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  3. On Cloning a Human Being It is now theoretically possible to recreate an identical creature from any animal or plant, from t

On Cloning a Human Being It is now theoretically possible to recreate an identical creature from any animal or plant, from t

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问题     On Cloning a Human Being
    It is now theoretically possible to recreate an identical creature from any animal or plant, from the DNA contained in the nucleus of any somatic cell. A single plant root-tip cell can be teased and seduced into conceiving a perfect copy of the whole plant; a frog’s intestinal epithelial cell possesses the complete instructions needed for a new, same frog. If the technology were further advanced, you could do this with a human being, and there are now startled predictions all over the place that this will in fact be done, someday, in order to provide a version of immortality for carefully selected, especially valuable people.
    The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry, and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
    Cloning is the most dismaying of prospects, mandating as it does the elimination of sex with only a metaphoric elimination of death as compensation. It is almost no comfort to know that one’s cloned, identical surrogate lives on, especially when the living will very likely involve edging one’s real, now aging self off to side, sooner or later. It is hard to imagine anything like filial affection or respect for a single, unmated nucleus; harder still to think of one’s new, self-generated self as anything but an absolute, desolate orphan. Not to mention the complex interpersonal relationship involved in raising one’s self from infancy, teaching the language, enforcing discipline, instilling good manners, and the like. How would you feel if you became an incorrigible juvenile delinquent by proxy, at the age of fifty-five?
    The public questions are obvious. Who is to be selected, and on what qualifications? How to handle the risks of misused technology, such as self-determined cloning by the rich and powerful but socially objectionable, or the cloning by governments of dumb, docile masses for the world’s work? What will be the effect on all the uncloned rest of us human sameness? After all, we’ve accustomed ourselves through hundreds of millennia to the continual exhilaration of uniqueness; each of us is totally different, in a fundamental sense, from all the other four billion. Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of human non-selfness, precise sameness, is terrifying, when you think about it.
    Well, don’t think about it, because it isn’t a probable possibility, not even as a long shot for the distant future, in my opinion. I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they’d be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today’s identical twins.
    The time required for the experiment is only one of the problems, but a formidable one. Suppose you wanted to clone a prominent, spectacularly successful diplomat, to look after the Middle East problems of the distant future. You’d have to catch him and persuade him, probably not very hard to do, and extirpate a cell. But then you’d have to wait for him to grow up through embryonic life and then for at least forty years more, and you’d have to be sure all observers remained patient and unmeddlesome through his unpromising, ambiguous childhood and adolescence.
    Moreover, you’d have to be sure of recreating his environment, perhaps down to the last detail. "Environment" is a word which really means people, so you’d have to do a lot more cloning than just the diplomat himself.
    This is a very important part of the cloning problem, largely overlooked in our excitement about the cloned individual himself. You don’t have to agree all the way with B. F. Skinner to acknowledge that the environment does make a difference, and when you examine what we really mean by the word "environment" it comes down to other human beings. We use euphemisms and jargon for this, like "social forces," "cultural influences," even Skinner’s "verbal community," but what is meant is the dense crowd of nearby people who talk to, listen to, smile or frown at, give to, withhold from, nudge, push, caress, or flail out at the individual. No matter what the genome says, these people have a lot to do with shaping a character. Indeed, if all you had was the genome, and no people around, you’d grow a sort of vertebrate plant, nothing more.
    So, to start with, you will undoubtedly need to clone the parents. No question about this. This means the diplomat is out, even in theory, since you couldn’t have gotten cells from both his parents at the time when he was himself just recognizable as an early social treasure. You’d have to limit the list of clones to people already certified as sufficiently valuable for the effort, with both parents still alive. The parents would need cloning and, for consistency, their parents as well. I suppose you’d also need the usual informed-consent forms, filled out and signed, not easy to get if I know parents, even harder for grandparents. But this is only the beginning. It is the whole family that really influences the way a person turns out, not just the parents, according to current psychiatric thinking. Clone the family.
    Then what? The way each member of the family develops has already been determined by the environment set around him, and this environment is more people, people outside the family, schoolmates, acquaintances, lovers, enemies, car-pool partners, even, in special circumstances, peculiar strangers across the aisle on the subway. Find them, and clone them.
    But there is no end to the protocol. Each of the outer contacts has his own surrounding family, and his and their outer contacts. Clone them all.
    To do the thing properly, with any hope of ending up with a genuine duplicate of a single person, you really have no choice. You must clone the world, no less.
    We are not ready for an experiment of this size, nor, I should think, are we willing. For one thing, it would mean replacing today’s world by an entirely identical world to follow immediately, and this means no new, natural, spontaneous, random, chancy children. No children at all, except for the manufactured doubles of those now on the scene. Plus all those identical adults, including all of today’s politicians, all seen double. It is too much to contemplate.
    Moreover, when the whole experiment is finally finished, fifty years or so from now, how could you get a responsible scientific reading on the outcome? Somewhere in there would be the original clonee, probably lost and overworked, now well into middle age, but everyone around him would be precise duplicates of today’s everyone. It would be today’s same world, filled to overflowing with duplicates of today’s people and their same, duplicated problems, probably all resentful at having had to go through our whole thing all over, sore enough at the clonee to make endless trouble for him, if they found him.
    And obviously, if the whole thing were done precisely right, they would still be casting about for ways to solve the problem of universal dissatisfaction, and sooner or later they’d surely begin to look around at each other, wondering who should be cloned for his special value to society, to get us out of all this. And so it would go, in regular cycles, perhaps forever.
    I once lived through a period where I wondered what Hell could be like, and I stretched my imagination to try to think of a perpetual sort of damnation. I have to confess, I never thought of anything like this.
    I have an alternative suggestion, if you’re looking for a way out. Set cloning aside, and don’t try it. Instead, go in the other direction. Look for ways to get mutations more quickly, new variety, different songs. Fiddle around, if you must fiddle, but never with ways to keep things the same, no matter who, not even yourself. Heaven, somewhere ahead, has got to be a change.
Explain in your own terms what the author means in the following passages:
a) The thought of human non-selfness, precise sameness, is terrifying, when you think about it.
b) "Environment" is a word which really means people, so you’d have to do a lot more cloning than just the diplomat himself.
选项
答案a)The cloning of humans will make humans have no specific characters，and it is horrible to be precisely the same． b)Environment exercises a great influence on people，so you’d have to clone the whole world instead of the diplomat himself．
解析 事实细节题。第四段后半部分提到，我们每个人都与世界上其他人不同，自我是生命的基本事实。而克隆人类会打破这种自我，这是很恐怖的事情。第八段提到创造相同环境是克隆中非常重要的一部分，接下来举例说明，最后指出，没有周围环境，克隆出的就只是一个空架子。因此，环境很重要。
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