Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 41 — page 9: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION of the phoenix nest. The du- plicate guinea pigs, likeable as they were, could not be shown to equal their proto- types in more than body. All guinea pigs are too much alike for that. Even dogs did not supply the necessary proof. The researchers determined at last to attempt the duplica- tion of a living human being. The first purpose of this would be, naturally, to demonstrate that a human being could be generated from cells in the same manner as salamanders, guinea pigs and dogs. But the second purpose would be to establish that, once generated, the human being would be the same person as the individual from whom the cells had been taken, having a personality which would be indistinguish- able in every way from that of his forebear. Just what this would mean in cases in which the forebear was still alive was a difficult point. When news of the experi- mental plans leaked out to the Press, a storm of protest burst forth from various reli- gious groups, who said that it was a sin against God and man to force a human soul to split itself in two so as to become the tenant of two bodies. The experimenters responded soothingly that God moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform, and that if they could exactly duplicate a physical human being in the laboratory, God would co- operate by handling the spiri- tual end of things in His own divinely efficient manner. The religionists were put off by this adroit use of their own arguments against themselves, and they subsided long enough for the University men to go ahead with the experiments. If, however, the scientists had disposed of religious ob- jections to the splitting of the - human soul, they had not quieted ail their own doubts. Long and heated discussions were carried on behind the locked laboratory doors. Pro- fessor Knaut, successor to the Original experimenters, was strong for the idea that the human mind was nothing more than a series of electrical charges which passed in ac- cordance with the natural laws of electronics through any Organism as complex as the human body. Dr. Stroth- conmmicloooks.comn)