多维教程通达unit03课文原文
Unit 3 Will We Follow the Sheep?
Jeffrey Kluge
It’s a busy morning in the cloning laboratory of the big-city hospital. As always, the list of people seeking the lab’s services is a long one--- and, as always, it’s a varied one. Over here are the patient s who have flown in specially to see if the lab can make them an exact copy of their six-year-old daughter, recently found to be suffering from leukemia so aggressive that only a bone-marrow transplant can save her. the problem is finding a compatible donor. If, by reproductive happenstance, the girl had been born an identical twin, her matching sister could have produced all the marrow she needed. But nature didn’t provide her with a twin, and now the cloning lab will try. In nine months, the parents, who face the very likely prospect of losing the one daughter they have, could find themselves raising two of her--- the second created expressly to help keep the first alive.
1.
Just a week after Scottish embryologists announced that they had succeeded in cloning a sheep from a single adult cell, both the genetics community and the world at large are coming to an unsettling realization: the science is the easy part. It is not that the breakthrough was not decades in the making. It’s just that once it was compl ete--- once you figured out how to transfer the genetic schematics from an adult cell into a living ovum and keep the fragile embryo alive throughout gestation--- most of your basic biological work was finished. The social and philosophical temblors it triggers, however, have merely begun.
2.
Only now, as the news of Dolly, the sublimely oblivious sheep, becomes part of the cultural debate, are we beginning to come to terms with those soulquakes? How will the new technology be regulated? What does the sudden ability to make genetic stencils of ourselves say about the concept of individuality? Is a species simply an uberorganism, a collection of multicellular parts to be diecast as needed? Or is there something about the i
ndividual that is lost when the mystical act of conceiving a person becomes standardized into a mere act of photocopying one?
3.
Last week President Clinton took the first tentative step toward answering these questions, charging a U.S. commission with the task of investigating the legal and ethical implications of the new technology and reporting back to him with their findings within 90 days. Later this week the House subcommittee on basic research will hold a hearing to address the same issues. The probable tone of those sessions was established last week when Harrold Varmus, director of the National Institute of Health (NIT), told another subcommittee that cloning a person is “repugnant to the American public”.clone
4.
Around the globe, the reaction was just as negative. France’s undersecretary for research condemned human cloning as “unthinkable”, the Council of Europe Secretary General cal
led it “unacceptable,” and Germany’s Minister of Research and Technology flatly declared: “There will never be a human clone.” Agreed Professor Akira Irirani,and embryology expert at Osaka’s Kinki University, “We must refrain from applying [the technique] to human beings.”
5.
Though the official responses were predictable--- and even laudable --- they may have missed the larger point. The public may welcome ways a government can regulate cloning, but what is needed
even more are ways a thinking species can ethically fathom it. “This is not going to end in 90 days,” says Princeton University president Harold Shapirs, the chairman of President Clinton’s committee. “Now that we have this technology, we have some hard thinking ahead of us.”
Also watching in the cloning lab this morning is the local industrialist. He does not have a
sick child to worry about; indeed, he has never especially cared for children. Lately he has begun to feel different. With a little help from the cloning lab, he now has the opportunity to have a son who would bear not just his name and his nose and the color of his hair but every scrap of genetic coding that makes him what he is. Now that appeals to the local industrialist. In fact, if this first boy works out, he might even make a few more.
6.
Of all the reasons for using this new technology, pure ego raises the most hackles. It’s one thing to want to be remembered after you are gone; i t’s quite another to manufacture a living monument to ensure that you are. Some observers claim to be shocked that anyone would contemplate such a thing. But that’s na?ve--- and even disingenuous. It’s obvious that a lot of people would be eager to clone themselves.
7.
“It’s a horrendous crime to make a Xerox of someone,” argues author and science critic J
eremy Rifkin. “You’re putting a human into a genetic straitjacket. For the first time, we’ve taken the principles of industrial design--- quality control, predictability--- and applied them to a human being.”
8.
But is it really the first time? Is cloning all that different from genetically engineering an embryo to eliminate a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis? Is it so far removed from in vitro fertilization? In both these cases, after all, an undeniable reductiveness is going on, a shriveling of the complexity of the human body to the certainty of a single cell in a Petri dish. If we accept this kind of tinkering, can’t we accept cloning? Harvard neurob iologist Lisa Geller admits that intellectually she does not see a difference between in vitro technology and cloning. “But,” she adds, “I admit it makes my stomach feel nervous.”

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