The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Down here in the start-up labs of the South End we’ve been printing DNA. Got ourselves some sterile vats full of 4 major amino acid groups, hooked em up to a 3-D printer, ran a USB port to a laptop and went to work experimenting with interesting combinations. Make our own stem cells with unusual variations of chromosomes, another year or two, you’ll see Wal-Mart offering kits for the kids. Make your own sibling! Puppy in a test tube! Fun for the whole family!

Course we’re still working out the bugs, literally sometimes. South Endomex Technologies made a fast mutating paramecium that ran rampant in the dumpster behind their lab a couple months ago. Two or three cats lost more than their allotted 9 lives before Billy Brandon, the night manager, noticed clumps of matted fur behind the building and alerted Frank, South Endomex’s project manager next morning. “Looked like they’d been turned inside out and twisted,” he whispered before giving notice.

Kind of a wake-up call, I guess. They double bag unwanted recombinants now, no point taking unnecessary chances. Not that anyone’s very worried. I mean, what are the odds of escaped life forms surviving in the hostile environment of the nettled South End? Humans barely eke out an existence, what chance does an unstable pile of amino acids have?

Still, always good to err on the side of caution even if the government hasn’t gotten around to clamping down on the profit motive with overly burdensome regulations.     Yet….     Which only makes us all that more inventive. Time, after all, is not on our side. But judging by the influx of venture capital, the potential is nearly unlimited. Forget Silicon Valley. This here is the Next Big Thing. This is the new Garden of Eden, a chance to get it right this time. You want an apple, Adam? Tart or sweet? Red or yellow? With or without seeds? Just punch a program, Big Fella, no need to disobey orders from On High. But … maybe keep an eye out for any odd looking worms. Still got some flies in the ointment….

No doubt you were as cheered as me recently to hear the news that a lab had successfully cloned a monkey. Human clones can’t be far behind. Probably all Kardashians. Or maybe Lottery winners. Sure not going to pick genes from losers. It’s a treat to live in a Brave New World. Clones, artificial intelligence, robots, drones, Facebook, cellphones, heated car seats — the future sure looks bright!

What I think is the genie’s out of the jar and he’s not granting three wishes. The guy who cloned the chimps said he can’t imagine cloning humans, too dangerous given the high failure rate. Monkeys okay, they can use them as experiments and save the ‘real’ ones. I’m kind of wondering what happened to the ‘failures’. Did they live, any of them? The humans? Will we keep the botched clones? Will we make a separate category of Homo Sapien? Can we expel them as illegal immigrants? Would you let your daughter marry one? Dr. Frankenstein is working on one now, you know it, I know it, Igor knows it. Just a matter of time before he succeeds, less for him to fail, then we get to make decisions afterwards.

Will we use them as the new scapegoats? Make them use separate bathrooms? Substitute them for crash test dummies? All kinds of great potential. Personally, I figure we’ll opt for bright robots. Cloned people? Passe’. Be like buying eight tracks over I-pods, maybe a nostalgia market, but not real big. And of course, the narcissists. Breed a few more of themselves. Nothing in the constitution yet that says multiple Donald Trumps can’t run for president.