Word: clones
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
More palatable than the ego clone to some bioethicists is the medical clone, a baby created to provide transplant material for the original. Nobody advocates harvesting a one-of-a-kind organ like a heart from the new child--an act that would amount to creating the clone just to kill it. But it's hard to argue against the idea of a family's loving a child so much that it will happily raise another, identical child so that one of its kidneys or a bit of its marrow might allow the first to live. "The reasons for opposing...
...problem is that once you start shading the cloning question--giving an ethical O.K. to one hypothetical and a thumbs-down to another--you begin making the sort of ad hoc hash of things the Supreme Court does when it tries to define pornography. Suppose you could show that the baby who was created to provide marrow for her sister would forever be treated like a second-class sibling--well cared for, perhaps, but not well loved. Do you prohibit the family from cloning the first daughter, accepting the fact that you may be condemning her to die? Richard McCormick...
...idea of a dictator's being genetically duplicated is not new--not in pop culture, anyhow. In Ira Levin's 1976 book The Boys from Brazil a zealous ex-Nazi bred a generation of literal Hitler Youth--boys cloned from cells left behind by the Fuhrer. Woody Allen dealt with a similar premise a lot more playfully in his 1973 film Sleeper, in which a futuristic tyrant is killed by a bomb blast, leaving nothing behind but his nose--a nose that his followers hope to clone into a new leader. Even as the fiction of one decade becomes...
Scientists don't pretend to know when that will happen, but some science observers fear it will be soon. The first infant clone could come squalling into the world within seven years according to Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. If he's right, science had better get its ethical house in order quickly. In calendar terms, seven years from now is a good way off; in scientific terms, it's tomorrow afternoon...
...behavior, but the underlying stories spring from two different sciences. The first, behavioral genetics, studies genetic differences among people. (Do you have the thrill-seeking gene? You do? Mind if I drive?) Behavioral genetics has demonstrated that genes matter. But does that mean that genes are destiny, that your clone...