New church designs are full of hot air

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 27, 2003 | by Stephen Goode

Byline: Stephen Goode, INSIGHT

New Church Designs Are Full of Hot Air

Want to know what the church of the future will look like? Martin Gill, a British designer, thinks he might have the answer. He's created what he claims is the "world's first inflatable church" and it is just that, a gray, hand-painted plastic "building" complete with inflatable altar, pulpit and organ. It stands 47 feet tall from the floor to the tip of the steeple.

The portable, blow-up house of faith also comes with Gothic arches and faux stained-glass windows made of colored PVC. Gill has big ambitions for his creation, that include revitalizing the moribund Anglican Church which (in England) currently suffers from a dire shortage of communicants and an exceedingly small number of the faithful.

Ambitious vicars could carry their church around with them in the back of a lorry (truck, to Americans) and set it up on a patch of grass when the spirit moves them and they have gained permission, Gill told a reporter from Reuters.

The eager inventor waxed ecstatic: "This could change the whole perception of what the Church of England stands for. It's revolutionary. It's moving with the 21st century."

For the people began to think these claims extravagant, if forgivable. But Gill explained: "If people won't go to church then the church needs to go to the people. This is a way of doing it."

Well, maybe. But if folks won't get up on Sundays to go to a fine-looking traditional church made of brick or stone or wood, who could expect them to get out of bed to worship in a balloon, even if it is parked in a lot next door?

The indefatigable Gill, however, is covering all bases. Apparently not a stickler for denominational loyalty, he says he's written the pope to see if the Vatican wants to buy an inflatable church. To date he's had no response from that quarter, either.

And if his churches don't sell, what then? Gill says he has plans in gear to start making inflatable pubs and inflatable nightclubs, and that he soon may be offering those for sale, whether his churches catch on or not.

Mother Nature Throws Monkey Wrench Into Cloning

With all the talk of cloning in recent years, many may have the impression that the only thing standing in the way of the wholesale cloning of humans and animals alike are (out of woeful ignorance and beyond all reason) a few old moralistic and troglodytic fuddy-duddies.

It seems that's not the case at all. In the April 11 issue of the prestigious journal Science, Gretchen Vogel writes in an article called "Misguided Chromosomes Foil Primate Cloning" that scientists are having a very difficult time indeed in attempts to clone rhesus monkeys because "cloning robs an embryo of key proteins that allow a cell to divvy up chromosomes and divide properly."

The problem isn't just with rhesus monkeys, notes Vogel, but with other primates, too, of which we human beings are one. Hundreds of times, a team headed by Gerald Schatten of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine attempted to clone rhesus monkeys but failed on every try.

It is almost as if someone "drew a sharp line between old-world primates, including people, and other animals, saying: 'I'll let you clone cattle, mice, sheep, even rabbits and cats. But monkeys and humans require something more,'" project leader Schatten tells Vogel.

But that's not the only dilemma would-be cloners face, Vogel adds. She points to another study from the April 15 issue of Development which finds that "genes important to early development frequently fail to turn on in mouse embryos cloned from adult cells." Experiments also indicate that "even apparently healthy cloned mice show abnormal levels of gene expression," according to Vogel.

"There may be no normal clones," conclude the scientists who conducted that second study. Says Vogel, "The debate [about cloning] will go on, but nature already seems to have imposed its own limits on cloning." Yet, for the people has observed, one hardly would know that from the all-too-eager press reports on cloning which describe the process as already something we all have to accept, right now.

Stephen Goode is a senior writer for Insight.