Drudge linked to an article about human DNA swapping. I'm not going to pretend that this article is complete or accurate or that I even fully grasp the science behind it.
The idea seems to be that scientists in Britain have started sucking the DNA out of embryos coming from women with a particular disorder, and then swap out the DNA in an egg from another woman and replace it with the previously removed DNA. (It's all about putting the DNA from an embryo with defective mitochondria into an egg with working mitochondria.)
Frankly, the spiritual implications of such a technology make me woozy.
Are we supposed to assume that the soul from the first embryo follows the DNA into the new egg?
Are we supposed to assume that the soul is separated from the embryo when the DNA is removed? Is it a kind embryonic death? Does a new individual emerges once the DNA is transplanted? (Michael Crichton played with this concept when he described teleportation technology in Timeline--if your body is fragmented, do you technically die? Is it the reassembled body still you or is it a separate entity that is an almost exact copy of you?)
Too complicated to compute at this hour...brain shutting down...
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