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亚麻油酸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 unttling 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.
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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 tho soulquakes? How will the new technology be regulated? What does the sudden ability to make genetic stencils of ourlves 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
八月 英文ndividual that is lost when the mystical act of conceiving a person becomes standardized into a mere act of photocopying one?
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Last week President Clinton took the first tentative step toward answering the 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 Hou subcommittee on basic rearch will hold a hearing to address the same issues. The probable tone of tho ssions 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”.
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Around the globe, the reaction was just as negative. France’s undercretary for rearch condemned human cloning as “unthinkable”, the Council of Europe Secretary G
在线日语翻译器eneral called it “unacceptable,” and Germany’s Minister of Rearch 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.”
大学专业排行榜5.
Though the official respons were predictable--- and even laudable --- they may have misd 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.”
clouderaAlso 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 no 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.
关爱的故事6.
Of all the reasons for using this new technology, pure ego rais 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 obrvers 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 themlves.
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“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.”
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But is it really the first time? Is cloning all that different from genetically engineering an embryo to eliminate a genetic dia like cystic fibrosis? Is it so far removed from in vitro fertilization? In both the cas, 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 e a difference between in vitro technology and cloning. “But,” she adds, “I admit it makes my stomach feel nervous.”