Road

Dined with a group of senior physicians and met MT - a consultant of another hospital.

"We have much difficulty in recruiting new trainees. Most think that internal medicine is too difficult a nut to crack, and the few who are stupid enough would choose a university hospital !" He complained.

"Actually not very much better for us. Nowadays, every graduate seems to have a better offer than medicine." I said.

"You know, there's now a road to success in medicine ?" MT replied, smiling in a funny way.

"Indeed ... ?" I was curious.

"R for radiology, O for ophthalmology, A for anesthesia, and D for dermatology. Aren't they fabulous ?" He finished with a twist in his lips.

I made a bad hiccup - an ordinary response when human diaphragm tries to laugh and vomit at the same time.

PS. The reason for my unsightly response may skip your eyes. Not only are the four specialties of limited scope and lead a leisured life, but, more importantly, none of them require a genuine patient-doctor relationship. The former is merely a client who come for purchasing a service.

I shall not discuss the metaphysical implication.

West-west

Don't be taken aback by my hypothetical novel (yet) - I have not gone through the worst part of the story.

Although it sounds plain sailing to have an experiment on the evolution of some artificial life in another planet, reality is never that simple.

Yes, several groups that share the laboratory (the planet, I mean) may not agree with each other and do conflicting experiments at the same time. But that's relatively trivial a problem.

Imagine, what if the funding dries up (say, because of a financial tsunami) and the planet is forgotten ? As we all know, their lives must go on - and experimental beings on the planet continue to thrive and evolve and wonder who creates them.

Or, even more likely, a nuclear war wipes out all of us - leaving the lovely creatures on the other planet continue to wonder: Should they follow our commandments ?

Alas, my idea is not new. At most I add a scientific coating to what Friedrich Nietzsche suggested. Franz Kafka used the same idea in An Imperial Message, and more subtly - but also in a more elaborated manner - as Count West-west in The Castle.

PS. Nietzsche and Kafka actually formed their idea from philosophical considerations rather than scientific possibility; I shall not elaborate further.

Being

One important precaution of doing all those exotic experiments on another planet is: We should not have direct contact with creatures there. We do not want, by any chance, to contaminate our own genome (I agree that's very unlikely, but realistically that would be something strongly insisted by people with a superior moral standard). Neither do we wish - because of the very presence of us - to disturb the behavior of those lovely creatures.

With time, the artificial creatures would evolve (naturally, plus or minus some assistance by generations of our research students) and develop intelligence - the latter is defined as the ability to use tools, have a language, aware of their own existence, and ask themselves the very question: Who creates us ?

You see, we are coming to the center of the problem. Are we going to play god and do the experiment, or are we the synthetic creatures and the subject of an experiment ?

This is, alas, the sketch of a novel that I prepared some 20 years ago. The tentative title is Experimental Being.

PS. My idea actually roots from a very scientific question: Is the speed of nature (i.e. random mutation) sufficient to explain the rate of evolution observed in this planet ?

Experiment

Friends, don't be surprised with my suggestion yesterday.

Imagine, we need two prerequisites, and one is now at hand: an entirely synthetic (or artificial, if you prefer the term) cell.

If our space scientists manage to find a planet that could support life (in essence, it has water, an atmosphere, and a reasonable surface temperature), it would be logical to put the synthetic life on that planet. Funding prospect seems great with project of this kind. We could achieve two things here: On one hand, we could see how evolution takes place in a real life situation. At the same time we could do away with all synthetic life on earth - which is being strongly protested by many moral purist as soon as the news of an artificial cell is made public.

And, the experiment does not end here. With the whole new planet as a gigantic laboratory, we would expect there are research opportunities for millions of generations of PhD student. One could fulfill the requirement of his thesis by simply inserting some new DNA sequence into one strain of the bacteria, put it back to the planet, and see the function of the gene product. Another may spend his three years by duplicating one gene, make a small mutation in one of the copies, and see the result of differential expression. Many many years later, when the synthetic creatures on that planet has evolved and differentiated into millions of species, one could even study ecology and behavioral science ...

Cell

Although the year 2010 has not yet been half way through, I believe we just saw the most influential scientific paper this year:

Gibson DG, et al. Creation of a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesized genome. In: Science Express on 20 May 2010.

Oh, the happening was simple. This group made an entirely artificial bacterial cell, which is capable of continuous self replication. In other words, this is the first time man creates life.

I shall not join the debates on whether scientists are playing too much the role of the god this time, whether we are going to create monsters in the near future, or whether the technique would be abused. (Well, what scientific technique could not be abused ?)

But, my very question is, if this synthetic species of bacteria continues with the evolution, and, millions of years later, became creatures that could think and act independently, should they obey to the command of Homo sapiens or descendants of the principal investigator of this research project (Craig Venter, an American biologist) ?

Fertile

Although the British administration in Burma proved highly successful (in terms of economy, to say the least), one important factor was the very character of Bamar people - they may not have all the good qualities that we desire, but the majority of them are calm, obedient, and not calculating.

In fact, they live in a place close to Shangri-La; as long as you plant some seeds onto the field, a good yield of rice could be harvested twice a year. Unlike, say, people in North Korea or Iceland, Burma should naturally be doing well; the current state of poverty is not a fault of its citizens.

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Every time when I come to think of Bamar people, I find that a similar character is common in this part of the world - Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian, and a few more. They all settle in fertile soil and excellent weather (for the purpose of agriculture). Protein is not a problem either: There is never a short supply of insects and worms and other crustaceans, so that keeping chickens and ducks is a piece of cake. If that's not enough, just take some supplement from the local river or seashore - there are tons of fish and shrimps and clams, and what not.

A shrewd reader may realize at this moment, the god's praise comes with the demon's curse. With a fantastic environment, people living there for centuries would become more leisured and never worry very much. (There's little to calculate or worry about. By the rule of evolution, those bearing the gene for being suspicious and calculating would see no benefit; by all probability, they are just more likely to die of premature heart attack.)

Alas, they would do well until some aggressive visitors come in ships - often with gun, germ, and steel - or some dictator arises by mutation.

Discrimination

Although Burma is now one of the poorest country on earth, it was - not too long ago - one of the wealthiest under British administration.

Believe it or not, before the Second World War, Burma was the largest exporter of rice in the world. The country claimed independence from Britain in 1948, and, 40 years later, was announced by the United Nation as the the Least Developed Country. True, Rome was not built in one day, but, under appropriate hands, it could collapse in a shocking speed.

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Oh, no. My interest in the British Burma is not quite related to its amazing capability in making an affluent country (Anglo-Saxon people almost always did well in this aspect), but to how they treat various groups of people there.

You know what, nearly 70% of the Burma population are Bamar (緬族), while over 130 ethnic groups constitute the remaining 30%. Notably, there are Shan (傣族) and Kayin (克倫族).

The catch is, most of the Bamar are farmers living in the central affluent part of the country, while Shan and Kayin (and most of the other tribes) tend to settle in peripheral mountainous areas. Rather than asking for democracy or consensus in any national policy, British administrator used a deliberately discriminating - and highly successful - strategy to run the country: Shan and Kayin people had had a free hand to run their own place (with a very low tax rate), while Bamar paid a higher tax but enjoyed a reliable (i.e. actively managed by the British people) legal and financial infra-structure - so that wealth could accumulate, or, in a less agreeable term, people were breed to become economic animals and forget about politics.

It all sounds familiar, eh ?