Word: sheeps
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...human cloning becomes possible--and since the birth of a sheep called Dolly, few doubt that it will be feasible to clone a person by 2025--even the link between sex organs and reproduction will be broken. You will then be able to take a cutting from your body and grow a new person, as if you were a willow tree. And if it becomes possible to screen or genetically engineer embryos to "improve" them, then in-vitro fertilization and cloning may become the rule rather than the exception among those who can afford...
...seems, is not just food but reward as well. But in the coming century, that will change. Much as we have awakened to the full economic and social costs of cigarettes, we will find we can no longer subsidize or ignore the costs of mass-producing cattle, poultry, pigs, sheep and fish to feed our growing population. These costs include hugely inefficient use of freshwater and land, heavy pollution from livestock feces, rising rates of heart disease and other degenerative illnesses, and spreading destruction of the forests on which much of our planet's life depends...
...obstacle to President Clone will come if cloning carries serious side effects. Dolly the sheep, it turns out, has prematurely aged cells, probably attributable to the fact that she is the biological extension of an animal that was already an adult. Human clones could have the same problem--plus cloning-related mental or behavioral defects that might not be apparent in a sheep...
Sure, why not? Scientists used to think it would be difficult to clone an animal as complex as a mammal, but Dolly the sheep neatly demolished that theory. If you can clone a sheep, a human isn't much tougher. Whether it is ethical to do so is another matter, and in fact human cloning has been outlawed in a number of countries and states. But illegal or not, someone's going to do it--and having been conceived by a convicted felon is no bar to public office...
...Butnitz's descriptions are often overdone, conferring the sense of a writing exercise gone awry. Ilana watches her bother Ari "rip the sheep from piece, till it was nothing but bloody meat," then describes him "trying to put the animal back together, licking his fingers and crooning, cramming the limbs back into their sockets." This display of the grotesque is one of many that causes the reader to wince and writhe; while indicative of her poetic prowess, Budnitz's portrayal of old country rituals offers little to Ilana's narrative and destroys the integrity of her tale...