Pork–the possibly cloned white meat. “Jon Fisher, owner of Prairie State Semen Inc. of Champaign, Ill., paid a then-record $43,000 in 1997 for a beautiful Hampshire boar at an auction in Texas,” writes Justin Gillis in the Washington Post (September 16). “The new animal, much in demand, greatly elevated Fisher’s reputation in the world of pig breeders. He named the boar 401-K, after the retirement account.” In 2001 the boar suddenly died, and it was several hours before Fisher could “salvage ear cells and ship them off to Infigen Inc. of DeForest, Wis., one of a handful of American companies offering cloning services to breeders.” The company came through, and “Fisher now has six clones of 401-K and one of The Man, another champion boar….Some offspring of Fisher’s clones are likely to wind up in the food supply.”
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Oh yeah, he’s a mistake. Leon Kass, a social-thought professor at the University of Chicago, writes in the November/December American Spectator: “Not long ago, at my own university, a physician making rounds with medical students stood over the bed of an intelligent, otherwise normal ten-year-old boy with spina bifida. ‘Were he to have been conceived today,’ the physician casually informed his entourage, ‘he would have been aborted.’ Determining who shall live and who shall die–on the basis of genetic merit–is a godlike power already wielded by genetic medicine.”
