Imagine the billions spent on research creating the monsters....

Okay, so if they can make clones, why don't they make a million of these supposedly special kids? And if they can do that, how are they unable to isolate what exactly makes the kids immune in the first place?

How would having a million "special kids" help with the development of an antiviral agent?

Creating clones is a relatively simple job, but creating antiviral agents is a totally different matter. Viruses mutate, so you're fighting a constantly changing opponent. This is why we still have the common cold and 'flu outbreaks.

As for VR, I've seen what's been done prosthetics, but IIRC they require months of training to learn.

I suppose you could build a pretty bad VR system that wouldn't fool a bat, and then wipe the kids' memories of the real world, so they had no baseline against which they could compare their virtual environment. Shrug.

I'm getting tired of these VR films. For the last thirty years, films have been showing us these VR rigs that plug into your spine, or that use trams-cranial magnetic stimulation helmets, but that actual technology has advanced rather slowly. I don't think we'll see a VR system that's indistinguishable from real life even in another thirty years: computers have stopped getting faster, except for easily parallelizable tasks; general purpose quantum computers are still a long way away, and we've hardly begun building the technology to intercept all the brain's inputs and outputs.

Then there's the problem that much of what our body does (e.g speech) is decided up to a second before you're aware of your 'choice' of words! Worse, many of our 'choices' aren't made in the brain (e.g reflex arcs) so a VR system would also have to monitor and stimulate the entire spinal cord, as well as the brain. I think the whole VR project will prove to be a lot harder than most people imagine.

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P.S.

The geneticists are so good they can clone the kid..

From several things that you've written, you sound like you believe that human cloning is difficult. Don't forget that Dolly, the sheep, was cloned 20 years ago this year, and that there's no reason to think that sheep are easier to clone than other mammals, including humans.

The obstacles to human cloning are moral, legal and religious ones - not technological! (Most geneticists I know believe that people - insanely wealthy egotists? - have already been cloned, albeit illegally and in secret. I’m pretty sure all the methods required to clone Dolly were published openly, so to clone a person you’d just need a suitable genetics doctor, an IVF specialist, an amoral ObGyn and a general medical doctor.)

Except this idea (of cloning) isn't a given in the film. It's made up by you after the fact. There's no indication that they can do this anywhere in the movie.

Again, I’d be amazed if human cloning wasn’t already possible, and the same can be said of many far more knowledgable genetics researchers.

As I mentioned before, a possible obstacle to the hypothetical cloning solution might be, that clones only acquire immunity by exposure to some unknown environmental factor, at just the right age. In a longer film (or the novel?) the scientists might’ve explained this point.

If this were the case (i.e. the immune kids have to have both the right DNA and be exposed to an unusual environmental factor at the right age) then I’d agree with your post of the 3rd of July: the kids are an incredibly valuable resource and they shouldn’t be exposed to the dangers of the maze.

____
"If you ain't a marine then you ain't *beep*

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P.P.S. This week's New Scientist, or the issue before, reported that artificial and seemingly viable sperm had been made in a lab from just a male human DNA sample.

That's a mighty good start

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