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  3. The never-ceasing pace of scientific accomplishment often surpasses the prog

The never-ceasing pace of scientific accomplishment often surpasses the prog

游客2023-11-03  46
问题     The never-ceasing pace of scientific accomplishment often surpasses the progress of moral thought, leaving people struggling to make sense, initially at least, of whether heart transplants are ethical or test-tube babies desirable. Over the past three decades scientists have begun to investigate a branch of medicine that offers astonishing promise—the ability to repair the human body and even grow new organs—but which destroys early-stage embryos to do so. In "The Stem Cell Hope" Alice Park, a science writer at Time magazine, chronicles the scientific, political, ethical and personal struggles of those involved in the work.
    Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent(多能性的): they have the ability to change into any one of the 200-odd types of cell that compose the human body; but they can do so only at a very early stage. Once the bundle has reached more than about 150 cells, they start to specialize. Research into repairing severed spinal cords or growing new hearts has thus needed a supply of stem cells that come from entities that, given a more favorable environment, could instead grow into a baby.
    Immediately after the announcement of the birth of Dolly the sheep—the clone of an adult ewe whose mammary(乳腺的)cells Ian Wilmut had tricked into behaving like a developing embryo— American scientists were hauled before the nation’s politicians who were uneasy at the implication that people might also be cloned. Concern at the speed of scientific progress had previously stalled publicly funded research into controversial topics, for example, into in vitro fertilization. But it did not stop the work from taking place: instead the IVF industry blossomed in the private sector, funded by couples desperate for a baby and investors who had spotted a profitable new market.
    That is also what happened with human stem cells. After a prolonged struggle over whether to ban research outright—which pitted Nancy Reagan, whose husband suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, against a father who asked George Bush’s advisers, "Which one of my children would you kill?"—Mr. Bush blocked the use of government money to fund research on any new human embryonic stem-cell cultures. But research did not halt completely: Geron, a biopharmaceutical(生物制药的)company based in Menlo Park, California, had started "to mop up this orphaned innovation" , as Ms Park puts it, by recruiting researchers whose work brought them into conflict with the funding restrictions.
    Meanwhile, in South Korea a scientist claimed not only to have cloned human embryos but also to have created patient-specific cultures that could, in theory, be used to patch up brain damage or grow a kidney. Alas, he was wrong. But a Japanese scientist did manage to persuade adult skin cells to act like stem cells. If it proves possible to scale up his techniques, that would remove the source of the controversy over stem-cell research.
    Three months after he took office, Barack Obama lifted restrictions on federal funding for research on new stem-cell cultures, saying that he thought sound science and moral values were consistent with one another. But progress has been slow: the first human trials in America, involving two people with spinal-cord injuries who have been injected with stem cells developed by Geron, are only just under way. The sick children who first inspired scientists to conduct research into stem cells in order to develop treatments that might help them are now young adults. As Ms Park notes, the fight over stem-cell research is not over, and those who might benefit from stem-cell medicine remain in need.  [br] We can infer from Paragraph 1 that______.
选项 A、scientific achievements occur at a slower rate than people’s expectation
B、repairing human bodies and growing new organs have already been realized
C、Alice Park has proved the meaning of stem cells in "The Stem Cell Hope"
D、people are concerned about moral and ethical implications of scientific research
答案 D
解析 推理题。根据文章第一段可知，科学进步的步伐经常超越人们的心理和道德接受的速度。从最初的心脏移植、试管婴儿到更先进的身体修复和器官在原体内的重新生长的科学愿景，人们一直在疑惑这样的科学成就是否合乎道德标准或值得期待，一位科学家就这些问题写了一篇关于这一研究在科学、政治、道德和私人层面上带来的潜在影响的文章。综上所述，我们可以推断出，人们对这些科研的道德影响很关注，故[D]为正确答案，同时排除[A]和[C]。根据第一段第二句“在过去的三十年里，科学家们已经开始研究将给我们带来神奇效果的医学分支——人体修复和新器官的培育生长”，可知[B]陈述错误，故排除。
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