# 187 THE SCIENCE OF CLONING & CONJECTURE

Despite the ongoing chaos among the people on this planet, I still marvel at the rhythm and order of the natural world. The rotation of seasons, the magic of moon and tides, the manner in which animal and plant live is sustained and renewed.

But this year I discovered laws of nature being broken. Last year the jumbo pansy seedlings I bought at the greenhouse grew and blossomed into monster flowers. In the fall, without disturbing the pots, I stored them for the winter. This spring, when I brought them back out to warm the dirt, new pansies began to sprout. But to my wonder and surprise, when they matured, though robust in every other respect, the foliage and flowers were not much bigger than miniature violets.

And last summer, I also had a patch of monster poppies. A friend examined them and asked if I would save her some seed in the fall. So I did. This spring she planted that seed and the poppies that resulted were nothing more than tiny miniatures of the parent plant. I was again so surprised until a wise and experienced gardener told me this happens with volunteer pansies and poppies from a previous year. And not only that, she told me next year the plants will even be smaller. I was amazed. What happened to the rules of order in this process? I could only surmise that the original seedlings I purchased were some kind of artificially developed hybrid-cloned seed with sexual and DNA deviations that interrupt the laws of normal reproduction.

So why not add these observations to the scie-fie conjectures about cloning that could end up to be prophetic reality? Could it be that if we clone hybrid humans and mess with the structures of normal reproduction, like my poppies and pansies, we could end up with a race of individuals that progressively become smaller? So small that eventually we discover that we have cloned a race of Lilliputians.

So what would we do with tiny people no bigger than flies? Several things. We could dress them in fatigues and put them in the cockpits of miniature drone planes that the military can now only clumsily fly with remote controls. Or we could tuck them into George Bushes’ hat-band or Rumsfeld’s eyeglasses to give either of them a good hard thumping crack on the head each time they speak false rhetoric. We could use tiny little people skilled in sword-fighting or the martial arts to slay internal bacterial body-invaders and others trained to locate and lay waste parasitic viruses. Those skilled in the field of electronics could re-wire brains and short out synapses of the too imaginative that teeter on the edge of a dark abyss.

Now come on, don’t shake your head in exasperation. Everyone has to admit that George Orwell and Gene Roddenberry, were well ahead of their time and, maybe, just maybe, so am I.