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Frankenstein and the Science of Cloning Essay Example

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Frankenstein and the Science of Cloning Essay Example
Frankenstein and the Science of Cloning
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" tells a story about a young man by the name of Victor Frankenstein and his pursuit to create life. Esther Schor describes Victor as "a man of science"(Schor 87). Victor Frankenstein attempts to travel beyond accepted human limits at the college of Ingolstadt, and access the secret of life, or as what he would call the elixir of life. Victor demonstrates this by creating a monster, not quite realizing fully how dangerous his creation would end up. Cloning is the science of recreating life by scientists in their laboratories. I believe Victor's creation of life and scientist use of cloning is unethical.
The purpose of cloning can have both a positive and negative way of appealing ideas to people. To understand the purpose of cloning one must know the exact meaning. Merriam-Webster defines cloning as "making a copy of", as in making a copy of a human being. The negative aspect of human cloning consists of universal fear, repulsion, and ethical rejection by a variety of religious, political, and philosophical perspectives that would not normally find themselves in agreement. Hatred toward anything associated with replicating human's branches off from the belief that by intervening in traditional reproductive processes, science is entering into the inappropriate territory of creating life. David Rorvik states, "This might be bad. Mankind, in my view, was already and increasingly beset by a sense of rootlessness and unreality … To some weary time-travelers, cloning might be a heavy blow, heralding the irreversible approach- if not the actual realization-of the synthesized, plasticized, carbon-copied Man"(Rorvik 26-27). Ian Wilmut, a genetic scientologist who cloned the first mammal in 1996 which was a sheep feels that human cloning is inhumane by saying, "As I will discuss, there are no proposed reasons for copying a person that I find ethically acceptable"(Wilmut 33). The positive outlook on human

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