"Human beings can be born without natural parents," wrote the physician, astrologer and alchemist Paracelsus in his treatise "De Natura Rerum". "In other words, these creatures can grow up without being matured and born of a female body - through the skill of a skilled alchemist."
Thus, in parallel with artificial insemination, a direction was developed that assumed the possibility of creating a person asexually. Later this method of obtaining people will be called "in virto", "from a test tube."
There is a legend according to which Paracelsus raised homunculi, for which he was persecuted. Most scientists completely deny this possibility.
However, even Moleschott, Liebig and Goethe believed in the possibility of artificial creation of people.
There is historical evidence that suggests that in some cases, such experiments have led to success. In 1775, Count von Kuefstein in Tyrol gave birth to certain creatures, which he called "spirits." The assistant to the aforementioned count left diaries, from which it followed that as a result of alchemical experiments, ten human entities were obtained in sealed bottles.
The spirits swam in these huge bottles and were about 23 cm in size. Later the creatures grew to about 35 cm, they showed secondary sexual characteristics (men have beards). The count fed these creatures every three or four days with some substance in the form of balls the size of a pea, once a week he changed the water in bottles to pure rainwater.
In the air, the "spirits" lost consciousness. These "genies in bottles" were used during Masonic meetings for divination. These predictions were usually confirmed, which is attested by Masonic manuscripts and books, to which, for example, the German physician Franz Hartmann, who left us with the biography of Paracelsus, refers.
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Further events with the spirits are completely detective in nature.
One of the homunculi ("monk") died when the bottle accidentally broke. The second ("king") escaped from his bottle, but was caught and put in place. The frightened count, who brought all this devilry to life, began to atone for sins and save his soul. He later got rid of the homunculi by destroying them.
There are still witnesses of this experiment - well-known personalities of that time in history. According to their testimony, the homunculi possessed visible and tangible bodies, spoke and acted like humans. If the information given in the records is suddenly correct, then this case remains, perhaps, an unsolved secret of a successful search for an artificial creation of a person or a humanoid creature.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, there were legends about artificial people appearing here and there, who served their masters, met guests, etc. It is said that once Rousseau (or Voltaire) visited a certain monk friend. At the garden gate, the guest was greeted by a man who accompanied him home. Something strange seemed in the movements and voice of the "servant", in which a mechanical man was then revealed. Enraged by the master's blasphemy, the guest smashed the mechanical servant to pieces with his cane and left in anger. Perhaps one of the first biorobots died this way.
The Austrian writer Meirink called one of these creations, allegedly created by man, Golem. Created on the street of Alchemists in old Prague, in the Jewish ghetto, this creature was the embodiment of the oldest Jewish beliefs in the possibility of creating artificial people, captured in the Talmud, Torah, Kabbalah.
The golem was a wax man, created from time immemorial and occasionally appearing in the Jewish quarter. The golem terrified people. This is the legend.
This legend focuses on the dream of people, preserved in esoteric books, about the repetition of the act of divine creation of the human mind. Mechanical people subsequently found brilliant embodiment in robots that moved, talked, taught, worked. They had an anthropomorphic appearance.
In 1933, the robot lecturer became famous in the United States. He could unbutton his shirt, expose the transparent ribcage and abdomen, and give a 20-minute lecture on the structure and function of human organs. It was a completely anthropomorphic robot, mystically inheriting from people their main vice - aggressiveness and the ability to destroy.
The robot killed its creator. When he tried to improve its design, the steel "hand" of the machine suddenly fell on the inventor's head. The designer died in the hospital from a skull injury.
Virtual reality is a reality created with the help of computers and modern electronics, video technology, engineering psychology and physiology. This is a complete imitation of the properties of the surrounding world. With the advent of neurocomputers, a real opportunity arose to almost completely simulate the work of the human brain. Although a neurocomputer is an ordinary machine consisting of microcircuits, it is very intelligent and even surpasses a human in speed, ability to discriminate and recognize, and analyze the situation.
Using neural computer networks, specialists create programs to identify galaxies, diagnose diseases, optimize banking operations, and predict scientific search strategies.
But perhaps the most striking in the application of computerization to model the human mind and its other properties and functions is the possibility of programming a virtual person being discussed today. In one version, it looks like this. Suppose that with the help of the latest biophysiological and medical-cybernetic technology, it was possible to remove the physiological parameters of the human brain of a newborn.
Introduced into a computer and further evolving according to a certain program (symbolizing the growth and development of an "organism"), they will eventually lead to the emergence of artificial intelligence, similar to natural. A human phantom may appear in the computer version. He will think, it will be possible to communicate with him, he will have age, character, temperament.
In principle, the "virtual man" will be similar in everything to the legendary "spirits" of Count von Kufstein from Tyrol or the homunculi of Paracelsus, but in this case he will be confined not in a bottle of water, but in the electronic "environment" of a computer. A virtual person is "grown" in the electronic bowels of a computer in a completely real time scale, "growing" and "developing" into an adult in parallel with the natural prototype (however, everything depends on the program, and there may be accelerated development).
In April 1994, a special commission of the US Congress decided to familiarize the public with a unique experiment on scanning the human brain (it was about a baby named Sid, doomed to death). The scanned data was entered into a so-called cluster computer - a network of personal computers throughout the country.
The information taken from the neurons of the brain healed in the electronic Through the Looking Glass with its own life, developing in accordance with the program laid down by the experimenters. The virtual child (the real one died shortly after the experiment), “grown up” to the age of three, allegedly even communicated with his parents through the multimedia systems and holographic equipment equipped in the house.
Three-dimensional computer models of people are being successfully created. They already serve as a guide for doctors. Virtual people can be given movement, the ability to act, and conversation. In this way, already dead artists and scientists can be "revived".
Therefore, visually and acoustically, artificial computer humans have already been created. It is expected that in the foreseeable future there may be communication with the virtual world at the level of tactile sensations, smells, and taste. Science fiction writers have written about computer sex with virtual partners. This has now become a reality. Reality has surpassed the dreams of alchemists about an artificial intelligent anthropomorphic creature.
The "in virto" direction does not die either. Such studies are carried out in many countries. The pioneer of this direction in our time was the Italian explorer Petruchio.
In the middle of the 20th century, Petruchio conducted experiments that became a sensation at that time. He managed to grow a human embryo in a test tube to the point where it is born. The question arose about what to do next. Science was silent for now.
Raising a fully artificial person is extremely difficult, and Petruchio was forced to interrupt the experiment. The press of those years wrote a lot about this promising undertaking, while the Church reacted extremely negatively to the experiments. It was believed that such an embryo could not have a soul.
Petruchio's experiments were further developed in attempts to grow a living organism using lower animals: fish, frogs, and warm-blooded animals such as sheep and rabbits. Paracelsus' idea of growing an organism from one cell turned out to be productive. It has been confirmed by genetic research.
However, if in Paracelsus a living organism was to be obtained from a male seed, then according to modern views this is possible from almost any cell of the body, not necessarily a sexual one. Each cell of the body, according to geneticists, carries a full set of hereditary information.
The whole question is how to make it work. It turns out that if you “cut off” one single cell, say, from the skin of a finger, then even from this seemingly genetically neutral substance you can grow an embryo.
Further, the heads of the researchers began to spin! The prospect of the repetition of an innumerable number of individuals of the same creature, say, a person, has opened up. In the fantasies of scientists and uneducated men, alluring distances were drawn to receive hundreds of Einsteins, Galileans, etc. If only there were, somehow, the cells of great people remained. Someone already thought about the revival of the Fuhrer, and not in a single copy. In short, the latest genetics and genetic engineering promised humanity a complete revolution in human reproduction.
Real experiments on sheep have confirmed the fundamental possibility of such fantasies. Sensational experiments, information about which went around the whole world, were carried out in 1996 in England. The embryo of a Welsh mountain sheep was taken. Thousands of cells from this embryo have been isolated. Some of them were placed in a special solution. Then each of these cells was implanted into an unfertilized ovum of a sheep, from which gene-carrying chromosomes were removed. That is, the ovum served only as a nutrient material.
Currently, British researchers have already managed to obtain a pair of genetically identical lambs, which have gone down in the history of modern genetics under the names Magen and Morag. These experiments are called cloning.
Artificial insemination not only of animals, but also of people, it seems, really has prospects in the coming civilization. This method of growing people was most widespread in the United States. True, the bottles of Paracelsus are not used, but the sperm of men is necessary.
Some celebrities in America, it turns out, regularly donate this valuable product to some secret semen bank. The names of the donors are hidden. Women are very willing to use this simple, hassle-free (no need to serve a man, cook, wash socks, etc.), but get pregnant in an expensive way.
The artificial insemination program involves not only men, but also women. Eggs are taken from the latter and fertilized when necessary, then implanted back into the donor woman. The most amazing thing is that the fertilized egg on the side can be injected into another woman. An infertile woman can thus "buy herself a child in the bud" and bear it.
Let us welcome the persistent striving of science to unravel the mysteries of human birth and accept its attempts to create an artificial thinking, rational being. In this process, biological, machine, genetic, cybernetic, computer and other methods of "creation of intelligence" have closed.
What will prevail, electronic or biological method of obtaining artificial people and human intelligence? Or will they merge into some kind of bioelectronic version? There are signs of such convergence as well. And then the emergence of a fundamentally new offspring of future supermen is not excluded. People are biologically and intellectually more perfect. People from the Electronic Biological Through the Looking Glass.
In the meantime, experiments and experiments continue. And, as always, the Americans were again "ahead" of the whole planet.
Richard Seed, for example, promises to put people on the “photocopying” stream. After the first experiments, the success of which Syd has no doubts, it is planned to produce up to 200 thousand cloned people a year. The doctor allegedly has already found helpers for himself and, moreover, recruited volunteers - childless couples who are ready "just" for several hundred thousand dollars to get a cloned child.
Alarmed by this development of events, psychologists and philosophers, physicians and politicians, theologians and legal scholars are crossing polemical swords, and parliaments of different countries and international organizations are preparing laws prohibiting technological human reproduction. Are the fears too exaggerated?
Of course, the experience of Edinburgh scientists on cloning Dolly the sheep was interesting, but they had to do 277 procedures to achieve the only positive result. The marriage rate is too high, many sheep died in utero, others were born with severe deformities, with damage to various organs and systems. It is unworthy to even experiment on animals for nothing, and even if we are talking about human cells …
Sid, if taken for authenticity, is going with his company to get a technological semblance of people endowed not only with somatics, but also with the psyche, emotional sphere, and intellect. When they talk about exact copying, this is a catchword.
You can only create the likeness of another person. Spiritual image, moral categories are formed in other ways - in interaction with parents, social environment, etc. If this is a "human copier", then, continuing the metaphor, we can say that it is a black and white copier from a color original, the form is the same, and the whole gamut is missing.
This venture, again, if you believe her, is not so much immoral or immoral as an adventure. As for experiments with cloning, this is still a poorly performing technology with very low efficiency. It does not require an absolute ban, but a long moratorium is urgently needed. Cancellation of it can be justified only when long-term safety is proved in experiments on animals (not one species - different).
This, if we go to religious terms, is a sin. And scientifically, it is unreasonable. Under Soviet rule, there was an anecdote: “The Armenian radio was asked: is communism a science or an art? Armenian radio answered: art. If it were science, they would first try it on dogs …”With cloning - the same situation. One poor lamb and no more positive results. More reports flashed, but it is difficult to judge the degree of their reliability.
There is not a single laboratory in the CIS that would work in this direction. There is a livestock laboratory in Dubrovitsy, Leningrad Region, and an Institute of Genetics and Animal Breeding. They continue to do these things. True, this is not so much the cloning of animals as the production of transgenic animals, that is, genetically transformed ones. As for cloning, so far there is only a heated discussion, from scratch.
In general, one must be wary of discoveries in the field of experimental embryology. It's not just about the content of the discovery. It's just that all sorts of commercial interests immediately begin to wind around such things.
And here are the opinions of scientists from different countries.
Per
USA. "Experiments with genetic copying of people are inevitable," said the American scientist Dell Gibson.
RUSSIA. In the Russian Academy of Sciences, in principle, they are not against the genetic "copying" of a person, if it ever comes true. They believe that a cloned person will only look like his "donor". Temperament is likely to be similar, as it is highly dependent on genes.
GREAT BRITAIN. The director of the Roslyn Institute, Grim Bulfield, believes that in practice, cloning technology can be used to "construct" pigs with human genes, then their hearts or kidneys could be used for human transplantation.
Against
USA. Official Washington described R. Seed's venture as "irresponsible, unethical and unprofessional."
POLAND. Only "terrorists from science" can clone people.
GERMANY. A poll conducted in the country showed that about 97% of burghers were unambiguously opposed to "replicating" people, and prefer to reproduce offspring in the old proven way.
Again AMERICA. The idea is as old as the world, but still shocking. In the state of New Mexico (USA), a team of scientists creates an artificial human. Over the course of six years, biologists, chemists, cybernetics and other specialists have conducted thousands of experiments in the strictest secrecy.
The first robot, created in the image and likeness of man, will have a female figure and will be named Miriam. The robot will be equipped with a human-like circulatory system, and even a kind of heart. In the veins of Miriam "blood" will flow, intended, however, only to cool the entire system.
A fuel tank will be placed in the stomach of the artificial woman, designed in such a way that the fuel will be supplied to the right places through its walls. It will even be equipped with metabolic organs. Waste gases will be disposed of in the same way as ordinary mortals.
The skin will be very similar to human skin. The breasts have not been forgotten either, although they will be purely decorative. There is also a brain. This is a somewhat unusually designed computer. Miriam will be able to distinguish smells and analyze the level of air pollution, will hear, see and carry out instructions.
