【正确答案】
The Controversy over Human Cloning
Ever since the birth in 1997 of
Dolly the cloned sheep, a number of other cloned animals have kept coming out every year. Recently, two scientists from the United States and Italy announced that they would work together on the cloning of human beings so as to help sterile couples have offspring. This explosive news instantly evoked worldwide repercussions. While some people have voiced their support, many more oppose the practice of human cloning, a practice that has already been outlawed or banned in many countries. Can human beings be cloned and whether human cloning should be allowed has become an ever-increasing concern of the world.
There has been a strong outcry against human cloning in academic, political and religious circles. They hold the view that technically the chance of successful cloning is slim and that consequently the cloning of human beings will destroy human moral principles and cause a social disaster.
Amongst the mainstream opposition there is a weak voice, saying that whether human cloning is right or wrong is yet to be determined by history. For people sharing this view, cloning technology is just like atomic technology, which can be a blessing or a curse to mankind. But fear of technology is essentially a fear of those who use technology wrongfully, rather than a fear of the technology itself. Historically, blood transfusion and organ transplant were both subjects of bitter controversy relating to ethics. When the first test-tube baby was born in the United Kingdom in 1978, the event caused a great disturbance. But so far there have already been more than three million test-tube babies in the world. So whether a technological progress will eventually be beneficial to mankind depends on how mankind handles and applies it.
Despite opposition on the part of the majority of people against human cloning, cloning as a technology has been developing fast. Some scientists believe that such experimentation is bound to go on and that what we should do is to learn how to control it.
Today, mankind possesses rich information, tools and resources as never before, and scientific development has entered an era of information, nuclear energy, space flight and life science. How to make science benefit instead of harming mankind and the earth is an issue that merits our attention and vigilance.