“Cut up embryos and stitched back together” seems like
an uncharitable description of a multi-stage microsurgical process where the starting point was only stem cells.
This is the description from the article:
” Then the team at Tufts, led by Levin and with key work by microsurgeon Douglas Blackiston—transferred the in silico designs into life. First they gathered stem cells, harvested from the embryos of African frogs, the species Xenopus laevis. (Hence the name "xenobots.") These were separated into single cells and left to incubate. Then, using tiny forceps and an even tinier electrode, the cells were cut and joined under a microscope into a close approximation of the designs specified by the computer.”
Because they didn't take "pieces" a la Frankenstein. Just single cells.
If the stem cells had been harmlessly extracted from living frogs would you still use the same terms? The experiment itself would be 99% the same in that case, it would just have a more complicated resource gathering step.
The parts were skin cells and heart cells. I concede that they were very tiny parts.
> If the stem cells had been harmlessly extracted from living frogs would you still use the same terms?
That would be perfectly fine in my view. I have no qualms about using living tissue. It's the unnecessary sacrifice of intelligent life that I find objectionable.
No, I would not use those terms in that case. The construction steps may be the same, but the lack of a lost life is a key distinction that invalidates the analogy for me.
So if they took a frog that died of natural causes and did the same thing, which actually makes it more like Frankenstein, you wouldn't use those terms because no life was lost as part of the experiment?
Correct. That's not objectionable to me, so it would make no sense to compare it to something objectionable. It's similar to the difference between organ donation and organ theft. Although the transplant operation is identical for the two, the analogies we might draw for each are entirely different because the life costs are different.
This is the description from the article:
” Then the team at Tufts, led by Levin and with key work by microsurgeon Douglas Blackiston—transferred the in silico designs into life. First they gathered stem cells, harvested from the embryos of African frogs, the species Xenopus laevis. (Hence the name "xenobots.") These were separated into single cells and left to incubate. Then, using tiny forceps and an even tinier electrode, the cells were cut and joined under a microscope into a close approximation of the designs specified by the computer.”