2015考研英语阅读理解精读P15—医学2015考研英语阅读理解精读P15—医学.docVIP

2015考研英语阅读理解精读P15—医学 　Passage 15 　　Depending on whom you ask, the experiment announced at a Texas medical conference last week was a potential breakthrough for infertile women, a tragic failure or a dangerous step closer to the nightmare scenario of human cloning. 　　Theres truth to all these points of view. Infertility was clearly the motivation when Chinese doctors used a new technique to help one of their countrywomen get pregnant. Unlike some infertile women, the 30-year-old patient produced eggs just fine, and those eggs could be fertilized by sperm. But they never developed properly, largely because of defects in parts of the egg outside the fertilized nucleus. So using a technique developed by Dr. James Grifo at New York University, Dr. Zhuang Guanglun of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou took the patients fertilized egg, scooped out the chromosome-bearing nuclear material and put it in a donated egg whose nucleus had been removed. In this more benign environment, development proceeded normally, and the woman became pregnant with triplets who carried a mix of her DNA and her husbands--pretty much like any normal baby. 　　What has some doctors and ethicists upset is that this so-called nuclear-transfer technique has also been used to produce clones, starting with Dolly the sheep. The only significant difference is that with cloning, the inserted nucleus comes from a single, usually adult, cell, and the resulting offspring is genetically identical to the parent. Doing that with humans is ethically repugnant to many. Besides, for reasons that arent yet well understood, cloned animals often abort spontaneously or are born with defects; Dolly died very young, though she had seemed healthy. And because the Chinese womans twins were born prematurely and died (the third triplet was removed early on to improve chances for the remaining two), critics have suggested that cloning and nuclear transfer are equally risky for humans. 　　Not likely, says Grifo. The obstetr