2014-2015学年高中英语（精品）同步教案第6课时：Unit 2 Cloning人教新课标选修8）.docVIP

2014-2015学年高中英语（精品）同步教案第6课时：Unit 2 Cloning人教新课标选修8） I. Reading comprehension: Hello, Dolly! British scientists have done something that many people thought was impossible: they created the first clone of an adult mammal. The clone, named Dolly, is a seven-month-old sheep, grown from a cell of an adult female sheep. What is a clone? A clone is a copy, a genetic copy. Genes are the instructions for life. They tell a cell what to do and how to do it. Genes make each individual plant or animal different and unique. But a clone has the same genes as the original organism. Cloning is not new. Plants have been cloned for centuries. New plants are often grown from cuttings from another plant. Also, plants like pineapples, strawberries and carnations are sometimes cloned. One benefit of cloning is that we can make many copies of the best and healthiest plants. It has been much more difficult to clone animals. Frogs have been cloned, but they died as tadpoles, never living long enough to become adult frogs. Mice, sheep and cattle have been cloned from embryos. But Dolly is the first healthy clone of an adult mammal. How did they do it? (1) An unfertilized egg was taken from a sheep. (2) The egg nucleus was removed. (3) A cell was taken from the udder of a pregnant sheep. It was “starved”, so that it stopped growing. (4) The two cells were combined into one and then implanted in a third sheep, where it grew normally. (5) The clone was born. It was genetically identical to the pregnant sheep in step (3). This sounds much easier than it actually was. To end up with one clone, the scientists started with 277 udder cells. And they needed in a way to make the egg cell accept a new nucleus. They did that by starving the cell in step (3). It may soon be possible to clone many types of animals. Will we also be able to clone human organs, or even whole human beings? We have only begun to think about the morality of cloning technology. Maybe the question to ask is not whether w