• Log in with Facebook Log in with Twitter Log In with Google      Sign In    
  • Create Account
  LongeCity
              Advocacy & Research for Unlimited Lifespans

Photo

Randolfe (Randy) Wicker


  • Please log in to reply
3 replies to this topic

#1 Bruce Klein

  • Guardian Founder
  • 8,794 posts
  • 242
  • Location:United States

Posted 14 December 2003 - 02:42 AM


RANDY WICKER wrote:

>Actually I worked all day yesterday on an article entitled:

"Cloning: A First Step Towards Immortality"

I have printed out your detailed formatting guidelines and now jus thave to rewrite and put in the footnotes in the proper fashion. Cloningly yours,

Randy Wicker



About Randy:


Posted Image

[sfty] I am a newly retired 65-year-old lifelong activist spanning many issues: gay liberation, abortion rights, civil rights, legalize marijuana, anti-Vietnam War and in recent years, reproductive human cloning.

My home web site is http://www.clonerights.com but I am also affiliated with www.reproductivecloning.net and http://www.humancloning.org. Since the 1960s I have been interested in cryonics and life extension. I view these issues as very cutting edge issues in today's social debate.


http://imminst.org/f...&f=75&t=2271&s=

Edited by caliban, 13 January 2004 - 11:36 PM.


#2 Bruce Klein

  • Topic Starter
  • Guardian Founder
  • 8,794 posts
  • 242
  • Location:United States

Posted 10 January 2004 - 06:26 PM

RANDY WICKER wrote:

> I had a bit of a fright today. My computer would not start up. I called my computer person (totally undependable) and finally discovered that my computer was not plugged in correctly.

Ah.. I know the feeling.

> So, I have been rescued from the brink of disaster. I have written the first draft of my essay for your book project. I have to make some changes. I repeat myself (having written this essay over several weeks)
> I also have to supply the footnotes for my testimony to Congress and other things. However, I am now in desperate fear that my computer won't boot up. Your book deadline is the most looming thing in my life for the next week or so. Therefore, I am going to attach my crude in-need-of-editing submission, so if I can't turn on my computer for the next few days, I am not left out of the rush.


Good plan.. thanks for submitting the draft now...


> I have also thought that perhaps your book might be a venue for a chapter (not yet totally finished but invitingly spectacular) from my book about my adventures printing "Clone Jesus" buttons. Not sure I want to go that route. Have considered holding b ack and using Slate or Salon as a venue. The Chapter is not finished but it certainly has "that spark". So, I will send you my unedited (to be updated) submission entitled "Cloning: The First Step Toward Immortality".


Thanks! I'll forward your submission to the editing team... feel free to submit any edits you make. The editing team will be in contact over the coming months.

> Not for publication, I will send you my "Clone Jesus" chapter. If you think you would be interested in the latter on a "limited permission" basis, I could try to finish it.


Sounds quite interesting. Also know that because of good response, we will create more books going forward.

Warm Regards,
Bruce

#3 Bruce Klein

  • Topic Starter
  • Guardian Founder
  • 8,794 posts
  • 242
  • Location:United States

Posted 10 January 2004 - 06:28 PM

Attached below.. word doc.

CLONING: THE STEPPING STONE TO IMMORTALITY
By Randolfe H. Wicker

Theologians frequently attack human cloning as a vain egotistical attempt to achieve immortality on the part of those being cloned. As a cloning activist, I have to disavow such intentions for tactical reasons. Allowing cloning to be equated with a quest for immortality frames this multifaceted issue in mainly theological terms.

Irrational as it may be, desiring immortality is viewed as morally reprehensible by the same religious institutions built upon God’s promise of the same. Theologians equate cloning with attempted immortality because they are the recognized authorities when it comes to immortality in general. Immortality is moral only if it comes from God. Immortality sought by mortals is sacrilegious. Anyone seeking immortality in a laboratory instead of in a church is playing God.

They see the connection. Cloning is to immortality what a trip to the Moon is to colonizing the universe. It is a small but necessary step toward the larger goal. More importantly, cloning proves the total rejuvenation of even an aged adult cell is possible.

Two New York Times articles, Science Section, 11/17/98, announced: “Immortality Of a Sort Beckons To Biologists” (by Nicholas Wade) and “Experts See Immortality in Endlessly Dividing Cells”.

Stem cells are gotten by cultivating an embryo into a culture before the individual cells start to differentiate around the fourteenth day. To have a stem cell culture to produce healing tissues for a patient, an embryo would have to be cloned from the patient’s cell. This is termed “therapeutic cloning” and is viewed favorably by the overwhelming majority (65%-70%) of the same public that disapproves of reproductive cloning in even greater numbers (75%-85%).

Mortals and immortalists alike have embraced stem cell regeneration. Therapeutic cloning and stem cell therapies are universally viewed as the new promising frontier of medicine. Whatever ails you; proponents insist, can be repaired, rebuilt or cured with stem cells. Critics maintain embryonic stem cell therapies have been unrealistically hyped and that concrete results will take decades to achieve.

Regardless of the time frame involved, everyone agrees that the essential secrets to regenerating aging human tissues lie in embryonic stem cell research. Some experts believe enough stem cell lines will make creating individual stem cell cultures unnecessary because compatible stem cell lines will already exist.

Embryo-centric theologians seek to confuse the reproductive cloning and stem cell debates. To avoid confronting the great public sympathy for stem cell therapies, they insist they “support stem cell research”. Of course, that’s “adult stem cell research” which doesn’t necessitate the destruction of an embryo. Adult stem cells are found in various parts of every human body. However, adult stem cells are difficult to find and have limited ability to transform themselves into other tissues.

Right-to-Life advocates develop their own confusing terminology when attacking the cloning of embryos and cultivating those embryos into cures for a patient. “Life should not be created,” they declare in one frequently repeated mantra during radio and television debates, “to be strip-mined for body parts.”

Who could take issue with that statement? If you can’t win a debate on substance, you do it by changing terminology and creating sound bites.

This same semantic sleight of hand takes place in the terminology used by those advocating cryonics. The dead are called patients. In fact, they are not dead at all. They are simply suspended or cryo-preserved.

Truth is always in the eye of the beholder. Once a “truth” has been embraced, terminology is simply another means of defining and defending it. Sound bites are the real weapons in today’s debates.

Journalists use shorthand preconceptions to simplify complicated issues. Immortalists will be asked if “they are playing God” or even be accused of attempting to do so. How does one explain they “do not wish to be an imposter of a mythical being”?

Real immortality is hard to sell even in a society swamped with religions promising it. Marvin Minsky noted during an appearance promoting The New Humanists on Book-TV that ordinary people almost always answered “no” when asked if they would like to live for five-hundred years. Even when their first rationale of “not wanting to be so decrepit” was assuaged with a promise of “just living on without aging”, they still answered “no”. They felt living would ultimately become boring.

Minsky reported that he got totally different answers from scientists. They almost universally embraced the idea of greatly extended lifetimes because they had “goals”. They had projects requiring more time to complete, more questions they wanted to find answers for.

Cloning activists face the same accusation that they are “playing God” by either “creating life” or by “seeking immortality”. Since sixty percent of the American public believes that religious belief is necessary for moral values, I choose to sidestep that issue. I identify myself quite accurately as “a lapsed Catholic” and/or “a mystical skeptic”.

Contrary to public misperception, cloning is not the creation of a new life but is simply passing an existing spark of life along to a new entity. Cloning could be said to originate in agriculture. Whenever one puts a cutting into the ground, one is cloning a plant. Actually, cloning was originally an agricultural term.

Likewise, a cloning activist is deemed to be seeking immortality even if you deny doing so. I explicitly told reporters from Time Magazine (2/19/2001) that I did not see cloning as a pathway to immortality.

In fact, I used all those arguments used against me at The Immortality Institute www.imminst.org . My later-born twin would NOT be me. I would NOT live on and see life through his eyes. He would NOT have my memories. My later-born twin would be a unique and different human being.

TIME described me as a gay man whose frustrated desire to reproduce had increased with age, who knew “that a clone would not be a photocopy of him”. Taking literary license, they continued: “And then he hints at the heart of his motive. ‘I can thumb my nose at Mr. Death and say,’ You might get me, but you’re not going to get all of me.’ He says. ‘The special formula that is me will live on into another lifetime. It’s a partial triumph over death. I would leave my imprint not in sand but in cement.’”

Then TIME turned to bioethicist Arthur Caplan who declared: “Cloning can’t make you immortal because clearly the clone is a different person. If I take twins and shoot one of them, it will be faint consolation to the dead one that the other one is still running around, even though they are genetically identical. So the road to immortality is not through cloning.”

You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t seek immortality.

One wonders what organized religion will do once the first cryonics patient is restored to a healthy life? Would even attempting to revive someone preserved through cryonics be considered sinful? Would there be charges such activity was an attack on the dignity of human life? Would it be even more sinful if a later-born twin of the deceased was the one attempting or insisting on such revival? My crystal ball is my political life experience as a reproductive human cloning activist.

Cloning and cryonics are linked in several essential ways. Life at a cellular level can be cryo-preserved. Cryonics is necessary to clone someone who is deceased. Cells, even in full body form, stored for cloning purposes validates cryonicists’ claims of being guardians of suspended life.

Cryonics and cloning are today’s two most fundamental cutting-edge renegade sciences. Their common enemies are Right-to-lifers and bioethicist deathists. The enemies of science, those who would cripple medicine, are our common enemy.


I view seeking immortality as “dreaming the impossible dream”. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a most basic and laudable human aspiration. If life is about living, then immortality is certainly the goal of the well-lived life.

I guess I am a conservative immortalist. I see life as being a marvelous to-be-desired-forever state. However, I also see people being burned to death, blown into multiple pieces, etc. in the daily news reports.

At the risk of being accused of sedition, I say being mortal means one must face the reality that one’s life will possibly or probably end someday. I don’t like the idea but that doesn’t keep me from accepting it.

Perhaps, that is why I am willing to settle for the only true immortality physically possible at this time, having my genotype live on into other lifetimes through cloning.

“ Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.” I might imaginarily say to a Roman Catholic priest, still technically being Roman Catholic since I was confirmed in that faith. “I have embraced a ‘partial temporary immortality’ to escape oblivion.”

I testified to Congress, in 1998 and 2001, essentially, as follows: “Religiously based restrictions have no place in the law. They violate religious freedom. Those who believe cloning offers a partial temporary immortality, have the right to to secure an extended life for their own genotype.

“Human cloning does change at least, slightly, the traditionally clear line between life and death. If even after death, a later-born identical twin can be born, carrying the originator’s genotype into another life, doesn’t that somehow deny death its traditional totality?

“Already, the Raelians –with whom I have no association whatsoever- are virtually preaching eternal or extended life through cloning. In the years ahead, religious beliefs such as these are likely to proliferate.” (1)


During my second appearance, I added: “You don’t have the right to tell me I have to die completely. An appropriate phrase might be:,’ Right to Life equals Right to Clone.’” (2)

While I might be accused of stealing a slogan or label from religious conservatives who oppose cloning, I have to commend them for a certain consistency. Every time someone supporting right-to-life calls during a radio appearance I ask them: “Well, once my later born twin brother is on the way, will you join me in fighting for his right-to-life?”

“Yeah, man. Absolutely!” has always been the response. See, shift a debate properly and your enemy becomes your ally. What would Roman Catholics do with a woman pregnant with a child conceived through cloning? Abortion is against their religion.


While many of those involved might object, I see those who embrace immortality, cryonics, extreme life extension, etc. as being the latest offshoots of a scientifically-based life-affirming belief system.

Most self-identified organized atheists rabidly object to my description of atheism as the World’s Oldest Religion. Ironically, the Raelians who view being cloned as the reward for a life well lived, describe themselves as “an atheist religion”. Traditional Christians put Secular Humanists into the same category. Even the Pope called Buddhism “an atheist religion”.

My favorite definition of Unitarians describes them as “atheists who like to take their kids to church”.

There are small groups of atheists who share my viewpoint. They are a persecuted minority within their own faith. Likewise, there are some cryonicists who recognize that their beliefs about life and death constitute a new religion. They call themselves The Society for Venturism www.venturist.org

Since I don’t worry about where I was when Columbus discovered America and have only dim hopes of living to see Earthlings colonize Mars, I take great delight in the current proliferation of scientifically based life-view rational religions. Religion is greatly improved once God is removed.

Indeed, there have been times when I have owned up to the strange reality of my own life: that cloning had really become my religion. I can only compare the experience of having this concept take over my life as comparable to what religious folk describe as having “a calling”. I do not exaggerate. I have neglected my business, spent tens of thousands of dollars, and have had my life consumed by this strange obscure cause. I can’t tell you why it happened. I can only tell you that it really did happen.

Hopefully, Immortalists will establish another branch of this rapidly proliferating belief that science can replace God and humankind can seize control of its own destiny.

Dr. Lee Silver, a professor at Princeton and author of Remaking Eden, points out that human beings took control of their own evolution once they were able to achieve conception outside the womb with in-vitro-fertilization (IVF).

I found it interesting that a poll I took about religious beliefs found nearly all Immortalists were atheists, agnostics or secular humanists. Buddhism scored about 4% which seems to validate the Pope’s assertion.

So, welcome to the 21st Century. FM 20/30, whose brain is cryo-preserved at Alcor described himself as “a man of the 21st Century who just happened to be born in the 20th Century”.

That quote, in his New York Times obituary, turned me into an FM 20/30 fan even though I hadn’t yet read any of his books. I understood exactly how he felt. After all, as the world’s first human cloning activist, I understood what being born before your time was all about.

Cloningly yours,

Randolfe H. Wicker
Founder, Clone Rights United Front, www.clonerights.com
Spokesperson, Reproductive Cloning Network, www.reproductivecloning.net
Member, The Immortality Institute, www.imminst.org


(1) “CLONING; LEGAL, MEDICAL, ETHICAL, AND SOCIAL ISSUES”
“COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES’
February 12, 1998
Serial No. 105-70

(2) “ISSUES RAISED BY HUMAN CLONING RESEARCH”
“COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND COMMERCE, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES”
March 28, 2001
Serial No. 107-5

Attached Files



#4 caliban

  • Admin, Advisor, Director
  • 9,150 posts
  • 581
  • Location:UK

Posted 01 February 2004 - 05:40 PM

Dear Mr. Wicker

Many thanks for proposing your article "Cloning: A First Step Towards Immortality" for inclusion into the Immortality Institute book project.
After reviewing scores of entries and arranging a common theme for the book, we regret to inform you that the inclusion of your article would not quite fit the current outline.
The reviewers felt that the idea how human reproductive cloning would interlink with efforts for actual scientific life extension was not developed sufficiently. Also the reasoning of the article seemed not quite structured enough to fit with the overall style of the book.
It does not seem likely that even an altered version would be accepted.

Nonetheless we would like to thank you for sharing this extremely interesting article. We understand that you have been elected an Institute advisor, and we might have to rely on your expertise in reproductive cloning and PR very soon.
As you know, we are already considering further publications. It would be our pleasure to invite you to participate again when the opportunity presents itself.

Best wishes
The Immortality Institute editors group




1 user(s) are reading this topic

0 members, 1 guests, 0 anonymous users