affect the direction of this technique.

I guess my question came down to one of morality. For some reason I am comfortable with selective breeding and hybridization, but this cloning thing has me stuck.

One of the questions had to do with the patriarchal nature of the major religions, Roman Catholicism in particular. The querent was asking whether the RC Church had always been patriarchal; she was disturbed about the exclusion of women in higher positions of the Church.

In answering this complex question, Mary told of a 9th Century Pope named Joan who went by the name of John because of her gender. Unfortunately, her identity was discovered when she had a miscarriage during a procession, of all things. She apparently reigned for two years between Leo IV and BenedictIII. To cover up this fiasco, the Church extended LeoIV's reign by two years. Later on though, "in 1276, Pope JohnXX altered his title to JohnXXI in recognition of Joan's legal and rightful reign."

This info blew me away. Have I been living in the Dark Ages or is this news to everyone else too?

I agree that the moral questions regarding such things as gene splicing and cloning are profound. At one research lab, they developed a mouse with a human ear growing from it's back. The idea behind the project wasn't just a haphazard "let's see what happens" kind of attitude but rather a serious attempt at providing a new life for those that might have been disfigured from such things as fire.

But we must ask ourselves some very fundamental questions regarding life, creation, and the nature of humanity.

For instance, how much of what makes up our behavior, our sense of morality, or even our spirit is encoded in our genes? I recall hearing of one study that showed identical twins shared much more than just physical similarities. They examined a large number of identical twins and compared their behavior patterns with paternal twins. The results showed a tremendously high correlation of behavior patterns even when comparing identical twins raised separately to paternal twins raised together.

An identical twin that performed a great deal of charity work would likely find that their twin also did charity work. If one identical twin engaged in criminal behavior, it was likely that the other also engaged in the same criminal behavior.

An even more startling finding was that identical twins raised separately would usually have even more in common than identical twins raised together. They proposed the theory that identical twins raised together found it necessary to distinguish themselves from each other and made conscious choices to do just that.

So let us assume that our genetic makeup gives us a pre-disposition to certain conduct. Let us further assume that we have the knowledge and ability to identify and change such genetic codes. What do we do with it?

If a certain genetic code sequence is responsible for creating a serial killer, do we have the right to "correct" that code? Knowing that we can change that code in an infant and ultimate prevent the loss of many lives as well as giving the infant a shot at a productive life, do we have the right not to?

Of course, we aren't even close to being able to do such things right now, but the possibility certainly exists.

But what of the things we can do right now? Labs are already creating new forms of bacterial life. Such life forms can have tremendous beneficial properties. But life is a force of it's own. It struggles for survival and doesn't care about any rules that we may want them to live by.

Let's make another assumption. Let's assume that a new bacteria strain is developed to clean up oil spills. This new strain of bacteria works quite well as the little buggers go about eating up the oil spilled in the ocean. When the oil is gone, so is the food supply and they die off. No more contaminated ocean, no more bugs. Except if just one of those millions of bacterium should mutate in response to the decreasing supply of food and finds a new source of sustenance, what could happen then?

Certainly, new strains of bacteria are evolving all the time without the intervention of man, but again that evolution is based on organisms that have already passed the test of time and evolution and not on some new organism that nature has not had a chance to provide defenses against. The resulting leap in evolution could prove catastrophic.

I can even foresee a time when a couple goes to their neighborhood gene doctor and fills out a form saying we want a child with blue eyes, blond hair, dimples, etc. The doctor collects the genetic material from the parents, manipulates it, and custom tailors their baby to their specifications. Nature depends on diversity for the continued growth of a species. If we eliminate that diversity, we as a species may cease to grow. By trying to control our future, we may lose it.