Worldly soultions through drunken discourse
1st October, 2006
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Watching politicians grapple with the thorny issue of stem cell research has been fun. Anything vaguely concerning ethics seems to send the into a spin. Luckily they were able to take a quick break from the debate to vote themselves a pay rise. Must have been a relief. Now they can get back to worrying about the sort of stuff the rest of us don't get paid to think about and don't get a say in deciding. We just do it for free.
Anyway, let's admit it: no one, bar a handful of scientists, really understands how the end results of jiggling about with stem cells really differs from the end results of genetic engineering. Which may be controversial, but we've been doing that for years and look at all the neat things it's brought us - funny T-shirts, computer-generated pictures of possible new animals and lots of excellent pub-based ideas about how to take advantage of the technology. One day I'm going to take a tape recorder to the pub and transcribe any random conversation. Lots of what you hear in pubs is just brilliant and if you could remember it the next day you could probably transform modern literature and advance our scientific aims by decades. Some topics are just made for bars: reminiscing about really bad hit songs of the past; speculating about who's bonking who at the office; starting vicious arguments about pointless moral questions; and inventing good uses for genetic engineering. Mud crabs could be crossed with cattle. They'd live in neat herds in paddocks planted with mangroves and be rounded up regularly. Better, if they were crossed with dairy cows, they'd line themselves up and just walk into buckets. I am indebted for this idea to colleague Mitchell Walker, who is sick of failing to outsmart Moreton Bay's crabs. More striped vegetables would be a good thing. Remember when rainbow chard first popped up in the supermarkets three or four years ago? (Looks like silverbeet with pink and orange and red and yellow stalks - very pretty.) It was such a compelling-looking vegetable that for a while it seemed like anyone with any cooking pretensions was serving it - until everyone worked out it is in fact a profoundly boring piece of greenery (or pinkery, or orangery). There used to be striped tomatoes and zucchinis and even carrots before science made them all boring uniform colours. Those glow-in-the-dark mice some genius produced by adding a splash of jellyfish were sort of cute. More to the point, wouldn't it be great if they made glow-in-the-dark trees so after they were pulped you could find the end of the toilet paper without turning on the bathroom light? If cats and dogs were crossed, dogs could get a dose of brains and cats could get a dose of compassion. And famous people could lend their names to their own lines of food. They could donate some hair or saliva, have their DNA crossed with something useful and voilą! Germaine Greer bananas! Shane Warne pork! Meanwhile, what if the nation's politicians stopped pretending to be grappling with important issues and just turned parliament over to pub conversation? Question Time would be a whole lot more interesting if the two sides argued over the relative merits of having a bionic arm or leg, or whether a single dead cow in a dam can contaminate the entire water source or just the water closest to the cow, or whether women feel more pain than men. Or whose DNA you'd combine to breed the perfect politician. |
