Okay, I’m in something of a quandary here.

As some of you may know, I’ve long been playing around with CRISPR gene editing technologies here in my test kitchen/laboratory, and for the last several months have been shepherding a stew of amino acids and pluripotent stem cells (okay, harvested foreskins– don’t even ask,) in an attempt to reprogram a mess of undifferentiated goo into a tissue culture of human cardiac muscle cells.

So, long nerd-story short, I finally got them to coalesce into a jello-like mass that shows signs of electrical activity, to the extent that I was able to detect and record a faint and rhythmic current running through it all– which is to say, I got a heartbeat. Arguably a human one.  No brain stem, no central nervous system, no recognizable features that would indicate “humanity” as you or I know it, but by golly, I got detectable muscular contractions of cardiac tissue any reasonable clinician would admit is indicative of a heartbeat.

So, anyway, yesterday, we were cleaning up my long-neglected living quarters when my dear but not-too-astute housekeeper apparently mistook one of my petri dishes for a cheese plate and stuck it in the dishwasher and sterilized it into oblivion, thus resulting in what could, by Texas legal standards now qualify as having aborted my petri dish heart thingy.

So here’s my question: Can I turn Brenda in to the Texas authorities for cooking it?  I mean, I sure could use that sweet, sweet $10K bounty y’all are offering for ratting out anyone caught aiding or abetting the abortion of a potential human being. More to the point, if I were to create a whole nursery of these things in Amarillo, could I say, take out a million-dollar life insurance policy on each one of the petri dishes housing these “living unborn” and collect a payout from the Texas taxpayers if someone “forgot” to water them over the weekend?

Just asking for a friend.