Cloning Disputed – Argumentative Writing Examples
Essay 1: Pre-reading VOCABULARY
Substitute the words printed in italics in the following sentences. Do not change the basic sense of the sentences.But you don’t have to be a genius to see the true utility of manufacturing headless creatures: for their organs – fully formed, perfectly useful, ripe for plundering.
These human bodies without any semblance of consciousness would not be considered persons …
It won’t be long, however, before these technical barriers are breached.
When prominent scientists are prepared to acquiesce in the deliberate creation of deformed and dying quasi-human life, you know we are facing a bioethical abyss.
There is no grosser corruption of biotechnology than creating a human mutant and disemboweling it at our pleasure for spare parts.
With its own independent consciousness, it is just a facsimile of you.
1. Last year Dolly the cloned sheep was received with wonder, titters and some vague apprehension. Last week the announcement by a Chicago physicist that he is assembling a team to produce the first human clone occasioned yet another wave of Brave New World anxiety. But the scariest news of all – and largely overlooked – come from two obscure labs, at the University of Texas and at the University of Bath. During the past four years, one group created headless mice; the other, the headless tadpoles.
2. For sheer Frankenstein wattage, the purposeful creation of these animal monsters has no equal. Take the mice. Researchers found the gene that tells the embryo to produce the head. They deleted it. They did this in a thousand mice embryos, four of which were born. I use the term loosely. Having no way to breathe, the mice died instantly.
3. Why then create them? The Texas researchers want to learn how genes determine embryo development. But you don’t have to be a genius to see the true utility of manufacturing headless creatures: for their organs – fully formed, perfectly useful, ripe for plundering.
4. Why should you be panicked? Because humans are next. “It would almost certainly be possible to produce human bodies without a forebrain,” Princeton biologist Lee Silver told London Sunday Times. “These human bodies without any semblance of consciousness would not be considered persons, and thus it would be perfectly legal to keep them ‘alive’ as a future source of organs.”
5. “Alive.” Never has a pair of quotation marks loomed so ominously. Take the mouse-frog technology, apply it to humans, combine it with cloning, and you are become a god: with a single cell taken from, say, your finger, you produce a headless replica of yourself, a mutant twin, arguably lifeless, that becomes your own personal, precisely tissue-matched organ farm.
6. There are, of course, technical hurdles along the way. Suppressing the equivalent “head” gene in man. Incubating tiny infant organs to grow into larger ones that adults could use. And creating artificial wombs (as per Adlous Huxley), given that it might be difficult to recruit sane women to carry headless fetuses to their birth/death.
7. It won’t be long, however, before these technical barriers are breached. The ethical barriers are already cracking. Lewis Wolpert, professor of biology at University College, London, finds producing headless humans “personally distasteful” but, given the shortage of organs, does not think distaste is sufficient reason not to go ahead with something that would save lives. And Professor Silver not only sees “nothing wrong, philosophically or rationally,” with producing headless humans for organ harvesting, he wants to convince a skeptical public that it is perfectly O.K.
8. When prominent scientists are prepared to acquiesce in – or indeed encourage – the deliberate creation of deformed and dying quasi-human life, you know we are facing a bioethical abyss. Human beings are ends, not means. There is no grosser corruption of biotechnology than creating a human mutant and disemboweling it at our pleasure for spare parts.
9. The prospect of headless human clones should put the whole debate about “normal” cloning in a new light. Normal cloning is less a treatment for infertility than a treatment for vanity. It is a way to produce an exact genetic replica of yourself that will walk the earth years after you’re gone.
10. But there is a problem with a clone. It is not really you. It is but a twin, a perfect John Doe Jr., but still a junior. With its own independent consciousness, it is, alas, just a facsimile of you.
11. The headless clone solves the facsimile problem. It is a gateway to the ultimate vanity: immortality. If you create a real clone, you cannot transfer your consciousness into it to truly live on. But if you create a headless clone of just your body, you have created a ready source of replacement parts to keep you – your consciousness – going indefinitely.
12. This is why one form of cloning will inevitably lead to the other. Cloning is the technology of narcissim, and nothing satisfies narcissism like immortality. Headlessness will be cloning’s crowning achievement.
13. The time to put a stop to this is now. Dolly moved President Clinton to create a commission that recommended a temporary ban on human cloning. But with physicist Richard Seed threatening to clone humans, and with headless animals already here, we are past the time for toothless commissions and meaningless bans.
14. Clinton banned federal funding of human-cloning research, of which there is none anyway. He then proposed a five-year ban on cloning. This is not enough. Congress should ban human cloning now. Totally. And regarding one particular form, it should be draconian: the deliberate creation of headless humans must be made a crime, indeed a capital crime. If we flinch in the face of this high-tech barbarity, we’ll deserve to live in the hell it heralds.
COMPREHENSION
Find substitute words for those printed in italics in the following sentences.
II. Fill in the blanks choosing a suitable word from the list here.
foreboding bioethics hubris abhorrent indicted affront perversions insemination tantamount in vitro impresarios virtuosity heralds
Founder and director of the Science, Ethics, and Public Policy Program at the California Institute of Technology, Daniel Kelves is a versatile writer who has published both in the USA and outside. His articles and essays, published both in scholarly and popular publications, primarily deal with the influence of scientific developments on history, society, politics, and morality. Some of his well known books are The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (1992), In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (1995), and The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science and Character (1998). The following essay was first published in 1997 in The New York Times.
1. In “Songs on Innocence,” William Blake asked, “Little Lamb, who made thee?”[1] The answer for Dolly the sheep is Dr. Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh.[2] Dolly, as the world knows, is a clone, a duplicate of one genetic parent. Her birth marks a milestone in our ability to engineer animals for food and medicine. It also signals that humans can, in principle, be cloned, too. That prospect troubles many people, but they ought not be too concerned about it at the moment.
2. Dolly has provoked widespread ethical foreboding. The Church of Scotland suggested that cloning animals runs contrary to God’s biodiversity. Dr. Wilmut himself said that cloning humans would be “ethically unacceptable.” Carl Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, urged that human cloning be prohibited in the United States. (President Clinton asked a Federal bioethics commission for a speedy review of the implications of mammalian cloning.)
3. The outcry over Dolly calls to mind the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane’s [book] “Daedalus,” … published in 1924. Haldane held that Daedalus of Greek mythology was the first biological inventor (the first genetic engineer, we would say) … [who procreated] the Minotaur[3] … . Daedalus escaped punishment from the gods for his hubris, Haldane noted, but he suffered “the age-long reprobation of a humanity to whom biological inventions are abhorrent.”
4. If Daedalus did not offend the gods of his day, many people have indicted biotechnologists for affronting God in ours. Yet Haldane, for one, knew that although biological innovations are often initially seen as perversions, over time, they become accepted as “a ritual supported by unquestioned beliefs and prejudices.” As technologies improve, people recognize them as advantageous. Society, through its legislatures and courts, figures out how to resolve the problems they posed at the outset.
5. In this way, artificial insemination of humans, considered tantamount to adultery before World War II, has become widely accepted. So have reproductive methods like in vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood. People abort fetuses with genetic disorders, administer growth hormones to smallish children, and use insulin made by bacteria injected with a human gene.
6. Scientists have long speculated about manipulating genes to produce new Einsteins, Heifetzes, and Hemingways. Now impresarios can dream of cloning Kareem Abdul-Jabar and raising their own Dream Team.[4]
7. The fantasies are endless, but they are just fantasies. People are the products not only of their genes but of their environments. Today an Einstein clone might grow up to be Steven Spielberg.[5] Anyway, no one knows what genes contribute to the qualities we most admire and value, whether virtuosity of the pen, the pitch, or the piccolo.
8. Still, Dolly heralds wondrous innovations with huge economic implications (that Dr. Wilmut held back the news of Dolly’s birth until he could register a patent has been reported without comment). Someday an infertile couple might choose to have a child by cloning one or the other partner. A cancer victim might use his DNA to clone spare body parts – liver, pancreas, lungs, kidneys, bone marrow.
9. For now, cloning should rightly be confined to animals. But as the technology evolves to invite human experimentation, it would be better to watch and regulate rather than prohibit. Outlaw the exploration of human cloning and it will surely go offshore, only to turn into bootleg science that will find its way back to our borders simply because people want it.
10. As with so many previous advances in biology, today’s affront to the gods may be tomorrow’s highly regarded – and highly demanded – agent of self-gratification or health.
COMPREHENSION
What are the qualities of this essay that make it a popular reading among general readers?
Essay 1: Pre-reading VOCABULARY
Substitute the words printed in italics in the following sentences. Do not change the basic sense of the sentences.But you don’t have to be a genius to see the true utility of manufacturing headless creatures: for their organs – fully formed, perfectly useful, ripe for plundering.
These human bodies without any semblance of consciousness would not be considered persons …
It won’t be long, however, before these technical barriers are breached.
When prominent scientists are prepared to acquiesce in the deliberate creation of deformed and dying quasi-human life, you know we are facing a bioethical abyss.
There is no grosser corruption of biotechnology than creating a human mutant and disemboweling it at our pleasure for spare parts.
With its own independent consciousness, it is just a facsimile of you.
Of Headless Mice … and Men
Medical practitioner turned journalist, writer Charles Krauthammer served as science advisor to President Jimmy Carter and as speech writer for Vice President Walter Mondale. He served as a writer and editor of The New Republic. His weekly column for the Washington Post and his monthly column for Time magazine earned him prestigious Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 1985. Cutting Edges is a collection of his work. The following essay first appeared in Time in 1998.1. Last year Dolly the cloned sheep was received with wonder, titters and some vague apprehension. Last week the announcement by a Chicago physicist that he is assembling a team to produce the first human clone occasioned yet another wave of Brave New World anxiety. But the scariest news of all – and largely overlooked – come from two obscure labs, at the University of Texas and at the University of Bath. During the past four years, one group created headless mice; the other, the headless tadpoles.
2. For sheer Frankenstein wattage, the purposeful creation of these animal monsters has no equal. Take the mice. Researchers found the gene that tells the embryo to produce the head. They deleted it. They did this in a thousand mice embryos, four of which were born. I use the term loosely. Having no way to breathe, the mice died instantly.
3. Why then create them? The Texas researchers want to learn how genes determine embryo development. But you don’t have to be a genius to see the true utility of manufacturing headless creatures: for their organs – fully formed, perfectly useful, ripe for plundering.
4. Why should you be panicked? Because humans are next. “It would almost certainly be possible to produce human bodies without a forebrain,” Princeton biologist Lee Silver told London Sunday Times. “These human bodies without any semblance of consciousness would not be considered persons, and thus it would be perfectly legal to keep them ‘alive’ as a future source of organs.”
5. “Alive.” Never has a pair of quotation marks loomed so ominously. Take the mouse-frog technology, apply it to humans, combine it with cloning, and you are become a god: with a single cell taken from, say, your finger, you produce a headless replica of yourself, a mutant twin, arguably lifeless, that becomes your own personal, precisely tissue-matched organ farm.
6. There are, of course, technical hurdles along the way. Suppressing the equivalent “head” gene in man. Incubating tiny infant organs to grow into larger ones that adults could use. And creating artificial wombs (as per Adlous Huxley), given that it might be difficult to recruit sane women to carry headless fetuses to their birth/death.
7. It won’t be long, however, before these technical barriers are breached. The ethical barriers are already cracking. Lewis Wolpert, professor of biology at University College, London, finds producing headless humans “personally distasteful” but, given the shortage of organs, does not think distaste is sufficient reason not to go ahead with something that would save lives. And Professor Silver not only sees “nothing wrong, philosophically or rationally,” with producing headless humans for organ harvesting, he wants to convince a skeptical public that it is perfectly O.K.
8. When prominent scientists are prepared to acquiesce in – or indeed encourage – the deliberate creation of deformed and dying quasi-human life, you know we are facing a bioethical abyss. Human beings are ends, not means. There is no grosser corruption of biotechnology than creating a human mutant and disemboweling it at our pleasure for spare parts.
9. The prospect of headless human clones should put the whole debate about “normal” cloning in a new light. Normal cloning is less a treatment for infertility than a treatment for vanity. It is a way to produce an exact genetic replica of yourself that will walk the earth years after you’re gone.
10. But there is a problem with a clone. It is not really you. It is but a twin, a perfect John Doe Jr., but still a junior. With its own independent consciousness, it is, alas, just a facsimile of you.
11. The headless clone solves the facsimile problem. It is a gateway to the ultimate vanity: immortality. If you create a real clone, you cannot transfer your consciousness into it to truly live on. But if you create a headless clone of just your body, you have created a ready source of replacement parts to keep you – your consciousness – going indefinitely.
12. This is why one form of cloning will inevitably lead to the other. Cloning is the technology of narcissim, and nothing satisfies narcissism like immortality. Headlessness will be cloning’s crowning achievement.
13. The time to put a stop to this is now. Dolly moved President Clinton to create a commission that recommended a temporary ban on human cloning. But with physicist Richard Seed threatening to clone humans, and with headless animals already here, we are past the time for toothless commissions and meaningless bans.
14. Clinton banned federal funding of human-cloning research, of which there is none anyway. He then proposed a five-year ban on cloning. This is not enough. Congress should ban human cloning now. Totally. And regarding one particular form, it should be draconian: the deliberate creation of headless humans must be made a crime, indeed a capital crime. If we flinch in the face of this high-tech barbarity, we’ll deserve to live in the hell it heralds.
COMPREHENSION
- What, according to Krauthammer, is “the scariest news of all” (1) in the field of cloning?
- What are the technical hurdles in creating headless human clones at present?
- What does the author imply when he says that the “ethical barriers” to the creation of headless human clones “are already cracking” (7)?
- “the deliberate creation of headless humans must be made a crime, indeed a capital crime.” (14) Why is the writer so opposed to the creation of headless human clones?
- What measures are suggested by the author to put a ban on human cloning? Are they workable?
- What is the thesis of the essay? Is it stated explicitly?
- Which readership, religious or secular (not subscribing to any formal religion), is likely to be more impressed by the writer’s arguments? Why?
- The essay is written in a subjective tone. Cite some instances of subjective tone.
- Paragraph 6 uses a number of fragments. Identify these fragments and comment on their effect.
- What is the method of development used in paragraphs 9 – 12? How does it serve writer’s purpose?
Find substitute words for those printed in italics in the following sentences.
- Dolly has provoked widespread ethical foreboding.
- President Clinton asked a Federal bioethics commission for a speedy review of the implications of mammalian cloning.
- The Greek mythology character, Daedalus, escaped punishment from the gods for his hubris, Haldane noted, but he suffered “the age-long reprobation of a humanity to whom biological inventions are abhorrent.”
- If Daedalus did not offend the gods of his day, many people have indicted biotechnologists for affronting God in ours.
- Yet Haldane, for one, knew that although biological innovations are often initially seen as perversions, over time, they become accepted as “a ritual supported by unquestioned beliefs and prejudices.”
- In this way, artificial insemination of humans, considered tantamount to adultery before World War II, has become widely accepted.
- So have reproductive methods like in vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood.
- Now impresarios can dream of cloning Kareem Abdul-Jabar and raising their own Dream Team.
- Anyway, no one knows what genes contribute to the qualities we most admire and value, whether virtuosity of the pen, the pitch, or the piccolo.
- Dolly heralds wondrous innovations with huge economic implications.
II. Fill in the blanks choosing a suitable word from the list here.
foreboding bioethics hubris abhorrent indicted affront perversions insemination tantamount in vitro impresarios virtuosity heralds
- His refusal to answer was ____________ to an admission of guilt.
- The uproar led to the establishment of ____________ committees to oversee cloning research.
- There’s a sense of ___________ in the capital, as if fighting might at any minute break out.
- The president’s speech ____________ a new era in foreign policy.
- He was punished for his ____________ .
- Famous mainly for his wonderful voice, Cole’s ___________ on the piano was no less.
- City’s famous theatrical ____________ play quite a role in molding the social tastes of the society.
- Scientists are studying these cells ___________ .
- Racism of any kind is ____________ to me.
- Five people were ____________ for making and selling counterfeit currency.
- He regarded the comments as an ____________ to his dignity
- His testimony was clearly a ____________ of the truth.
- Artificial ____________ is a common practice to improve animal breeding.
Study Cloning, Don’t Ban It
Founder and director of the Science, Ethics, and Public Policy Program at the California Institute of Technology, Daniel Kelves is a versatile writer who has published both in the USA and outside. His articles and essays, published both in scholarly and popular publications, primarily deal with the influence of scientific developments on history, society, politics, and morality. Some of his well known books are The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (1992), In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (1995), and The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science and Character (1998). The following essay was first published in 1997 in The New York Times.
1. In “Songs on Innocence,” William Blake asked, “Little Lamb, who made thee?”[1] The answer for Dolly the sheep is Dr. Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh.[2] Dolly, as the world knows, is a clone, a duplicate of one genetic parent. Her birth marks a milestone in our ability to engineer animals for food and medicine. It also signals that humans can, in principle, be cloned, too. That prospect troubles many people, but they ought not be too concerned about it at the moment.
2. Dolly has provoked widespread ethical foreboding. The Church of Scotland suggested that cloning animals runs contrary to God’s biodiversity. Dr. Wilmut himself said that cloning humans would be “ethically unacceptable.” Carl Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, urged that human cloning be prohibited in the United States. (President Clinton asked a Federal bioethics commission for a speedy review of the implications of mammalian cloning.)
3. The outcry over Dolly calls to mind the great biologist J.B.S. Haldane’s [book] “Daedalus,” … published in 1924. Haldane held that Daedalus of Greek mythology was the first biological inventor (the first genetic engineer, we would say) … [who procreated] the Minotaur[3] … . Daedalus escaped punishment from the gods for his hubris, Haldane noted, but he suffered “the age-long reprobation of a humanity to whom biological inventions are abhorrent.”
4. If Daedalus did not offend the gods of his day, many people have indicted biotechnologists for affronting God in ours. Yet Haldane, for one, knew that although biological innovations are often initially seen as perversions, over time, they become accepted as “a ritual supported by unquestioned beliefs and prejudices.” As technologies improve, people recognize them as advantageous. Society, through its legislatures and courts, figures out how to resolve the problems they posed at the outset.
5. In this way, artificial insemination of humans, considered tantamount to adultery before World War II, has become widely accepted. So have reproductive methods like in vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood. People abort fetuses with genetic disorders, administer growth hormones to smallish children, and use insulin made by bacteria injected with a human gene.
6. Scientists have long speculated about manipulating genes to produce new Einsteins, Heifetzes, and Hemingways. Now impresarios can dream of cloning Kareem Abdul-Jabar and raising their own Dream Team.[4]
7. The fantasies are endless, but they are just fantasies. People are the products not only of their genes but of their environments. Today an Einstein clone might grow up to be Steven Spielberg.[5] Anyway, no one knows what genes contribute to the qualities we most admire and value, whether virtuosity of the pen, the pitch, or the piccolo.
8. Still, Dolly heralds wondrous innovations with huge economic implications (that Dr. Wilmut held back the news of Dolly’s birth until he could register a patent has been reported without comment). Someday an infertile couple might choose to have a child by cloning one or the other partner. A cancer victim might use his DNA to clone spare body parts – liver, pancreas, lungs, kidneys, bone marrow.
9. For now, cloning should rightly be confined to animals. But as the technology evolves to invite human experimentation, it would be better to watch and regulate rather than prohibit. Outlaw the exploration of human cloning and it will surely go offshore, only to turn into bootleg science that will find its way back to our borders simply because people want it.
10. As with so many previous advances in biology, today’s affront to the gods may be tomorrow’s highly regarded – and highly demanded – agent of self-gratification or health.
COMPREHENSION
- By implication, is Kelves rejecting the age-old belief that life is created only by God when he cites William Blake in conjunction with Wilmut’s creation of Dolly?
- Kelves maintains that initially biological inventions are viewed as perversions, but later they are embraced for people recognize them as advantageous. What are the instances cited in support of his argument?
- What does Kelves imply when he says, “no one knows what genes contribute to the qualities we most admire and value”?
- What will happen, according to Kelves, if human cloning is outlawed?
- The writer lays down his thesis quite explicitly. Identify this thesis and paraphrase it in your own words.
What are the qualities of this essay that make it a popular reading among general readers?
STYLE & STRUCTURE
[1] The famous romantic poet, William Blake (1757-1827), concludes his poem with an answer to this question, “God made thee.” The implication here is that such an answer is no longer valid today in view of cloning research.
[2] Wilmut and his team produced the first viable genetically cloned creature, a sheep, named, Dolly in 1997.
[3] In Greek mythology, Minotaur was a monster having the figure of half human and half bull.
[4] Albert Einstein (1879 –1955) was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Jascha Heifetz (1901 – 87) a renowned violinist, Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961) a Nobel Prize-winning writer, and Kareem Abdul-Jabar (1947 – ) a famous basketball player.
[5] A noted filmmaker
- Where does Kelves recognize and refute the opposite view? Do you find his refutation balanced and convincing?
- How would you characterize the tone of the essay? Is the language objective or is it subjective and passionate? Give examples to support your opinion.
- What is the method of development (mode of discourse) used in paragraphs 1, 3-5, and 8-9? How these methods of development advance his central thesis?
- Is Kelves attacking religion and Christianity by citing the myth of Daedalus when he says that Daedalus escaped the wrath gods but he could not escape “the agelong reprobation of a humanity to whom biological inventions are abhorrent”?
[1] The famous romantic poet, William Blake (1757-1827), concludes his poem with an answer to this question, “God made thee.” The implication here is that such an answer is no longer valid today in view of cloning research.
[2] Wilmut and his team produced the first viable genetically cloned creature, a sheep, named, Dolly in 1997.
[3] In Greek mythology, Minotaur was a monster having the figure of half human and half bull.
[4] Albert Einstein (1879 –1955) was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Jascha Heifetz (1901 – 87) a renowned violinist, Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961) a Nobel Prize-winning writer, and Kareem Abdul-Jabar (1947 – ) a famous basketball player.
[5] A noted filmmaker
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