From cloned polo ponies to cloned polo players

By Gonzalo López Martí    – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• Last week I wrote about the various implications -medical, moral, racial, etc- of creating genetically modified human beings.
• Designer babies.
• Just so you know: it is not a futuristic dystopian what-if scenario.
• It’s happening.
• As we speak.
• All over the developed and not-so-developed world.
• China possibly being the hottest petri dish of experimentation (pun intended).
• Google CRISPR.
• Or, if you want to see the possibilities first hand, go watch a polo game in Palm Beach, Florida.
• Second home of the rich, island of the famous.
• Also known as of late as The Winter White House.
• See those beautiful animals?
• Not the players: the horses.
• Clones.
• Adolfo Cambiaso, the Argentine polo player usually identified as the best in the world, was so sad when his favorite mare “Cuartetera” started to show signs of aging that he decided to, you guessed it, clone her.
• He now gallops to victory with the invaluable help of no less than six replicas of his favorite ride.
• The purpose, however, not only is to keep Mr. Cambiaso literally at the top of his game: he and a number of business partners own and operate Crestview Genetics, a company with state of the art labs in Texas and Argentina devoted to breeding and selling these superb made-to-order equine specimens to uber rich polo players across the world who want to imitate Mr. Cambiaso’s athletic prowess.
• Crestview has cloned more than 200 horses since 2009.
• The question lingers in the air, of course.
• If polo ponies can be cloned, what is holding us back from cloning the actual players?
• Yup: designer babies.
• Properly equipped with the right cognitive abilities, the right athletic build, the right appearance, the right race.
• Creepy, huh?
• Sure, we can opt to see the glass half full.
• There’s lots of room for hope with recent discoveries and technologies that could enormously improve our quality of life.
• The Human Cell Atlas, for instance.
• A global initiative spearheaded by Chan Zuckerberg (yup, Mark’s wife), aimed at cataloguing every single type and subtype of human cell at a molecular level to identify and fight disease.
• The Human Cell Atlas organizing committee reads like a who is who of cutting edge medical innovation and academia.
• Which begs for the question: what makes a person sick or unfit?
• Can we consider aging a disease?
• Is death an inevitable progression of life or is it a disease that should be cured too?
• Will we soon erase “death by natural causes” from our vocabulary?
• Are we entering an era of inordinate longevity, leisure and health?
• Will enhanced immortal cyberhumans be roaming the galaxy any time soon?
• Or, as Elon Musk tends to believe, will we just be too busy arm-wrestling and browbeating mean intelligent machines for our very survival?
• Immortality versus infallibility?
• Indeed.
• So stick around for team Cyborgs versus team AI.
• Team Ironman vs team Terminator.
• Team Highlander vs Team HAL
• HAL, should you ask, is the stubborn and quite pesky supercomputer with a mind all its own who haunts a crew of astronauts in Stanley Kubrick’s prophetic classic “2001 a space Odissey”.
• Coming soon to a planet near you.