Legal and Moral Implications of Cloning 课文结构分析(text structure analysis)

The essay focuses on one central theme: the legal and moral implications of cloning. One characteristic writing technique that runs throughout the reading passage is listing. The essay lists a number of questions about the legal and moral implications that arise from cloning. The whole essay can be divided into 4 parts:


    1. The first part is Paragraph 1. It deals with the background situation of the passage. With the success of cloning an adult mammal, a world with human clones was suddenly within reach. It was just like science fiction coming to life.


    2. The second part is made up of 2 paragraphs, Paragraph 2 and Paragraph 3. The two paragraphs are about the strong and immediate responses to the background situation mentioned in the first paragraph. Governments hurried to draft guidelines for an unknown future and President Clinton ordered a national commission to study the relative issues. Some countries began examining the moral implications of cloning other species. At the same time cloning has generated a long list of difficult puzzles for scientists, politicians, and philosophers just like the Theory of Relativity, the splitting of the atom, and the first space flight.


    3. The third part is the major part of the essay, consisting of 15 paragraphs, from Paragraph 4 to Paragraph 18. In this part the author lists as many as 6 puzzles or questions on the issue of cloning. The 6 puzzles are: 1) Why would anyone want to clone a human being in the first place? 2) Will it be possible to clone the dead? 3) Would a cloned human be identical to the original? 4) What if parents decided to clone a child in order to harvest organs? 5) How would a human clone refer to the donor of its DNA? 6) What are the other implications of cloning for society? All the 6 questions are about the legal and moral implications of cloning. We can find that the questions are provided with complete or partial answers from the up-to-date knowledge.


    4. The fourth part is Paragraph 19, which is a reiteration that the list of questions could go on and people are just beginning to wonder about the future of the world after cloning.

Responses to the general situation:       _________________________________________________________                                              Responses from governments: Governments hurried to draft guidelines for an unknown future and President Clinton ordered a national commission to study the relative issues. Some countries began examining the moral implications of cloning other species. Para. 2  Responses from scientists, etc.: Like the Theory of Relativity, the splitting of the atom, and the first space flight, cloning has generated a long list of difficult puzzles for scientists, politicians, and philosophers.   Para. 3