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1、Passage APassage BReturn to MenuReturn to MenuUnit 4Unit 4攀枝花学院大学英语3Passage AThink About ItRead About ItTalk About ItWrite About It1. What kind of people are in favor of carrying on with the cloning science?Infertile people who cannot have babies otherwise, people suffering fatal diseases, and some
2、religious people seeking immortality.Reference:2. For what reasons do most governments prohibit cloning?Most governments prohibit cloning mainly because it is against nature and causes ethical problems. Besides, the failure rate of cloning is very high.Reference:Read About ItLanguage PointsContent A
3、warenessLanguage FocusNot Now, Dr. MiracleSeverino Antinori is a rich Italian doctor with a string of private fertility clinics to his name. He likes watching football and claims the Catholic faith. Yet the Vatican is no fan of his science.In his clinics, Antinori already offers every IVF treatment
4、under the sun, but still there are couples he cannot help. So now the man Italians call Dr. Miracle is offering to clone his patients to create the babies they so desperately want.And of course its created quite a stir, with other scientists rounding on Antinori as religious leaders line up to attac
5、k his cloning plan as an insult to human dignity. Yet its an ambition Antinori has expressed many times before. Whats new is that finally it seems to be building a head of steam. Like-minded scientists from the US have joined Antinori in his cloning adventure. At a conference in Rome last week they
6、claimed hundreds of couples have already volunteered for the experiments. Antinori shot to fame seven years ago helping grandmothers give birth using donor eggs. Later he pioneered the use of mice to nurture the sperm of men with poor fertility. He is clearly no ordinary scientist but a showman who
7、thrives on controversy and pushing reproductive biology to the limits. And that of course is one reason why hes seen as being so dangerous. However, his idea of using cloning to combat infertility is not as mad as it sounds. Many people have a hard job seeing the point of reproductive cloning. But f
8、or some couples, cloning represents the only hope of having a child carrying their genes, and scientists like Antinori are probably right to say that much of our opposition to cloning as a fertility treatment is irrational. In future we may want to change our minds and allow it in special circumstan
9、ces. But only when the science is ready. And thats the real problem. Five years on from Dolly, the science of cloning is still stuck in the dark ages. The failure rate is a shocking 97 percent and deformed babies all too common. Even when cloning works, nobody understands why. So forget the complex
10、moral arguments. To begin cloning people now, before even the most basic questions have been answered, is simply a waste of time and energy. This is not to say that Antinori will fail, only that if he succeeds it is likely to be at an unacceptably high price. Hundreds of eggs and embryos will be was
11、ted and lots of women will go through difficult pregnancies resulting in miscarriages or abortions. A few years from now techniques will have improved and the wasteful loss wont be as excessive. But right now there seems to be little anyone can do to keep the cloners at bay. And its not just Antinor
12、i and his team who are eager to go. A religious group called the Raelians believes cloning is the key to achieving immortality, and it, too, claims to have the necessary egg donors and volunteers willing to be implanted with cloned embryos. So what about tougher laws? Implanting cloned human embryos
13、 is already illegal in many countries but it will never be prohibited everywhere. In any case, the prohibition of cloning is more likely to drive it underground than stamp it out. Secrecy is already a problem. Antinori and his team are refusing to name the country theyll be using as their base. Like
14、 it or not, the research is going ahead. Sooner or later we are going to have to decide whether regulation is safer than prohibition. Antinori would go for regulation, of course. He believes it is only a matter of time before we lose our hang-ups about reproductive cloning and accept it as just anot
15、her IVF technique. Once the first baby is born and it cries, he said last week, theworld will embrace it. But the world will never embrace the first cloned baby if it is unhealthy or deformed or the sole survivor of hundreds of pregnancies. In jumping the gun, Dr. Miracle and his colleagues are taki
16、ng one hell of a risk. If their instincts are wrong, the backlash against cloning and indeed science as a whole could be catastrophic. miraclemiracle n. n. an an unusual unusual and and mysterious mysterious event event that that cannot cannot be be explained by the laws of natureexplained by the laws of natureExamplesExamples The Great Wall is a The Great Wall is a miraclemiracle of architecture. of architecture. A car ran over the child, but by a A car ran over the child, but by a miraclemirac
