The New Biology

It is quite possible that the advances in human biology in the remainder of the twentieth century will be remembered as the most significant scientific achievement of the animal species known as Homo sapiens. But in order to become a part of medical history, parahuman reproduction and human genetic engineering must circumvent the recalcitrance of an antiquated culture. If they succeed, the rewards will be immeasurable. In any event, the issues such a confrontation will create should be a concern of every man who values his life and his liberty.

TOWARD CLONAL MAN

In 1952 Doctors Robert Briggs and Thomas King, of the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, replaced the nucleus of a fertilized egg cell of the Leopard frog Rana pipens with the nucleus from another frog's blastula cell (i.e. the embryonic tissue at the end of the cleavage stage). The result was a biological innovation: an embryo of the identical genetic arrangement as the adult donor animal. [1] And in 1961 Doctor J.B. Gurdon, a zoologist at Oxford, again transplanting nuclei, produced a colony of toads (the South African clawed toad Xenopus laevis), each toad having exactly the same genetic characteristics of the donor toad. [2-3]

Not only were these reproductions asexual, but they were also clonal. Klon is the Greek word for "twig." Originally applied to horticulture, the term cloning meant to colonize via cuttings from the parent plant. Coincidentally, these clones are genetic replicas of the donor.

Today, human clonal reproduction has become a distinct possibility. As in frogs, the human genotype exists not only in the egg and sperm cells, but in every cell of the body. One cell from any part of the body contains all the secrets necessary to duplicate the physique of the donor. The human clone would be an identical twin of its donor because the nucleus of the donated cell would carry forward all 46 chromosomes instead of only 23 contained in the sperm or ovum.

While much of the tedious homework has yet to be completed, Stanford University's distinguished Professor of Genetics and Biology, Doctor Joshua Lederberg, feels that human clonal reproduction is only a few years away. [4] And Doctor James F. Bonner of the California Institute of Technology insists that within the next 15 years we will be able to "order up carbon copies of people" and be on our way to "mass human reproduction." [5] Professor Robert Sinsheimer, a biologist at CIT, has predicted that cloning in mammals, including man, may be accomplished in as early as a decade! [6]

Writers in popular journals are spreading the news, often with mixed emotions. [7] The possibility of thousands of persons who look exactly like Cary Grant, Richard Nixon, James Bond, Ringo Starr, Lena Horne, Mae West—or you—is both fascinating and frightening. Incredibly, the key to reproducing the identical twin of any person is merely one of his or her cells; a loose hair or fingernail clipping would do, since cells do not have to be "alive" to be potent, just intact.

The Beginning

A very crucial step toward artificial human birth was the demonstration of actual test tube conception. Doctor John Rock of Harvard was the first to accomplish such a fertilization back in the 1940's. He obtained ripe eggs from female donors and exposed them to sperm in the laboratory. [8]

In Vitro fertilization of the human ovum became fact just about the same time man detonated the first atomic bomb. Which event is to prove more profound remains to be seen.

Doctor Landrum Shettles of Columbia University has refined Doctor Rock's techniques to the point where test tube fertilization can be routinely repeated. Doctor Shettles grows his test tube babies to the blastocyst stage (64 cells) for experimentation.

One of the problems to be solved in producing human clones is dramatized by the comparative size of the fetus vis-a-vis the tadpole. The life support system required by the Homo sapiens embryo is infinitely more complex. This difficulty can be nicely sidestepped (until the technology and hardware catch up) by using surrogate mothers to carry the test tube-conceived baby while it develops. Recently, in a German academic journal, Doctor Shettles reported that he took a nearly mature egg from its follicle in the ovary of a donor woman, matured it in vitro, fertilized it with sperm, grew it in a culture for five days to the blastocyst stage, and then implanted it in the uterus of a second woman. The menstrual cycles of the two women had already been synchronized to insure a hospitable reception for the transplanted embryo. [9]

The orphan embryo planted itself on the lining of the uterus of the stepmother and grew successfully and normally for several days. Then Doctor Shettles removed it surgically: the point of his test was not to produce a term baby, but to determine whether implantation would occur under artificial circumstances. Now no one doubts that such a baby is possible.

The British team (which many scientists believe to be more advanced than the Americans) led by Doctor Patrick Steptoe of Oldham General Hospital, Lancashire, and Doctor R.G. Edwards of Cambridge University "hope to accomplish implantation and subsequent growth into a normal baby within the coming year."[10] It is quite possible that by the time this article is published, a hospital-supplied nanny is already nursing the first test tube-conceived infant.

Once the doctors have perfected the techniques of growing a test tube baby to maturity in a surrogate mother, the final step—the coup de maitre—will be to insert an adult diploid nucleus into a human ovum and simultaneously to remove the maternal haploid nucleus. While this step is a little more delicate than nuclei transplants into enucleated frog eggs, generically it is the same operation. And it is too logical a move to be delayed much longer.

Fit the parts of the puzzle together: nucleus transplant, test tube growth to blastocyst and uterus implant—the result is clonal man.

The knowledge attained enroute to producing a clonal man will have many beneficial offshoots. Women who long to bear children, but could not do so before for a variety of medical reasons can be impregnated by embryo implant. Likewise, women who want children, but desire to be free of the pain and burdens of natural childbirth, can look forward to watching their offspring develop completely in vitro. "If I can carry a baby all the way through to birth in vitro," says an American scientist who wants his anonymity protected, "I certainly plan to do it—although, obviously, I'm not going to succeed on the first attempt, or even the twentieth." [11]

Applied to pathology, the engineering know-how necessary to clone a man could wipe out more than fifty sex-linked hereditary diseases. Mongolism, schizophrenia, diabetes, dwarfism, muscular dystrophy and perhaps even cancer could become things of the past. Genetic engineering will soon make such conveniences as sex selection in offspring a trivial matter. More complex refinements in physiognomy and physiology via hybrid breeding are sure to follow. An Eugenic Age is just around the corner.

TOWARD IMMORTAL MAN

The potentialities of genetic engineering are truly fantastic. Although the genotype necessary to duplicate Homo sapiens is present in every cell of the body, the cell selected to trigger the reproduction can be "modified" to grow into a specific part of the body rather than the entire form. Uncontrolled, this "modification" as it occurs by accident in nature can precipitate a sub-human freak or a severe birth defect. Under scientific management, the result can be human parts-farming: the methodical production of precious organs such as eyes, hands, livers, hearts, and lungs. Such organs would be identical genetically to the cell-donor's organs. Grown from nuclei lifted from the donor's body (preferably from the particular organ desired), these farmed parts could be used for medical replacement in the case of damage or old age. There would be no fear of transplant "rejection" since the organs, for all intent and purpose, would indeed be the patient's very own.

The ultimate step in genetic "farming" will be the production of an android-clone. [12] An android-clone is the donor's identical twin born without the humanizing portions of the brain's cortex: the product of a sort of "reverse eugenics".

Androids will become immensely valuable in prolonging the lifetime of Homo sapiens; they are the ideal depositories for human brains whose bodies have become decrepit. Since an android-clone is not human, the adoption of its body by a human will not present the moral, legal and medical problems that using someone else's body would.

Even before we can produce android-clones, it will become tempting to try brain or head transplants. Two headlines which appeared as long ago as 1967 are particularly noteworthy: [13]

"The Dead Body and the Living Brain,"
LOOK, November 28, 1967.

Professor Robert White, Director, Department of Neurosurgery at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital: "…we can transfer the head of a man onto the trunk of another man…I only know that today we could keep Einstein's brain alive and make it function normally…the only way to transfer the brain of a man to another man is to transfer the entire head…I could cool the head and keep it alive while the body is dying, and free the arteries, and feed it blood through the T cannula, and then separate the head. It can be accomplished now with existing techniques.…"

"Debakey Sees Brain Transfers,"
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, December 13, 1967.

It is possible that doctors of the future will be able to transplant not only hearts from one person to another, but also a heart-and-lung system and even the brain, Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, the noted heart surgeon, said last night.

The brain transplant is inevitable. It dawns upon one writer as a revelation, which he describes as:

"The awareness that we mortals can literally graft ourselves onto the corpus Dei, become, by transplantation, the right arm of God, become immortals."

Continuing, he proclaims:

"…I've seen a vision of a dreamed-of Eden where men, immortal and forever young, soar on angels' wings. And I've found the key to the gate of the garden, genetic engineering…reproduce by controlled cloning." [14]

For another imaginative description of the operation that will, in time, bring the end of death by old age, see Robert A. Heinlein's I WILL FEAR NO EVIL:

"Johann Sebastian Bach Smith was immensely rich—and very old. His mind was keen, but his body was worn out. So surgeons transplanted his brain into a new body." [15]

Heinlein's fictional operation was consummated between two individuals of identical blood type and Rh factor; it will be a simpler operation between a man and his clone.

Since the brain is mostly an electrochemical storehouse, the supporting flesh is little more than an inert superstructure. The brain's lifetime, and therefore the lifetime of the human being it represents, is potentially infinite, provided the supply-train of blood vessels and bodily functions are renewed and/or kept healthy. It would be judicious, naturally, to transplant the brain before its aging host causes senility through an inability to provide proper care. [16]

In anticipation of the time when such operations are possible, stories have increased that the wealthy (e.g. Howard Hughes) plan to use cryogenics to maintain their bodies for future revitalization. [17]

And at least one state has anticipated some of the legal problems:

"Maryland Defining Death"
CHICAGO DAILY NEWS, February 9, 1972.

Annapolis, MD (AP) The House of Delegates, acting to remove a roadblock to organ transplants in Maryland, sent to the Senate Tuesday a bill that would add a legal definition of death to state law. The bill defining death as the absence of any spontaneous brain activity stirred the longest House debate of the current session.

The Search for Ligatures

In order to unravel and understand the complexities of the brain, scientists in a number of laboratories are separating and reconstructing the living brain tissue of animals. After taking tissue from the fetus of, say, an unborn mouse, researchers coax the individual cells apart with the help of enzymes and then put the separated cells into a growth-sustaining solution. Carefully incubated, the mix displays an extraordinary activity as the brain cells rejoin and organize themselves into the same pattern as the original tissue.

Neurobiologist Nicholas Seeds of the University of Colorado has been able to completely "reconstruct" the brain cells of mice. In his experiments, the cells in the test tube mature and form synapses, the vital cell-to-cell connections that transmit messages through the brain and the rest of the nervous system. The material also appears to develop the myelin "insulation" that covers part of the cell in order to protect the messages from interference from other nearby cells. [18]

The work of such men as Doctor Seeds will make the brain surgeons' job of central nervous system fusion in related transplant operations easier by supplying the cellular "glue" to connect foreign spinal cords to patients or the "wallpaper" to seal the violated anachnoid, dura mater and pia mater.

TOWARD ARTIFICIAL LIFE FORMS

On still another front, Doctor Sidney Fox, Director of the Institute of Molecular Evolution at the University of Miami, is close to making a living cell out of raw chemicals. He has already been successful in creating amino acids and growing spheroids that act in many ways like animal cells.

Doctor Rohlfing, a biologist at the University of South Carolina, has created a type of protein that demonstrates enzymatic activity. Doctor Marvin Caruthers, a chemist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has assembled chemical compounds which resemble our genetic codes.

This January at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Philadelphia, Doctor James F. Danielli, Director of the Center for Theoretical Biology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, announced that he had successfully transferred the nuclei from one species of amoeba to another to get a brand new life form of one-celled animal. Doctor Danielli said that "the ability to synthesize new cells may eventually be used for making new species of animals and possibly even new societies of man.…" He continued, "We are now at a stage in which the general strategy and tactics for artificial synthesis are being developed."

Questioned further, Doctor Danielli insisted that there were good reasons to suppose that artificial synthesis can give us organisms which will be more effective than existing organisms; for example, he said, it may be possible to create a living entity from human brain cells which could be used to help men think. [19]

THE POLITICAL HURDLES

What will be the political framework for the continued development of genetic engineering: 1984, BRAVE NEW WORLD, or a libertarian ATLANTIS?

Current trends are certainly not encouraging. With socialized medicine becoming a greater and greater possibility in this country, with Medicare and Medicaid, with research more and more influenced by government grants, the chance that free enterprise will get a sustaining foothold in the cultivation of applied genetic engineering is an "iffy" proposition. Will the Welfare State see that in order to guarantee everyone a minimum standard-of-living, the Government must be the only institution to determine who can live and who can die?

The federal government is incessantly at work prying into the prerogatives of free men. Walter E. Mondale (D-Minn.) has suggested that the United States set up a National Commission on Health, Science, and Society. This bureaucrat's delight would be charged with "making substantive prescriptions, after one year's study, about the biological policy of the human species."

During his committee's hearings on recent biological breakthroughs, Senator Ribicoff revealed the thoughts of his colleagues by asking Doctors Kornberg and Lederberg, "Do you see this [genetic engineering] leading to a master race?"

According to one reporter, Harvard's James "Double Helix" Watson warned the same congressional committee that "all hell will break loose" in the wake of embryo transplants. Dr. Watson urged the politicians to establish a commission to consider the ramifications of test tube conceptions and nuclei transplants and possibly even to "take steps quickly" to make them illegal. The British authorities have already set up such a commission—one designed to consider the "ethical, medical, social and legal implications of using fetuses and fetal material for research." [20]

Dr. Watson's approach is typical of today's academicians. Calling on the Government for a solution, he rejects with disdain the possibility that a free market could cope with the problem:

"This is a matter far too important to be left solely in the hands of the scientific and medical communities. The belief that surrogate mothers and clonal babies are inevitable because science always moves forward, an attitude expressed to me recently by a scientific colleague, represents a form of laissez-faire nonsense dismally reminiscent of the creed that American business, if left to itself, will solve everybody's problems." [21]

Others of the intellectual elite are adopting a similar position. Late last year the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation called together "knowledgeable scientists and thinkers of the Western world" to consider "the ethics of new technologies in beginning life." They struggled with such questions as "who should be born" and what actions government should take to regulate "engineered" births. So much for noblesse oblige.

Of course the conservative legions are not to be preempted. Most laymen are familiar with the traditional Roman Catholic position on artificial conception and contraception techniques as typified by Pope Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae (On the Regulation of Birth) July 25, 1968. Upon the occasion of Dr. Shettles' attendance at the International Fertility Conference in Italy in 1954, Pope Pius XII condemned all scientists who would "take the Lord's work into their own hands." Monsignor Vallanic, the Vatican press officer, referred to current forms of genetic manipulation as "immoral acts and absolutely illicit." Will theologians be able to harass doctors and biologists like they once did Galileo? Are those of us young enough to benefit from the advances brought about by geneticists to be left wanting, victims of shamanists and clerics with caveman epistemologies?

Not all traditionalists are to be found in the church. A "Motion and Brief Amicus Curiae" submitted to the United States Supreme Court for the October 1971 term was signed by hundreds of physicians, medical school professors, obstetricians, gynecologists and fetologists. By their brief these men and women sought to place before the Court "the scientific evidence of the humanity of the unborn so that the Court may know and understand that the unborn are developing human persons who need the protection of the law as do adults." [22]

The prescribed bromide is always the same: government control. Voices for freedom are seldom heard, even though some "experts" seem to sense the awful dichotomy of a statist approach. Dr. Watson has noted that, social and moral problems notwithstanding, "of even greater concern would be the potentialities for misuse by an inhumane totalitarian government." [23] As Ayn Rand has mentioned, "Collectivist planners have dreamed for a long time of creating an ideal society by means of eugenics—by breeding men into various castes physiologically able to perform only one specific function." [24]

THE PHILOSOPHICAL HURDLES

The foremost philosophical problem presented by the new biology is semantical: what is a human being?

The reason that abortion causes such consternation among laymen is that their personal philosophies are not rigorous enough to define the term human. They assume that the words human and Homo sapiens are synonymous. The search for the beginning of humanity is therefore reduced to a timing of the moment the egg and sperm unite; thus the layman argues that to kill an embryo or fetus is murder. Because his premise is wrong, his conclusion is wrong.

Humanity per se is based on cognitive abilities. A philosophy of reason will define a human being as life which demonstrates self-awareness, volition and rationality. Thus, it should be recognised that not all men are human. The severely mentally retarded, victims of lobotomies, the fetus, blastocysts, androids, etc. are not human and therefore obtain no human rights. Furthermore, it is this writer's conclusion that all nonhuman animal life is available for exploitation as private property. [25] Rational man should have no qualms about accepting a heart transplant, eating a beef steak, aborting an embryo, cloning a twin, or engineering himself a new set of lungs.

With regard to the specific question of humanity in Homo sapiens infants, much is already known. Fetal development, according to the new science of perinatology, is looked upon as continuous through the first year succeeding birth. The actual removal of the child from the mother is an independent variable unrelated to the infant's humanity. In fact, there is little evidence that termination of an infant's life in the first few months following extraction from the womb could be looked upon as murder. Recent studies suggest that cognitive development does not begin until the age of nine months. [26] Such experiments are inconclusive however. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget has argued that during a period up to 18 months after birth the infant knows the world only in terms of his sensory impressions and motor activities. [27] It would seem, in either case, to be more "inhumane" to kill an adult chimpanzee than a new born baby since the chimpanzee has greater mental awareness. Murder cannot logically apply to a life form with less mental power than a primate.

It certainly follows that the practice of abortion is not immoral. And it is furthermore conclusive that experiments with fetal material and the engineering of nonthinking Homo sapiens tissues are not immoral. Such activities, are, in fact, amoral.

The corollary to the axiom that not all Homo sapiens are human is, of course, that not all humans are necessarily Homo sapiens. There seems no reason to maintain that we will not discover, one day, other human life forms with which mankind could communicate and trade.

Unfortunately, the advent of a free market of genetic ideas and products is threatened by a common inability to distinguish between the trader and the traded: a symptom of the semantical obfuscation characteristic of today's culture.

As Dr. Thomas S. Szasz has said,

"In language and logic we are the prisoners of our premises, just as in politics and law we are the prisoners of our rulers. Hence we had better pick them well." [28]

CONCLUSION

Thinking persons should be cognizant of the many rewards and pitfalls inherent in continued radical biological research. A clear definition of humanity in terms of mental acuity, rather than physical appearance, should be encouraged. And libertarians should continue to defend as absolute the prerogative of humans to conduct their own lives independent of societal norms, whether that conduct involves euthanasia, suicide, abortion, organ transplant, or ownership of genetic material.

Countless practical benefits will accrue to mankind if genetic engineering is allowed to proliferate, but none so dramatic and meaningful as the promise of perpetual life. To the libertarian-objectivist, the focal point of all existence is the individual, his life, and his own rational self-interest. Nothing could be so profound to rational men than the possibility of significantly lengthening their life spans as a reward for, or as a function of, their rationality.

If a full-body transplant costs, say, $50,000.00 and becomes necessary on or about the seventieth birthday, it should become a less arduous task to convince people to stop smoking, or drinking, or otherwise waging war on their present bodies. To shorten the mean lifetime of the first body would have dire financial consequences, given the time it takes to accumulate this amount of capital.

Likewise, the incentive for developing a rational philosophical framework, including a psychology of self-esteem, will be magnified. Few could ignore the relative futility of transplanting a short-circuited, malfunctioning brain into any body, however healthy. Particularly not the mortgage institutions, which will be arranging the loans necessary to finance major transplants. An inability to demonstrate potential productivity over the decades succeeding a brain transplant will severely hamper the task of borrowing upon that future.

Mental and physical health, which once meant the difference between 60 and 70 years, tomorrow might mean the difference between 60 and 1,000 years!

John Maynard Keynes said that "In the long run we are all dead." Perhaps libertarian theorists have underestimated the impact of this supposition on the decisions that men make in an economic context. The fact that death has always ended the game of life, for the winner as well as for the loser equally (if not equally, at least eventually) must have influenced the great majority of men.

If men could live for hundreds or thousands of years, rather than for tens of years, new levels of intellectual sophistication would undoubtedly be achieved. History tells us the industrial revolution could not begin until man had increased his mean lifetime to the point where abstract thoughts and goals had the chance to be formed and realized. With lifetime orders of magnitude greater than those possible today, perhaps people will learn that the result of any irrationality, whether in the form of alcoholism, existentialism, or socialism, is simply death, a premature and unnecessary death at that. Perhaps the trauma of another quantum jump in mean lifetimes will be the necessary catharsis and catalysis to precipitate laissez faire capitalism and a second, more virile, industrial revolution.

Whether my predictions materialize or not, it should be increasingly obvious that a philosophy of reason is needed to meet the test of present day living, and that it is the only orientation able to readily absorb the ever developing spectrum of scientific discovery. Men without a well-integrated, rational sense-of-life are susceptible to Toffler's FUTURE SHOCK and, tragically, to the only political form compatible with the shock-produced feelings of inferiority and doubt: dictatorship.

Fortunately for us neither dictatorship nor death is inevitable. While it is true that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have been the scourge of days gone by, that conquest, famine, war and death rode rampant then and have stubbornly reappeared in recent years, they must not be considered perpetual parts of man's destiny. Rationality, when allowed to flourish, can stymie these equestrians.

So when you hear men sigh euphemistically that "nothing is certain but death and taxes," tell them that with the knowledge made available in the twentieth century, we have the opportunity to make both death and taxes voluntary institutions!

Winston L. Duke received his M.B.A. from Harvard University, and also has a B.S. in Physics and an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. He is currently employed by Commonwealth Edison Company, Chicago.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES

[1] Thomas King and Robert Briggs, "Transplantation of living nuclei from blastula cells into enucleated frogs eggs," in THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, May 1952, p.38.
[2] Gurdon, et al, "Sexual mature individuals of xenopus laevis from the transplantation of single somatic nuclei," NATURE, vol. 182, pp.64-65.
[3] J.B. Gurdon, "Adult frogs derived from the nuclei of single somatic cells," DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY (1962), p.4.
[4] For some of the ideas of this well known genetist, see Joshua Lederberg, "Biological future of man" in MAN AND HIS FUTURE (Ciba Foundation Volume, London 1963).
[5] Paul Ramsey, FABRICATED MAN, The Ethics of Genetic Control (Yale University, 1970) p.65.
[6] "Cloning: the ethical question," SCIENCE DIGEST, August 1971.
[7] Willima Gaylin, "We have the awful knowledge to make exact copies of human beings," NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, 5 March, 1972.
[8] David M. Rorvik, "The test tube baby is coming, Taking life in our own hands," LOOK, 18 May, 1971, p. 83.
[9] Rorvik, supra note 8,at p.86.
[10] James D. Watson, "Moving toward the clonal man, is this what we want?" ATLANTIC, May 1971, pp.50-53.
[11] Albert Rosenfeld, THE SECOND GENESIS: The Coming Control of Life (Prentice Hall) p.117.
[12] I define androids as Homo sapiens without the humanizing mental apparatus, e.g., a creature with the body of a man but the brain of an anthropoid. This manipulation is no more difficult than the graphic, albeit accidental, case of the birth of babies without arms via the misuse of drugs. A selective genetic mutation can be accomplished chemically or surgically.
[13] Alan Harrington, THE IMMORTALIST, An Approach to the Engineering of Man's Divinity (Random House 1969), p.229.
[14] Both of these quotes are from characters in John Boyd's stimulating novel, THE ORGAN BANK FARM, (Bantam, 1972). Coincidentally, there is interesting agreement in this book with Branden's emphasis on guilt as a cause of psychosis and Rand's comment that a person's musical preferences are particularly psychologically revealing.
[15] From the book cover (paperback) of I WILL FEAR NO EVIL by Robert A. Heinlein (1970).
[16] Brain research is making amazing strides; for one summary, see "Probing the Brain," NEWSWEEK, 21 June 1971.
[17] For a thought-provoking fictional portrayal by a European, see FREEZING DOWN by Anders Bodelsen (Harper & Row—Danish title is FRYSEPUNKTET).
[18] "Brains in a Test Tube," TIME, 26 January 1972, p.68.
[19] Ronald Kotulak, "Scientists Say Artificial Life Creation Is Near," CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 2 January 1972.
[20] Rorvik, supra note 8, at p.88.
[21] James D. Watson, "The Future of Asexual Reproduction," INTELLECTUAL DIGEST, October 1971.
[22] Francis L. Filas, et al., "Abortion and the Right to Life," CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 19 March 1972.
[23] Watson, supra note 10.
[24] Ayn Rand, "To Young Scientists," THE OBJECTIVIST NEWSLETTER, October 1962.
[25] As pointed out to this author by Dr. Robert Nozick of Harvard University, the "rights" of nonhuman animal life forms vis-a-vis human rights is a subject libertarians could further ponder. Robert LeFevre, for one, illustrates this uncertainty among freethinkers; one of the reasons he is a vegetarian is to circumvent this quandary.
[26] Jerome Kagan, "Do Infants Think?" SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, March 1972.
[27] H. Ginsburg and S. Opper, PIAGET'S THEORY OF INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT (Prentice-Hall, 1969).
[28] Thomas S. Szasz, "The Ethics of Suicide," INTELLECTUAL DIGEST, October 1971, p.55.