Emil Cioran The Fall Into Time Pdf
Kiliano Ratha
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
It was in thinking about dreaming that led me to sleep. I did a project about dreams after 9/11, looking at both the dreams of New Yorkers and the dreams of the hijackers, which we actually have testimonies of. I was trying to find a different way to write history. In 2011, I moved to Cairo with Bidoun to cover the Arab Spring, and I started asking people what dreams they were having about the uprisings. It was there that I started researching Cossery, who in turn was greatly inspired by this play by Tawfiq Al-Hakim, The People of the Cave. It tells the story of three men fleeing persecution who fall asleep in a cave for 300 years, a Christian miracle tale that also appears in the Quran. I became obsessed with tracing the myth of the sleepers, with how it is so often told at moments of political awakening, and the work took off from there.
You wrote a New York Times op-ed about the stigma of procrastination, and the cycle of guilt and shame that accompanies it in a time of always-on productivity. Are you a procrastinator yourself?
Alongside topics of sleep, laziness, procrastination, and political awakenings, you are now writing a book on men who accidentally become gods. Even when the subject of your writing varies, they all seem to inform each other. Do you feel like all of your writing stems from the same vein of research?
When you conceive of an idea, after following a particular thread of an obsessive interest all the way to its esoteric core, how do you then shape that idea into a piece of writing, or a book?
But with writing the book, the proposal stage actually turned out to be immensely helpful. To begin with, I was really not so keen on doing a proposal at all. I had a sort of nostalgic vision of how writing a book should unfold. I thought I would just write it, and then try to sell the whole thing, finished.
Can you talk more about your self-editing process? How do you take something down from the mythic plane and whittle it into an argument? How do you figure out what is interesting and worth keeping, and what to cut?
Resumo Em 1996, a ovelha Dolly foi clonada, valendo-se da tcnica revolucionria do somatic cell nuclear-transfer (SCNT), desenvolvida por pesquisadores escoceses do Roslin Institute de Edimburgo. Esse fato representa uma inovao biotecnocientfica relevante, com provveis conseqncias significativas no campo da sade pblica, pois permitir, em princpio, ampliar as possibilidades da autonomia reprodutiva de casais infrteis e portadores de doenas de origem mitocondrial. Neste artigo, abordam-se 1) os dados tcnicos do experimento e as implicaes tericas para as cincias biolgicas; 2) a percepo pblica no que se refere clonagem e os principais documentos internacionais que visam a sua regulamentao jurdica e moral; 3) os argumentos morais pr e contra a clonagem, do ponto de vista da teoria moral conseqencialista. Conclui-se que, no estgio atual do debate sobre a moralidade da clonagem, no qual no existem argumentos deontolgicos cogentes, nem a favor nem contra, a ponderao da probabilidade de riscos e benefcios constitui a nica maneira razovel de enfrentar a questo em sociedades que se pretendem democrticas, pluralistas e tolerantes.
Palavras-chave Engenharia Gentica; Clonagem; Sade Reprodutiva; Biotica
On July 5, 1996, the lamb Dolly was born, a clone of the Finn Dorset breed, created from nuclear DNA from a differentiated adult cell extracted from the udder of a gravid ewe and introduced into the previously enucleated oocyte of another ewe of the Blackface breed, thanks to a technique known as nuclear substitution or somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), developed by the team of embryologist Ian Wilmut at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland (Pennisi & Williams, 1997; Wilmut et al., 1997).
Considering that Dolly resulted from the union of two individual cells, of which at least one is a sexual cell (the oocyte of the receptor ewe), strictly speaking Dolly cannot be considered a true clone (or an individual born of another individual through asexual reproduction), but rather a sui generis clone or a 'later-born identical twin' of the ewe that provided the nuclear DNA.
However, both the mass media and the specialized literature presented Dolly as a clone, given that: a) Dolly was born without undergoing the process known as reproduction by fecundation, using male and female gametes; b) the researchers have 'reprogrammed' a differentiated (or specialized) adult cell, making it a stem cell. In this sense, Dolly involves the transformation of the very concept of cloning; hence we will consider her a 'clone' for the purposes of this discussion.
If Wilmut's experiment is confirmed, Dolly will open up new possibilities for human reproduction and procreative autonomy, inevitably implying a review of moral values consolidated through a new consideration of risks and benefits for human well-being.
Since the first data on the experiment were published, Dolly has been the focus of various types of speculation, including the moral controversy between those affirming the intrinsic immorality of human cloning (presumed to be contrary to human dignity and human rights, and thus subject to prohibition under any circumstances) and those who favor its regulation after weighing the potential risks to reproductive health and the benefits for procreative autonomy.
In fact, Dolly is not the first animal clone in natura, nor the first produced by man, or even the 'closest' clone to the original. There are clones that are genotypically much closer, much more common in the plant kingdom, but not uncommon in the animal kingdom, including mammals, even in the human species. Such is the case of monozygotic twins (also known as 'identical twins'), born of a single oocyte fecundated by a single sperm cell, born in the same uterine environment and which thus share not only the same nuclear DNA (like Dolly) but also the same mitochondrial DNA (although the role of the latter in vertebrate development remains obscure) (Kitcher, 1997:59). Dolly is also not the first man-made animal clone, since clones have already been produced with amphibians, fish, and mammals since 1952 (Di Bernardino & McKinnell, 1997; Gurdon, 1997). But these cases involved the use of the cell mass division technique, also known as embryo splitting or blastomere separation, consisting of manipulating embryos in the first stages of life. Embryo splitting was also used in an experiment for cloning human embryos in 1993 at George Washington University, by Jerry Hall and colleagues, with the purpose of helping infertile couples (the experiment was interrupted by US government officials). The Roslin researchers had already reported the birth (in March 1996) of Megan and Morag, using the same SCNT technique, but applied to adult embryonic cells (Campbell et al., 1996).
Less than a year after the creation of Dolly, Wilmut and his team created the transgenic lamb Polly, combining animal and human genetic material and utilizing the embryo splitting technique. There are substantial differences between the two experiments: a) Dolly has the same nuclear DNA as her older sister, while Polly contains part of the DNA from the donor ewe and part from human DNA; b) Dolly was 'cloned' from specialized adult cells, while Polly was created from embryonic stem cells. However, one could also conceive of a continuum between the two experiments, since Polly is aimed at producing a line capable of supplying milk containing -1-antitrypsin, a human plasma protein used in the treatment of cystic fibrosis, thereby opening the way for the large-scale, low-cost production of other human proteins. In short, one can reasonably suppose that the experiments at the Roslin Institute will serve to facilitate and universalize the prevention and cure of various human diseases; transgenic cloning could also allow for creating a sufficient supply of organs for transplantation in human beings, with lower rejection rates.
This interpretation appears to bear out if we think about the different public reactions to the two cases. Dolly caused a huge public commotion, immediately becoming a 'case', while Polly went virtually unnoticed and became a banal fact. This difference in public perspective appears paradoxical if we consider that Polly contains human genetic material, but this can probably be explained by the fact that the mass media focused mainly on the threatening side of cloning with Dolly, while for Polly the therapeutic potential prevailed, and I believe properly so (Schramm, 1997a).
The first doubts and criticism from the scientific community only came in January 1998, published in Science (Sgaramella & Zinder, 1998). The critics based their attack on the observation that there were not 'more Dollies' capable of confirming the 'single observation' by Wilmut, and that clones of other mammal species, promised for 'very soon', had still not appeared (at least publicly). Therefore, went the argument, there were serious reasons to doubt whether Dolly had actually been created in the terms reported by Wilmut or thus that she represented a relevant and innovative scientific fact. Besides, Wilmut and his team were believed to have committed a series of methodological errors: 1) the fact that they had not performed the genetic confirmation with the 'fingerprint' technique, relatively easy and which would have allowed to determine whether Dolly was a later-born twin from the donor ewe; 2) the fact that they had not utilized an adult mammary cell, but rather a fetal cell supposedly present in their cell culture, which could be explained by the fact that the donor ewe was gravid at the time the cells were harvested.
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