Elves live forever

Right now I'm reading a book I brought with me...it's an ethics report on how drugs and biotechnology is changing life...the report is from the President's council on ethics, and probably written by Leon Kass, since it has the same style and delicate sociological thinking that reminds me of what Kass has written in other books...

I bring this up because we are reading of human cloning.
LINK
Of course, as I noted in previous posts, the dirty little secret is that if you clone, or use the few stem cells from an embryo, you don't have many cells, so you have to grow them...and if you grow too many generations, they have a tendency toward turning cancerous; adult stem cells, since the numbers obtained are higher, don't have to be grown as much and have not shows this problem as much
.
Second problem no one talks about is the "sorcerer's apprentice" problem: How do you turn them off? Tranplants to parkinson's patients using embryo brain cells ended up overgrowing...

Then you have THIS...

Placing the mind on a computer? Sounds like Startrek...but is the mind the soul? (There is an old SciFi novel where this was done, and the reborn person was soulless...on the other hand, in Cordwainer Smith's story the dead lady of Clown town, the robot had no soul but had the compassion and personality of the dead lady)....

When cloning etc. is discussed, it is in the language of the modern Holy Grail...if you oppose it, you are evil, because you are keeping sick people from getting well...which is nonsense, of course, because those saying this rarely bring up SUCESSFUL experiments with adult stem cells...

The question that needs to be publically discussed is what Kass' book attempts to do: when we experiment blithely with early human life, does it harden our world against the vulnerable? And what changes will we cause by our search for perfection and immortality? Already those birthing children with Down's syndrome meet with nasty questions why their children were not aborted...and one suspects the next step will be worse...one mother of a retarded child noted of some of her child's doctors: "They are the type of doctor who see my beloved autistic child, and can see only a potential organ donor"...

Science Fiction discusses this; Cordwainer Smith, with his immortal men and under people (half human half animal slaves) discusses this in a serious way...as does the more famous "Brave New World".
And the background of Tolkien's worlds is, of course, the revolt against limitations and change and mortality by both men and elves. The Ring in LOTR is not power, nor addiction: It is the promise of eternal life....and as Tolkien has said, the technology of a kindly Saruman with the Ring would be "more humane" but ultimately more dangerous to what is truly human than the obvious evil of Sauron...

our shiny promise of immortality might not be as wonderful in the long run as it seems....