The Summer (Cold) Of A Dormouse

There seems to be no outcry - none that I've read - that mice have been genetically modified to receive rhinovirii (which cause 3/4s of human colds) with an aim to better understanding the common cold and how to treat it.

I raise you three objections: the (1) genetic modification of (2) mice in order to (3) treat the common cold.

Damien and I once acknowledged a law that The closer a thing is to nature, the better it is with the converse also being true The further a thing is from nature, the worse it is.*

Therefore I must - and do - consider laboratory-created genetic mutations to be unwelcome interferences with nature. Dolly the sheep should not have been artificially cloned as this is an offense to nature; likewise a lab mouse should not have a human ear grown on its back. These are glimpses of a futuristic freak zoo that humans seem hell-bent on crafting.

In the same breath, or dormouse should not have its genes scrambled so that humans can inject it with virii that from which it is otherwise immune. This is an unnecessary distress to the animal.

I have always declared myself as a Darwinist, and therefore see humans as animals. An animal with a particular evolution. If humans do possess such a thing as spirit then it is mutually inclusive of all other animals.

I do not accept that humans have a divine - or any other kind of - right to hurt or imprison other animals. It is interesting that when the chimpanzee was proved to share around 96-98% of its DNA with humans, that we (humans) began to ruminate that we should not subject chimpanzees to laboratory cruelty.

It is strange that, on this evidence, instead of demoting humans to animal status, we instead elect the chimpanzee to very-almost-human status and thus privy to a piece of human sentience.

But such rationalising allows us to continue hurting non-primates, such as the poor old dormouse.

No, I am not so warped that I don't think that we test on mice for cures for cancer and other horrific diseases (although I think that the Earth has abundand natural medicines, I will leave this speculation for another time), but I mean, c'mon, the common cold. "Don't be a Jessie" as my father used to say.

As moderately inconvenient as a cold is, it's hardly worth worrying about or treating. I would suggest - though I have no medical training, so don't quote (or sue) me on the issue - that the common cold is beneficial. It's like a boxer sparring ahead of the big fight. How ill prepared the boxer would be if he didn't take a few knocks from his trainer. He'd be down in the second round for six, KO'd in the third round.

Whenever humans interfere with the harmony of nature, there is, as a consequence, some degree of disaster (splitting the atom, for example). And there will be consequences too as and when we pharmacologically medicate ourselves against the common cold.

Besides, it is one less excuse to stay off work.





*This presupposes a duality of goodness and badness, which I have always loathed, and found the recognition of such dual concepts to be childlike (e.g., a six-year olds preoccupation with goodies and baddies in cartoons), so I would rather claim that nature has - or is - a property which could be understood as goodness or betterness or harmoniousness. There are no words to describe the concept, but it is intuitively understood. As a comparison, consider Lao Tzu's Way, a concept which is easy to intuit but impossible to render into language.