Cloning
Cloning has been a very controversial issue in the United States over the past few years. There are two different sides, either one is for the process of cloning or they're not. It's that simple. Strictly speaking, a clone refers to one or more offspring derived from a single ancestor, whose genetic composition is identical to that of the ancestor. No sex is involved in the production of clones, and since sex is the normal means by which new genetic material is introduced during procreation, clones have no choice but to have the same genes as their single parent. The first successful clone was accomplished about two years ago, although not a human clone. "Dolly" was her name, and she was a sheep. This controversial issue has been studied and examined by many great people, including two men by the names of Laurence Tribe and Charles Krauthammer, whose essays will be examined in this paper. In "Second Thoughts on Cloning", written by Laurence Tribe, a much stronger, opposing viewpoint is conveyed than that of Charles Krauthammer's "Of Headless Mice...and Men".
Tribe, a professor teaching constitutional law at Harvard, printed an article in the New York Times on December 5, 1997 in support of cloning. The article that will be examined in this paper was originally published in TIME magazine on January 19, 1998. Krauthammer talks about the mice used in the University of Texas experiments; "For sheer Frankenstein wattage, the purposeful creation of these animal monsters has no equal"(Krauthammer 469). Congress should ban human cloning now. If human cloning is to be banned, then, the reasons had better be far more compelling than any thus far advanced"(Tribe 461). And regarding one particular form, it should be draconian: The deliberate creation of headless humans must be made a crime, indeed a capital crime. s Krauthammer is a medical doctor and a licensed psychiatrist, but he is chiefly known as a writer. He wrote about the early controversies that were connected with cloning; "But others saw a nightmarish and decidedly unnatural perversion of human reproduction. And that, in turn, requires us to think in terms of a class of potential outcasts-people whose very existence society will have chosen to label as a misfortune and, in essence, to condemn"(Tribe 460). "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"(Krauthammer 470). He feels that this is meaningless and that does not accomplish anything; yet it really does. Overall, Tribe makes a significant amount of arguments that really helps one to start believing in cloning. California enacted a ban on human cloning, and the President's National Bioethics Advisory Commission recommended making the ban nationwide"(Tribe 460). In the beginning of his article, he talks about the cloning of headless mice that took place in a laboratory in Texas.
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Acceptance Essays
