For Love or for Money?

Science is very much incorporated in our society today. Many things and careers are established, thanks to science. Our world is slowly, but surely, becoming very dependent on it.

In Oryx and Crake, since it is perceived as the future, the only jobs that will get you far and will financially aid you are the one's that involve science. This book, in a way, foreshadows our future on Earth. Soon, having a job that you love, such as being an artist or even a writer, will eventually get you nowhere. Or at least that was our society makes it as. It is not enough to just do what you love anymore, it has to have an impact in our world in a big way, and the only careers today that allow you to do that are the one's that have to do with science, such as being a doctor, or a successful scientist. This book demonstrates to what extents people will go to just to be financially well-off, even if the job requires you to be utterly unethical and cruel. For example, in Oryx and Crake, Jimmy's father has a job that drains people of all their money and integrity. This is what will happen to our future. Soon enough, everyone will be so intrigued by companies that do this, just because as a whole they bring in a lot of income. We will be brainwashed by all of these big incorporations, and even pretend to be astonished by their findings. They will allow us to have this mentality like "Oh, they say that's the right thing to do and the right path to take, so I will obey and do the same," as if they've taken hold of our society's concious. In the future, no will will do what pleases them. Everyone will just follow, just like a bunch of robots. Robots, made with the great invention of science technology!

Even the simplest things require science. Wanna get rid of your wrinkles that haven't even developped yet? We got something for that. Wanna be skinner without the hastle of dieting and exercising? We got something for that. Wanna remove body hair for ever? We got something for that, too. All with the fortunate existence of science!

In another case, wanna be a writer? Poor your blood and tears into a few hundrend pages? Publish and sell hard copy books? Oh, wait, they already have that online! These science advances will come to no end. Everyone will abuse it until they get every last information they can.

Hate sciences but wanna make a lot of money in the future? Well, it seems like the only option is to actually do what you hate. Study what you can't stand.
People will have to give up what they always loved to do, just to be able to live a normal, stable life.

So the question comes to, WOULD YOU?

Genetic selection

Is gene selection bad, will it lead a problematic future, I don't think so. When the possibility to choose the genes of our children surely it will only be for the rich. This will lead to a big distinction between the classes (upper class, middle class, and lower class). But I do think that when the technology gets better it will eventually become affordable to the general public. This would mean that most of the human population would have and be able to select genes. People will choose to have their children perfectly beautiful and perfectly intelligent. Which wouldn't be all that different from now. I say that because it couldn't be possible for everyone to be equally beautiful regardless of being able to the genes. Everyone would have to look the same for everyone to be equally beautiful. And for the intelligence it would mean that there would be lots of intelligent people doing jobs the drop outs can do today, which will definitely lead to frustration but that's no different in some cases now in Canada (of course other places too). The competition would be very high in schools because that half mark on the test would be the difference between passing and failing (passing grade would be something ridiculously high like 98%. This is different though). More or less distinctions would be made even if people were able to choose the genes of their children or not.

This is purely speculation.
I saw several blog that talked about the same topic, if I am repeating someone, I apologize, I haven't read all the blog entrees.
I choose to write my blog entree like this to see what other people thought of this topic.

WE GOT A SITUATION

While reading the novel Oryx and crake I found a significant amount of similarities between the novel and the movie I am legend.  They both involve mass destruction of their somewhat corrupted futuristic society, and the characters just about have the same scenarios of survival. Another significant scenario was when Jimmy is witnessing the death of his mother. All his life he had been secretive about his mother, to keep her hidden from authority and after so much time, there he was watching her die through a TV screen. She had given him a pet named “killer” and it he would never forget it. In I am Legend, we witness how hard Robert tries to protect his family from the infected humans. He puts his wife and daughter in a helicopter out of New York, just as he tells them goodbye, his daughter gives him a baby German shepherd. As the helicopter goes up, a mass of mutants sabotage another helicopter which then collides with the helicopter that Roberts’s wife and daughter were put into. Robert finds himself gazing upon his family’s death with his daughter’s puppy in his arms.

     As I read through Margaret Atwood’s’ Oryx and Crake, pages 173-280, I had realized that I no longer attained the images of Margaret Atwood’s characters and scenarios, but the movie I am legend. In these sections of the novel, Jimmy is very much alone left with the carcass of many unknown beings surrounding him. Jimmy later on finds himself trapped in an establishment and he is being hunted by the notorious genetically modified “pigoons.” He tries every tactic to lure them away and escape their blood thirsty snarls. Jimmy shelters himself in a watch tower, finds a radio and tries to contact someone-anyone. In the movie, the character, Robert Neville, is the last human in the city. He goes out everyday to send out radio messages in search to find anyone else out there. He too shelters himself from the “infected” scientifically modified but corrupted beings. He walks up and down the destroyed streets of his city with nothing but death surrounding him. He dwells behind the darkness and emptiness of his home to protect himself from the mutants. He to begins to be hunted.

    The novel and the movie share similar ideas. They aware both settings of the future and science in society. What waits for us in the future? Will we be faced with mutants and devastation as well? Many novels and movies indicating “the future,” present only devastation, clones, and mutants. Is there ever truly a happy ending?





What Future?

Having read the first half of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake I find it impossible not to draw similarities between the futuristic world she envisioned and the one we are living in now. It is eerie how easily this book could become the story of our future; almost as if Atwood has seen where we are headed and has come back to warn us of the fatalities which lie in wait, urge us to derail this train of scientific improvement, mutant crossbreeds, killer spliced bacteria, lab made meat and food that really can’t be considered food anymore. 

We are already on a face paced track toward having pleeblands and compounds of our own, in some places, separation like this are already in existence. NooSkins and OrganInc., stripping your entire epidermis for a new one, growing multiple organs in pigs for harvest... it doesn’t take any stretch of the imagination to see ourselves endorsing such concepts in fifteen-twenty years. Even the creation of ChickieNobs, chickens genetically reduced to just breasts or legs, is not too far off from what we do today. Already the chicken we eat has been altered to ensure that certain areas, like the breasts of the chicken are larger than naturally necessary.

It’s just a small jump in genetic engineering and we’ll have ChickieNobs of our own. The question at this point is when was the turning point, what pushed Jimmy and Crake’s world over the edge? Have we as a society already passed this point, or are we capable of avoiding the same apocalyptic fate? 

Is there a pig in your future?

Following the discussion at the end of our Wednesday class about the possibility of animal organ transplant, I decided to do some research on the subject. At first I was sceptical about these practices, but soon later realized that their may be a case for these procedures.

Pig organ transplants – mainly of hearts, livers, and kidneys – have been envisaged for some years. 

According to the U.K. newspaper The Independent, in the article “Pig-to-human tissue transplants 'imminent'” of 2003, in the mid nineteen-nineties, a small biotechnology company called Imutran, based in Cambridge, England, pioneered the transplantation of a pig's heart into a monkey. This achievement, although not proven to be fully safe for humans, demonstrated for the first time that Xenotransplantation was possible.

Xenotransplantation, is a procedure by which a transplant of one specie's organ into another is possible. Therefore a pig transplant would fall in this category.

What makes today these procedures possible is the breeding of a modified pig. The “GAL-knockout” is the name given to a genetically modified pig which has had its Galactose sugars removed. This change has allowed the human body to easily accept the transplanted body part without activating rejection by the immune system.

A remaining concern was the transmission of pig viruses, such as the swine-flu, but a clinical trial involving 200 subjects did not give any evidence of transmission of any such virus.

I have some reservations about the ethical basis of this form of treatment of animals, however, since pigs are already used in the food supply, the transplant would not seem to be a further issue.

Is the future in Xenotransplantation or is it in the transplantation of synthetic body tissues?