Mother, Father ... and other mother?

So as the world evolves, so will the requirements for tracking identity and digital identity. It's no longer enough to have attributes for "mother" and "father" ... now we have to account for the possibility of multiple parents! This article talks about some research going on where an embryo will be created with genes from two mothers. So a child born of this type of research will have to be able to list their mother and father ... and other mother. As we continue to explore digital identity, I hope that people realize that the old ways of thinking about identity are long gone.

This reminds be of some foresight used by the authors of HumanML ... the Human Markup Language. When I was reading through their schema I was surprised to see that they have already accounted for the possibility that someone has had a gender-change operation! They already define the attributes for 'gender', along with 'gender at birth'! Yep ... they might not be the same.

The ironic issue is that this might not be enough ... what if they change their gender numerous times? May we live in interesting times. The world of identity is going to be rocked.

The cloned baby with two mothers. Daily Mail Sep 9 2005 8:10AM GMT [Moreover Technologies - moreover...]

[tags: identity digitalidentity genetics cloning]