《新视野大学英语 New Horizon College English》课程教学资源（PPT课件讲稿）Unit 8 Legal and Moral Implications of Cloning

disrespected) social class: "the clones". One expert believes the situation could be comparable to what occurred in the 16th century, when Europeans puzzled over how to classify the unfamiliar inhabitants of the Americas, and endlessly debated whether or not they were humans.

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Legal and Moral Implications of Cloning At first it was just plain surprising. Word last week that a scientist named Ian Wilmut had succeeded in cloning an adult mammal—an achievement long thought impossible—caught the imagination of everyone. The laboratory process that produced Dolly, an unremarkablelooking sheep, theoretically would work for humans as well. A world with human clones was suddenly within reach. It was science fiction coming to life. In the wake of Wilmut’s announcement, Back human cloning, began examining the moral implications of cloning other species. Like the Theory of Relativity, the splitting of the atom, and the first space flight, Dolly’s appearance has generated a long list of difficult puzzles for scientists, politicians, and governments hurried to draft guidelinesfor the unknown, a future filled with incredible possibilities. President Clinton ordered a national commission to study the legal and moral implications of cloning. Leaders in Europe, where most nations already prohibit philosophers. And wild questions on the topic of cloning continue to mount. Why would anyone want to clone a human being in the first place? The human cloning situations that experts consider most frequently fall into two broad categories: 1) parents who want to clone a child, either to provide transplantsfor a dying child or to replace that child, and 2) adults who for a variety of reasons might want to clone themselves. Will it be possible to clone the dead? Perhaps, if the body is fresh, says one expert. The cloning method used by Wilmut’s lab requires combining an egg cell with the nucleus of a cell containing the DNA of the person to be cloned. (DNA is a very long, ribbon-like molecule that contains our genetic information.) And that means that the nucleus must be intact. Cells die and the cell nucleus begins to break apart after death. But, yes, in theory at least it might be possible. Would a cloned human be identical to the original? Identical genes don’t produce identical people, as anyone who knows a set of identical twins can tell you. In fact, twins are more alike than clones would be, since they have at least shared the same environment within the mother, are usually raised in the same family, and so forth. Parents could clone a second child who resembled their first in appearance, but all the evidence suggests the two would have very different personalities. Twins separated at birth do sometimes share personality characteristics, but such characteristics in a cloned son or daughter would only be reminders of the child who was lost. Even in terms of biology, a clone would not be identical to the “master copy”. The clone’s cells, for example, would have energy-processing machinery that came from the egg, not from the person who was cloned. But most of the physical differences between originals and copies are so minor that detection of them would require a sophisticated laboratory. The one possible exception is bearing children. Wilmut and his coworkers are not sure that Dolly will be able to have lambs. They will try to find out once she’s old enough to breed. What if parents decided to clone a child in order to harvest organs? Most experts agree that it would be psychologically harmful if a child sensed he had been brought into the world simply as an organ donor. But some parents already produce second children with nonfatal transplants in mind, and many experts do not oppose this. Cloning would increase the chances for a tissue match from 25 percent to nearly 100 percent. If cloned animals could be used as organ donors, we wouldn’t have to worry about cloning twins for transplants. Pigs, for example, have organs similar in size to humans’. But the human body attacks and destroys tissue from other species. To get around that, one company is trying to alter the pig’s genetic code to prevent pig organs from being attacked. If the company’s technicianssucceed, it may be more efficient to produce such pigs by cloning than by current methods. How would a human clone refer to the donor of its DNA? “Mom” is not right, because the woman or women who supplied the egg and gave birth to the infant would more appropriately be called Mother. “Dad” isn’t right, either. A traditional father supplies only half the DNA in a child. Judith Martin, in her writings under the name of “Miss Manners”, suggests the phrase, “Most honored sir or madam”. Why? “One should always respect one’s ancestors,” she says, “regardless of what they did to bring one into the world.” That still leaves some confusion over vocabulary. The editorial director of one dictionary says that the noun “clonee” may sound like a good term, but it’s not clear enough. Instead, he prefers “original” and “copy”. What are the other implications of cloning for society? The gravest concern isn’t really cloning itself, but genetic engineering—the deliberate altering of genes to create human beings according to certain requirements. Specifically, some experts are concerned about the creation of a new (and disrespected) social class: “the clones”. One expert believes the situation could be comparable to what occurred in the 16th century, when Europeans puzzled over how to classify the unfamiliar inhabitants of the Americas, and endlessly debated whether or not they were humans. The list of questions could go on; people are just beginning to wonder about the future of the world after cloning

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