reproducibility of man
When Walter Benjamin wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in 1969, I am sure he didn't expect it to parallel the arguments of today's discussions on the ethics of cloning. In the short shadow of the replication of Dolly the sheep, and five little piglets from Virginia comes the discussion on if this practice should really be allowed, and if so, what limits do you set? How can you look in the eyes of people who have had there family members pass away because the cloning of pigs for their organs have been outlawed. But what do you say when it comes to the question of just raising humans, lets say in a "human farm", for exact organ and tissue matches. Where do you draw the line on the recreation of things from our past? After finding the perfectly preserved wooly mammoth in the arctic a few years in the past, researchers from several nations have been actively collecting tissue from the remains of the wooly mammoth in preparation for an attempt to bring the beast back from ten thousand years of extinction (Salsberg 1). If you let scientists do this, do you restrict them from cloning mummified Pharos from ancient Egypt, for historical purposes only right? Another issue of cloni
the product of mechanical reproduction can be Unfortunately with the developments in cloning, you know some egotistic person will want to clone themselves. With the right amount of money, this could actually happen. "Others worry that interests would be sure to make clones of great athletes and other idols of pop culture, rock singers, movie stars, and the like, and, even worse, that temporary, parochial standards of beauty and human excellence might be frozen into flesh (Ferre 2). Inevitably, racist preferences would surface and those with the power of this technology would use it to distort human genetic history, reflecting their conscious and unconscious prejudices. This leads to human population evolving into a society where everything is alike, somewhat of a cloning holocaust. "During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence" (Benjamin 31). If someone decides they no longer desire that type of person they have selected, how do you go about finding a new candidate to clone if you have already eliminated every other type of person? Walter Benjamin wrote about original artwork in this way. His essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction spoke of original artwork in this area. The original was just not as impressive anymore if you could make a dozen to a thousand copies of it. Wouldn't the same standards apply to the replication of a human? While identical twins share most of their genetic make up, you can still tell them apart from one another. They have slight differences in physical characteristics, and some have major differences in personality. With a clone, you would have an exact replica. There would be no differences in the make up of these two. The original sheep in Dolly's case was six years old before it was clone. People would have to grasp the concept of having identical twins born in different year
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1309
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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