2014届高考英语一轮复习精品阅读理解提升文章精选一百篇73.docVIP

Unit 74　　Will We Follow Dolly, the Sheep?　　Hearing Scottish scientists success in cloning a sheep from a single adult cell, the world cones to an unsettling realization: the science is the easy part. its not that the breakthrough was not decades in the making. Its that once you figured out how to transfer the genes 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 tremors it triggers, however, have merely begun. How will the new technology be regulated? What does the sudden ability to make carbon copies of ourselves say about the concept of individuality? Or is there something about the individual that is lost when the mystical act of conceiving a person becomes standardized into a mere act of photocopying one?　　Of all the reasons for using the new technology, pure ego raises the most hackles. The Pharaohs built their pyramids, the Emperors built Rome, and Napoleon built his Arc de Triomphe -- all, at least in part, to make the permanence of stone compensate for the impermanence of the flesh. But big buildings and big tombs would be a poor second choice if the flesh could be made to go on forever. Now it appears, it can. However, its one thing to want to be remembered after you are gone; its 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 thats naive. Its obvious that a lot of people would be eager to clone themselves. Especially those who think the world could use more of them; people who are so arrogant that they have no qualms about bestowing their inner life on a dozen members of the next generations; people, in short, with high self-esteem. Its a horrible crime to make a Xerox of someone. It amounts to putting a human into a genetic straitjacket.　　More acceptable than the ego clone is the medical clone, a baby created to provide tr