But patenting of human genes will escalate these issues, as best-selling author Michael Crichton

pointed out a while back in a piece for the New York Times titled Patenting Life, in which

he claimed that people could die in the future from not being able to afford medical treatment

as a result of medicines owned by patent holders

of specific genes related to the genetic makeup of those persons.

Former Special Counsel for President Richard Nixon, Charles Colson added, quote,

the patenting of genes and other human tissues has already begun to turn human nature into property.

The misuse of genetic information will enable insurers and employers to exercise the ultimate form of discrimination.

Meanwhile, advances in nanotechnology and cybernetics threaten to enhance and one day perhaps

rival or replace human nature itself in what some thinkers are already calling transhumanism.

Number three, human cloning.

The prospect of human cloning was raised in the 90s immediately after the creation of the

much-celebrated Dolly, a female domestic sheep clone.

Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned using somatic cell nuclear transfer, which involves removing the DNA from an

unfertilized egg and replacing the nucleus of it with the DNA that is to be cloned.

Now today, a version of that science is common practice in genetic engineering labs worldwide, where therapeutic

cloning of human and animal embryos is employed for stem cell harvesting. The stem cells,

in turn, are used to separate virtually any type of specialized cell in the human body.

But that type of cloning was in the news again when it emerged from William J. Clinton

Presidential Center documents that the newest members of the Supreme Court, while at that

time, Atlanta Kagan, had opposed during the Clinton White House any effort by Congress

to prevent humans from being cloned specifically for experimental purposes.

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