Yo Soldier, Your Intellect’s Been Belittled

Trapped Sodlier

By: Cercatore

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Burning, chocking sulphur

Maiming fire blazing through

All around her, shells hurtled

As she sheltered her ears from their deafening whur

Thrown into a blind war

Stripped of civilization, she slowly grew

Wary of the leaders who belittled

The intellect of her people

Trying to understand, to comprehend

She gripped the rifle to fend against

The danger that lurked since the battle commenced

Still dreaming that it will all soon end

She saw that glint in his eyes

As she shot him right through the head

Yet her heart wrenched and cried

At the loss of yet another brother

And then the death came

To dear Anna

Creeping slowly behind her back

In the form of yet another shell

Bleeding to death

She made a circle on the soil of Mother Earth

Wondering, questioning

We are all connected, then why this misery

Why this pain without any healing

Incoherence gripped her mind

As she struggled to find her voice

As she struggled to find humanity

Admist this senseless insanity

Half dead but still struggling

She looked into the eyes of the fallen soldiers

Really, you can’t tell who is friend or foe

They have always felt the same, you know

Why did we choose to wear medals

And follow blindly the devil

When we could have chosen the path of love

The path of equality, the path of God

What Has Happened?

Today, I saw this picture of a child standing next to rubble, somewhere in Iraq and the only thought left standing in my mind was “What have they done?” Shouldn’t children be somewhere playing in a park, or be in a toy store, perhaps in a loving child day care center or in mom’s caring arms. What is this child doing here, standing so innocently next to this rubble…looking for his mom perhaps? Perhaps searching for lost toys, or perhaps just wondering with those big eyes “where’s my milk bottle?”. And what about those young men standing down there in the rubble? What are their perspective in life like? Education, work, marriage? What kind of future do they have now? All this for some crummy oil fields? For this little piece of paper called money? How low can one stoop? I wonder if they sleep well, these murderers. I wonder if they can sing well, I wonder if their smiles are real, I wonder how they can look in the eyes of their own children, I wonder eh! After reading and thinking about this, I flopped on the bed, tears in my eyes, thinking of the cruelty of some people, the loss of many and …. exhausted, I thought, I got nothing on me, to protect anyone…what do I have to offer? And then there was just one little light inside my heart, called Hope! that’s all I got to offer. I have hope in these humans, I think and hope in the People. All is not lost yet. All is not lost yet. We just got to try inshaAllah, in our given capacities, that’s all that matters now and leave the rest in God’s merciful hands.

Curfew Extended in Iraqi Capital

Baghdad’s military command has extended a round-the clock curfew in the city for an indefinite period.

It was imposed on Thursday amid clashes between troops and Shia militias in Baghdad and elsewhere, and had been due to expire early on Sunday morning.

The extension came hours after radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr said his Mehdi Army militia would defy a government call to lay down its weapons.

Across Iraq, fighting has claimed more than 200 lives since Tuesday.

The BBC’s Crispin Thorold in Baghdad says the curfew extension will damage the capital economically, as well as inconveniencing residents.

The initial imposition of the curfew was a sign of how badly security in Baghdad had deteriorated, he says.

Baghdad, particularly the Shia-dominated Sadr City area in the east of the city, has seen some of the worst violence in recent days, including a series of US air strikes on Friday.

Air strikes

The curfew extension came after a day of skirmishes between security forces and Shia militiamen in the southern city of Basra, where the current wave of unrest began.

Fierce gun battles were reported, while the UK military said US warplanes carried out two air strikes.

Iraqi police said an earlier US air strike killed eight people, although no independent confirmation was available.

Turkey hits rebel targets

British forces in the city fired artillery rounds on what they said were militia mortar positions – the first time they had directly joined the fighting since government forces launched the operation in Basra.

Iraqi forces have been trying to wrest control of the city and other Shia areas from the Mehdi Army.

In an interview, Moqtada Sadr said he would ignore the call by the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki, for his forces to surrender their weapons.

He said they would only be handed over to a government which could get the occupying forces out of Iraq.

Mr Maliki has extended an original three-day deadline, telling the fighters they had until 8 April to hand in their weapons in return for cash.

On Saturday the prime minister vowed that government troops will not leave Basra until “security is restored”, describing the gunmen as “worse than al-Qaeda”.

Iraqi soldiers have met fierce resistance in Basra

“We will continue to stand up to these gangs in every inch of Iraq,” he said.Meanwhile Al-Jazeera TV broadcast excerpts from an exclusive interview with Moqtada Sadr that it conducted hours before the beginning of the clashes on Tuesday.

Mr Sadr called on Arab and Muslims states and the UN to

“recognise the legitimacy of resistance”

and offer support to Iraqi to

“drive the occupation forces out of its land”.

Power struggle

Estimates vary of the number of deaths since the fighting broke out.

Health officials in Baghdad say at least 75 people have been killed while in Basra, the British military give a death toll of 50.

However, Basra medical sources report as many as 290 dead and an Iraqi army commander, Maj-Gen Ali Zaidan, said on Friday his forces had killed 120 “enemy” fighters there. He did not give casualty figures for his own soldiers.

Scores of people are believed to have been killed in other southern cities, according to Iraqi police or medical reports.

At least 44 people were killed in and around Kut, 15 in Nasiriya, 12 in Karbala and six in Hilla.

The fighting is blamed on a power struggle between rival Shia factions.

Moqtada Sadr’s followers have in the past rebelled against the US-backed government, although the cleric’s political bloc has backed Mr Maliki’s ruling coalition.

A ceasefire by the Mehdi Army, in place since August 2007 and renewed in February, has been widely credited with reducing sectarian tensions and contributing to the recent overall drop in violence.

Correspondents say Moqtada Sadr’s supporters fear the prime minister – also a Shia – wishes to weaken their movement before local elections due later this year.

In separate developments on Saturday:

• Two US soldiers were killed in eastern Baghdad, the US military said
• Turkey said it had killed 15 Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq in cross-border shelling on Thursday, and carried out air strikes in the area on Friday.

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What Did They Do This For?

I am sickened beyond belief. When I was in high school, I did this paper on “Cloning” and ended up studying ethical perspective of human cloning in much detail. After reading everything, my conclusion was that human cloning should be banned because there is only one real you and nothing, nobody has a right to duplicate that. The unique you is you, that’s all. No need to clone you right. That’s what makes you precious, there is only one of you.

So, I thought, oh scientists would understand that one day; maybe some did and some didn’t. Today, I read this article and man! Its the “Boss of All Scientific Atrocities”. You all got to read this and if you feel like screaming, make sure to close the door to your room. Sheesh! what people do for money! You know as a Human Being, I totally feel violated by this endeavor.

We have a right to be angry at this. A couple of years ago, when they cloned Dolly, some human rights organizations raised some hue and cry. And now they did a”step up” on that and made Cybrids. What’s next? Chimeras?

British Researchers Create Human-Animal Hybrid Embryo Amid Political Row Tue Apr 1, 11:36 PM

LONDON (AFP) – For the first time in Britain, researchers at Newcastle University said Tuesday they had created human-animal hybrid embryos, amid a political row over a disputed embryo research bill in parliament.

According to the northern English university, the research, which was first presented at a lecture in Tel Aviv on March 25, has yet to be published or verified, with a spokesman for the university telling AFP that the institution “wouldn’t claim it to be final at all.”

The revelation comes with British MPs engaged in a fierce battle over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which allows the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for medical research.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s governing Labour Party conceded in March that its party lawmakers with moral or ethical objections would be allowed to vote against parts of the proposed legislation when it comes before parliament this year.

The embryos were created by injecting DNA taken from human skin cells into eggs derived from cow ovaries with almost all their genetic material stripped away, and lasted for three days in a laboratory.

The Newcastle University spokesman said that the research would likely be published in “months rather than weeks”.

At present, researchers wanting to create such embryos have to apply for a license from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which currently regulates the practice in Britain, and hybrid embryos have to be destroyed after 14 days.

The government says that the scientific advantages of allowing the creation of hybrid embryos for research purposes could help millions of people to recover from illness or disease.

Religious leaders, however, have argued against the bill, with the leader of Catholics in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, using his Easter Sunday sermon to brand the bill a “monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life” which will allow experiments of “Frankenstein proportion”.

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Oh well, what were they thinking? And what exactly is the ethical issue behind this scientific endeavor? Given my experience in a Genetics Lab at University of Toronto, I realize that there are more than one way of finding the same answer. Given how unethical this situation is, I say the scientists should simply try to find another way inshaAllah. Where there is a will, there is a way, simple.

 Could Animal-Human Chimeras Be On The Way?

by Nancy L. Jones 

On November 13th 2002, stem cell researchers convened by the New York Academy of Sciences gathered together to probe what vistas could be opened up by human stem cell biology. It has often been stated that once embryonic stem cells are removed from a blastocyst (an embryo at the 64-200 cell stage) and cultured, these cells cannot form a fetus. While that is true in the purest sense, these embryonic stem cells may be used as “building blocks” to make “transgenic” (or “chimeric”) animals. Such a use of embryonic stem cells may be especially attractive to scientists desiring to insert a new gene into the germ line. The stem cell researchers gathered posed the question: How should human embryonic stem cells be used in research? In particular, how much “mixing” between humans and animals should be permitted?

One alleged deficiency of adult stem cells has been their reduced pluripotentiality. Pluripotentiality is the ability of a stem cell to form many tissue types and has been widely touted as the hallmark of embryonic stem cells. However, the essential experiment(s) to prove if human stem cell lines–whether adult or embryonic–are pluripotent have not yet been done. We should do these experiments, right? Before hastily offering an affirmative answer to this question, we must recognize what constitutes the gold standard for proving pluripotency. Stem cells are injected into a developing embryo at the blastocyst stage (the same stage used to isolate embryonic stem cells), and the resulting developing fetus is then examined (usually at autopsy) to determine how many tissues were derived from the injected stem cell lines.

Thankfully, scientists recognize that it would be unethical to do such an experiment with human embryos! However, this recognition leaves us with the prospect of using mice to determine to what extent human stem cells are pluripotent. Can scientists inject human stem cell lines into a mouse blastocyst as a means of discovering how many tissues in the resulting mouse are of human origin? Though this type of experiment has not yet been attempted, it may hypothetically provide a way to produce–in an animal model–complex human tissue, and possibly even organs, needed for therapeutic purposes by replacing all the mouse genetic material in certain tissues with human genetic material. Until such an experiment is actually conducted, there is no way of knowing if human stem cells could even produce tissue in a mouse, if such tissue would grow normally and function, or if all types of animal tissue could be converted to human tissue (the intriguing question emerges here of whether we would feel differently about human stem cells that contributed to the liver, rather than, say, to the brain). In the face of such ambiguity, the overarching ethical question is: Should we even begin these types of experiments?

For twenty years, transgenic mice containing human genes in their genomes have been scurrying about in laboratory cages. These human genes were placed into the mouse genome and passed on to subsequent mice generations. However, several technical obstacles have limited the amount of human genes that are expressed in a mouse: only a few human genes could be successfully inserted into the mouse genome at a time without interrupting essential mouse gene functions or creating a fatal combination. This may not be the end of the story, though, as the wedding of human embryonic stem cell biology and mouse developmental biology may allow for the creation of even more fascinating–and more mixed–human-mouse chimeras. Human stem cells could potentially be placed in a mouse embryo with the result that human genetic material alone would drive developing “human” tissues and organs in a mouse.

What principles may Christians invoke to guide them in formulating a response to the possibility of such animal-human chimeras? Some concern should certainly be expressed for the experimental animal’s suffering; however, Christians do believe that they have been given stewardship over animals and are permitted to use them to benefit humanity. Another concern would be zoonotic transmission of disease, which occurs when pathogens cross the traditional species barriers of disease transmission. When human and animal tissues are intertwined so closely, potential mutations of once species-specific pathogens may gain a unique ability to infect organisms of other species. A more fundamental Christian concern involves violation of the divinely created order. The Bible tells us that God designed procreation so that plants, animals, and humans always reproduce after their own kind or seed. (Gen 1:11-12, 21) In the biblical view, then, species integrity is defined by God, rather than by arbitrary or evolutionary forces. The fusion of animal-human genomes runs counter to the sacredness of human life and man created in the image of God.

The creation of animal-human chimeras as a means of deriving human tissue and organs highlights the deeper issues facing our generation: the new biological genomic revolution and the resultant power that may permit scientists to redesign various species and biological life. We must not allow such an ability to outstrip the ethical analysis that must accompany it. CBHD

Editor’s Note: The story referenced in this article is “Human-Rodent a Reality?” which can be found at http://www.health24.co (Accessed January 2, 2003). For further information, see also “Scientists Produce Viable Pig and Goat Sperm from Mice” in Denver Post.

Nancy L. Jones is Fellow at The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity and Associate Professor of Pathology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

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