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"Opinion" is a word that is often used carelessly today, It is used to refer to matters of taste, belief, anti judgment. This casual use would probably cause little confusion if people didn’t attach too much importance to opinion. Unfortunately, most do attach great importance to it. "I have as much right to my opinion as you to yours," and "Everyone’s entitled lo his opinion," are common expressions. In fact, anyone who would challenge another’s opinion is likely to be branded intolerant.Is that label accurate Is it intolerant to challenge another’s opinion It depends on what definition of opinion you have in mind. For example, you may ask a friend "What do you think of the new Buicks "And he may reply, "In my opinion, they’re ugly. "In this case, it would not only be intolerant to challenge his statement, but foolish. For it’s obvious that by opinion he means his personal preference a matter of taste. And as the old saying goes, "It’s pointless to argue about matters of taste. "But consider this very different use of the term. A newspaper reports that the Supreme Court has delivered its opinion in a controversial case. Obviously the justices did not stale their personal preferences, their mere likes and dislikes. They stated their considered judgment, painstakingly arrived at after thorough inquiry and deliberation.Most of what is referred to as opinion falls somewhere between these two extremes. It is not an expression of taste. Nor is it careful judgment. Yet it may contain elements of both. It is a view or belief more or less casually arrived at, with or without examining the evidence.Is everyone entitled to his opinion Of course. In a free country this is not only permitted, but guaranteed. In Great Britain, for example, there is still a Flat Earth Society. As the name implies, the members of this organization believe that the earth is not spherical, but flat. In this country, too, each of us is free to take as creative a position as we please about any matter we choose. When the telephone operator announces That 11 be 95 ￠ for the first three minutes, you may respond "No, it won’t—it’ll be 28 ￠. "When the service station attendant notifies you "Your oil is down a quart, " you may reply " Wrong—it’s up three.Being free to hold an opinion anti express it does not, of course, guarantee you favorable consequences. The operator may hang up on you. The service station attendant may threaten you with violence.Acting on our opinions carries even less assurance. Some time ago in California a couple took their eleven-year-old diabetic son to a faith healer. Secure in their opinion that the man had cured the boy, they threw away his insulin. Three days later the boy died. They remained unshaken in their belief, expressing the opinion that God would raise the boy from the dead. The police arrested them, charging them with manslaughter. The law in such matters is both clear and reasonable. We are free to act on our opinions only so long as, in doing so we do not harm others. The example the writer gives us in the last paragraph shows that ().
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The changes in the U. S. A. in the 1960s began with the ______ Right Movement.
During the Christmas shopping rush in London, the intriguing story was reported of a tramp who, apparently through no fault of his own, found himself locked in a well-known chain store late on Christmas Eve. No doubt the store was filled with last-minute Christmas shoppers and the staff were dead beating and longing to get home. Presumably all the proper security checks were made before the store was locked and they left to enjoy the three-day holiday untroubled by customers desperate to get last-minute Christmas presents.However that may be, our tramp found himself alone in the store and decided to make the best of it. There was food, drink, bedding and camping equipment, of which he made good use. There must also have been television sets and radios. Though it was not reported if he took advantage of these facilities, when the shop re-opened, he was discovered in bed with a large number of empty bottles beside him. He seems to have been a man of good humour and philosophic temperament—as indeed vagrants very commonly are. Everyone else was enjoying Christmas, so he saw no good reason why he should not do the same. He submitted, cheerfully enough, to being taken away by the police. Perhaps he had had a better Christmas than usual. He was put into prison for seven days. The judge awarded no compensation to the chain store for the food and drink our tramp had consumed. They had, in his opinion, already received valuable free publicity from the coverage the story received in the newspapers and on television. Perhaps the judge had a good Christmas too. When the tramp was arrested, he ().
Gene therapy and gene-based drugs are two ways we could benefit from our growing mastery of genetic science. But there will be others as well. Here is one of tile remarkable therapies on the cutting edge of genetic research that could make their way into mainstream medicine in the coming years.While it’s true that just about every cell in the body has the instructions to make a complete human, most of those instructions are inactivated, and with good reason: the last thing you want for your brain cells is to start churning out stomach acid or your nose to turn into a kidney. The only time cells truly have the potential to turn into any and all body parts is very early in a pregnancy, when so called stem cells haven’t begun to specialize.Yet this untapped potential could be a terrific boon to medicine. Most diseases involve the death of healthy cells -- brain cells in Alzheimer’s, cardiac cells in heart disease, pancreatic cells in diabetes, to name a few; if doctors could isolate stem cells, then direct their growth, they might be able to furnish patients with healthy replacement tissues.It was incredibly difficult, but last fall scientists at the University of Wisconsin managed to isolate stem cells and get them to grow into neural, gut, muscle and bone cells. The process still can’t be controlled, and may have unforeseen limitations; but if efforts to understand and master stem-cell development prove successful, doctors will have a therapeutic tool of incredible power.The same applies to cloning, which is really just the other side of the coin; true cloning, as first shown with the sheep Dolly several years ago, involves taking a developed cell and reactivating the genome within, resetting its developmental instructions to a pristine state. Once that happens, the rejuvenated cell can develop into a full fledged animal, genetically identical to its parent.For agriculture, in which purely physical characteristics like milk production in a cow or low fat in a hog have real market value, biological carbon copies could become routine within a few years. This past year scientists have done for mice and cows what Ian Wilmut did for Dolly, and other creatures are bound to join the cloned menagerie in the coming year.Human cloning, on the other hand, may be technically feasible but legally and emotionally more difficult. Still, one day it will happen. The ability to reset body cells to a pristine, undeveloped state could give doctors exactly the same advantages they would get from stem cells: the potential to make healthy body tissues of all sorts, and thus to Cure diseases. That could prove to be a true "miracle cure". The word "rejuvenated" (Line 3, Para. 5) most probably means ().
Foods not in sufficient supply tend to be wasted more.
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