joan didion essay about college

Joan Didion Essay About Being Rejected by Her Top College

• February 23, 2021

David Bersell

By Joan Didion

This piece, about the author’s college rejection from her first-choice college, appeared in The Saturday Evening Post April 16, 1968.

“Dear Joan,” the letter begins, although the writer did not know me at all. The letter is dated April 25, 1952, and for a long time now it has been in a drawer in my mother’s house, the kind of back-bedroom drawer given over to class prophecies and dried butterfly orchids and newspaper photographs that show eight bridesmaids and two flower girls inspecting a sixpence in a bride’s shoe. What slight emotional investment I ever had in dried butterfly orchids and pictures of myself as a bridesmaid has proved evanescent, but I still have an investment in the letter, which, except for the “Dear Joan,” is mimeographed. I got the letter out as an object lesson for a 17-year-old cousin who is unable to eat or sleep as she waits to hear from what she keeps calling the colleges of her choice.

Here is what the letter says: “The Committee on Admissions asks me to inform you that it is unable to take favorable action upon your application for admission to Stanford University. While you have met the minimum requirements, we regret that because of the severity of the competition, the committee cannot include you in the group to be admitted. The Committee joins me in extending you every good wish for the successful continuation of your education. Sincerely yours, Rixford K. Snyder, Director of Admissions.”

I remember quite clearly the afternoon I opened that letter. I stood reading and re-reading it, my sweater and my books fallen on the hall floor, trying to interpret the words in some less final way, the phrases “unable to take” and “favorable action” fading in and out of focus until the sentence made no sense at all. We lived then in a big dark Victorian house, and I had a sharp and dolorous image of myself growing old in it, never going to school anywhere, the spinster in Washington Square . I went upstairs to my room and locked the door and for a couple of hours I cried.

For a while I sat on the floor of my closet and buried my face in an old quilted robe and later, after the situation’s real humiliations (all my friends who applied to Stanford had been admitted) had faded into safe theatrics, I sat on the edge of the bathtub and thought about swallowing the contents of an old bottle of codeine-and-Empirin.  I saw myself in an oxygen tent, with Rixford K. Snyder hovering outside, although how the news was to reach Rixford K. Snyder was a plot point that troubled me even as I counted out the tablets.

Of course I did not take the tablets. I spent the rest of the spring in sullen but mild rebellion, sitting around drive-ins, listening to Tulsa evangelists on the car radio, and in the summer I fell in love with someone who wanted to be a golf pro, and I spent a lot of time watching him practice putting, and in the fall I went to a junior college a couple of hours a day and made up the credits I needed to go to the University of California at Berkeley. The next year a friend at Stanford asked me to write him a paper on Conrad’s Nostromo , and I did, and he got an A on it.  I got a B- on the same paper at Berkeley, and the specter of Rixford K. Snyder was exorcised.

So it worked out all right, my single experience in that most conventional middle-class confrontation, the child vs. the Admissions Committee. But that was in the benign world of country California in 1952, and I think it must be more difficult for children I know now, children whose lives from the age of two or three are a series of perilously programmed steps, each of which must be successfully negotiated in order to avoid just such a letter as mine from one or another of the Rixford K. Snyders of the world.

An acquaintance told me recently that there were ninety applicants for the seven openings in the kindergarten of an expensive school in which she hoped to enroll her four-year-old, and that she was frantic because none of the four-year-old’s letters of recommendation had mentioned the child’s “interest in art.” Had I been raised under that pressure, I suspect, I would have taken the codeine-and-Empirin on that April afternoon in 1952. My rejection was different, my humiliation private: No parental hopes rode on whether I was admitted to Stanford, or anywhere. Of course my mother and father wanted me to be happy, and of course they expected that happiness would necessarily entail accomplishment, but the terms of that accomplishment were my affair.

Their idea of their own and of my worth remained independent of where, or even if, I went to college. Our social situation was static, and the question of “right” schools, so traditionally urgent to the upwardly mobile, did not arise. When my father was told that I had been rejected by Stanford, he shrugged and offered me a drink.

I think about that shrug with a great deal of appreciation whenever I hear parents talking about their children’s “chances.” What makes me uneasy is the sense that they are merging their children’s chances with their own, demanding of a child that he make good not only for himself but for the greater glory of his father and mother. Of course there are more children than “desirable” openings. But we are deluding ourselves if we pretend that desirable schools benefit the child alone. (“I wouldn’t care at all about his getting into Yale if it weren’t for Vietnam,” a father told me not long ago, quite unconscious of his own speciousness; it would have been malicious of me to suggest that one could also get a deferment at Long Beach State.)

Getting into college has become an ugly business, malignant in its consumption and diversion of time and energy and true interests, and not its least deleterious aspect is how the children themselves accept it. They talk casually and unattractively of their “first, second and third choices,” of how their “first-choice” application (to Stephens, say) does not actually reflect their first choice (their first choice was Smith, but their adviser said their chances were low, so why “waste” the application?); they are calculating about the expectation of rejections, about their “backup” possibilities, about getting the right sport and the right extracurricular activities to “balance” the application, about juggling confirmations when their third choice accepts before their first choices answers. They are wise in the white lie here, the small self-aggrandizement there, in the importance of letters from “names” their parents scarcely know. I have heard conversations among 16-year-olds who were exceeded in their skill at manipulative self-promotion only by applicants for large literary grants.

And of course none of it matters very much at all, none of these early successes, early failures. I wonder if we had better not find some way to let our children know this, some way to extricate our expectations from theirs, some way to let them work through their own rejections and sullen rebellions and interludes with golf pros, unassisted by anxious prompting from the wings. Finding one’s role at 17 is problem enough, without being handed somebody else’s script.

Joan Didion is an iconic American writer who launched her career in the 1960s after winning an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the ’60s and the Hollywood lifestyle. For more info about Joan Didion, you can visit her website. 

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About Joan Didion: “On Keeping a Notebook”

Book jacket of re-issued essay collection, first published in 1969.

Having myself always been an inveterate notebook keeper, but with no substantive knowledge of the habits of other notebook keepers, whom I’ve known in a meaningful way since I was in college, I have no idea why others do so. Or, consequently, what they take notes of, how they take them, of what they consist rhetorically, or why they think they keep a notebook in the first place. This is not true of Joan Didion.

There’s this essay (which I am sure I read back when it was published in the late 1960s, but of which I have no recollection) from the redoubtable Ms. Didion. What’s clear are two things, one not very important, because it’s personal, and the other which seems to point to maybe a significant insight.

The unimportant thing is, it’s clear that Joan Didion and I have different feelings on the subject, and different motivations. It’s not as clear that she is solid on recognizing that maybe her natural note-taking instincts are not universal ones.

The more important thing is what seems to emerge, from her generalized thoughts about the specific kinds of notes Joan Didion takes and why she thinks she takes them (because there’s not much here demonstrating the content of specific notes; and what there is, as she indicates is true even for her, is that sometimes notes can be so vague as to require massive reconstruction as to the factual underpinnings, the actual event that may have inspired taking a note, and the probative value in other contexts, like a deposition, of the documentation). What seems to emerge, specifically for me, is that maybe there is the foundation of some kind of taxonomy here.

Maybe, I’m thinking, there are those of us more subconsciously led by an urge eventually (and only speculatively and provisionally) to be writers of what has come to be called creative nonfiction. And there are those equally internally disposed, but with different objectives in mind, if only vaguely and possibly wholly inchoate, to write what is called fiction. I’ll only interject here, as some are coming to believe (and why would we expect otherwise in this age of things becoming indeterminate and not so distinct, or, if you prefer the term, queer – presumably as opposed to definitive, precise, replicable, evidentiary, and “normal”): as if there really is a difference ultimately (and that qualification is _so_ important) between creative nonfiction and fiction.

Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. …   Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. …   So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

I would tell you what I do, but I am not Joan Didion, who had ample reason I surmise in retrospect even then to believe that there were people who cared to know, separate and apart from what issued from those notes she kept.

One thought on “ About Joan Didion: “On Keeping a Notebook” ”

Aha! So I now grok a big difference…my notebook is largely about the future, while yours is about the present and the past and thoughts and dreams…

…by “the future” I mean, e.g., “don’t forget to go to the dentist tomorrow”….

Comments are closed.

This Joan Didion essay will make you rethink the way you deal with failure and rejection

In an exclusive extract from Joan Didion's new essay collection, the literary icon shares wise words on how to rebound from failure

Joan Didion has been canonised for her prose style, worshipped for her actual style (those sunglasses, that bob) and elevated to the status of cultural icon for her deft, distinctive reportage. She is particularly known for her coverage of California in the 1960s, which uncovered the realities of life there, the beautiful and the ugly. In fact, it's hard to see where this doyenne of letters begins and that seminal period ends. The summer of love, the Manson murders and the Black Panthers, were all events and movements she both reported on and found herself physically immersed in. In what was to become a defining characteristic of her writing throughout her career, she was somehow always both apart from, and fundamentally within the story.

Although 86-year-old Didion retired from writing in 2011 - a great shame to all of us who would have gobbled up her reporting on the Trump years - a new essay collection of hers is released today. It might not be strictly 'new', but 'Let Me Tell You What I Mean' includes twelve pieces which have never before been collected together. They span her career from the 1960s to the 2000s, covering everything from Gambler's Anonymous to Martha Stewart.

One of the standout essays, published in full below, is from 1968 and, like so much of Didion's writing, it has still has a striking relevance to today. 'On Being Unchosen by the College of One's Choice' is a brilliant example of how Didion mined her own personal experiences to find a universal message. Here, she looks at how to recover from perceived failure - in this case, her rejection from Stanford - and how, ultimately, things we think will destroy us, seldom do. It is a beautifully pertinent message for any school leavers over the last year of academic chaos , or anyone who feels crushed by the expectations of others, or the pressure they put on themselves.

On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice

"Dear Joan,” the letter begins, although the writer did not know me at all. The letter is dated April 25, 1952, and for a long time now it has been in a drawer in my mother’s house, the kind of back-bedroom drawer given over to class prophecies and dried butterfly orchids and newspaper photographs that show eight bridesmaids and two flower girls inspecting a sixpence in a bride’s shoe. What slight emotional investment I ever had in dried butterfly orchids and pictures of myself as a bridesmaid has proved evanescent, but I still have an investment in the letter, which, except for the “Dear Joan,” is mimeographed. I got the letter out as an object lesson for a seventeen-year-old cousin who is unable to eat or sleep as she waits to hear from what she keeps calling the colleges of her choice. Here is what the letter says:

The Committee on Admissions asks me to inform you that it is unable to take favorable action upon your application for admission to Stanford University. While you have met the minimum requirements, we regret that because of the severity of the competition, the Committee cannot include you in the group to be admitted. The Committee joins me in extending you every good wish for the successful continuation of your education. Sincerely yours, Rixford K. Snyder, Director of Admissions.

I remember quite clearly the afternoon I opened that letter. I stood reading and rereading it, my sweater and my books fallen on the hall floor, trying to interpret the words in some less final way, the phrases “unable to take” and “favorable action” fading in and out of focus until the sentence made no sense at all. We lived then in a big dark Victorian house, and I had a sharp and dolorous image of myself growing old in it, never going to school anywhere, the spinster in Washington Square. I went upstairs to my room and locked the door and for a couple of hours I cried. For a while I sat on the floor of my closet and buried my face in an old quilted robe and later, after the situation’s real humiliations (all my friends who applied to Stanford had been admitted) had faded into safe theatrics, I sat on the edge of the bathtub and thought about swallowing the contents of an old bottle of codeine and Empirin. I saw myself in an oxygen tent, with Rixford K.Snyder hovering outside, although how the news was to reach Rixford K. Snyder was a plot point that troubled me even as I counted out the tablets.

Of course I did not take the tablets. I spent the rest of the spring in sullen but mild rebellion, sitting around drive-ins, listening to Tulsa evangelists on the car radio, and in the summer I fell in love with someone who wanted to be a golf pro, and I spent a lot of time watching him practice putting, and in the fall I went to a junior college a couple of hours a day and made up the credits I needed to go to the University of California at Berkeley. The next year a friend at Stanford asked me to write him a paper on Conrad’s Nostromo, and I did, and he got an A on it. I got a B− on the same paper at Berkeley, and the specter of Rixford K. Snyder was exorcised.

.css-1u9apw1{color:#242424;font-family:Didot,Didot-fallback,Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:2rem;letter-spacing:-0.04rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;}@media(min-width: 48rem){.css-1u9apw1{font-size:2rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-1u9apw1{font-size:2rem;line-height:1.2;}}.css-1u9apw1 b,.css-1u9apw1 strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-1u9apw1 em,.css-1u9apw1 i{font-family:inherit;font-style:italic;} We are deluding ourselves if we pretend that desirable schools benefit the child alone

So it worked out all right, my single experience in that most conventional middle-class confrontation, the child vs. the Admissions Committee. But that was in the benign world of country California in 1952, and I think it must be more difficult for children I know now, children whose lives from the age of two or three are a series of perilously programmed steps, each of which must be successfully negotiated in order to avoid just such a letter as mine from one or another of the Rixford K. Snyders of the world. An acquaintance told me recently that there were ninety applicants for the seven openings in the kindergarten of an expensive school in which she hoped to enroll her four-year-old, and that she was frantic because none of the four-year-old’s letters of recommendation had mentioned the child’s “interest in art.” Had I been raised under that pressure, I suspect I would have taken the codeine and Empirin on that April afternoon in 1952. My rejection was different, my humiliation private: no parental hopes rode on whether I was admitted to Stanford, or anywhere. Of course my mother and father wanted me to be happy, and of course they expected that happiness would necessarily entail accomplishment, but the terms of that accomplishment were my affair. Their idea of their own and of my worth remained independent of where, or even if, I went to college. Our social situation was static, and the question of “right” schools, so traditionally urgent to the upwardly mobile, did not arise. When my father was told that I had been rejected by Stanford, he shrugged and offered me a drink.

I think about that shrug with a great deal of appreciation whenever I hear parents talking about their children’s “chances.” What makes me uneasy is the sense that they are merging their children’s chances with their own, demanding of a child that he make good not only for himself but for the greater glory of his father and mother. Of course it is harder to get into college now than it once was. Of course there are more children than “desirable” openings. But we are deluding ourselves if we pretend that desirable schools benefit the child alone. (“I wouldn’t care at all about his getting into Yale if it weren’t for Vietnam,” a father told me not long ago, quite unconscious of his own speciousness; it would have been malicious of me to suggest that one could also get a deferment at Long Beach State.)

Finding one’s role at seventeen is problem enough, without being handed somebody else’s script

Getting into college has become an ugly business, malignant in its consumption and diversion of time and energy and true interests, and not its least deleterious aspect is how the children themselves accept it. They talk casually and unattractively of their “first, second, and third choices,” of how their “first-choice” application (to Stephens, say)does not actually reflect their first choice (their first choice was Smith, but their adviser said their chances were low, so why “waste” the application?); they are calculating about the expectation of rejections, about their “backup” possibilities, about getting the right sport and the right extra-curricular activities to “balance” the application, about juggling confirmations when their third choice accepts before their first choice answers. They are wise in the white lie here, the small self-aggrandizement there, in the importance of letters from “names” their parents scarcely know. I have heard conversations among sixteen-year-olds who were exceeded in their skill at manipulative self-promotion only by applicants for large literary grants.

And of course none of it matters very much at all, none of these early successes, early failures. I wonder if we had better not find someway to let our children know this, some way to extricate our expectations from theirs, some way to let them work through their own rejections and sullen rebellions and interludes with golf pros, unassisted by anxious prompting from the wings. Finding one’s role at seventeen is problem enough, without being handed somebody else’s script. 1968.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion published by 4 th Estate on 4 February 2021, available from amazon.co.uk

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Joan Didion has died at 87.

Joan Didion died today at her home in Manhattan,  The New York Times reports. The legendary novelist and essayist was 87. According to Paul Bogaards, an executive at Knopf, Didion’s publisher, the cause was Parkinson’s disease.

Didion was one of the most distinctive and influential contemporary writers, who changed the landscape of the American essay—and the landscape of American thought—with collections like Slouching Towards Bethlehem   (1968) and  The White Album   (1979), as well as novels like  Play It As It Lays   (1970) and  A Book of Common Prayer   (1977), and memoirs  The Year of Magical Thinking   (2005) and  Blue Nights   (2011).

“Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer,” she wrote . “Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind? ”

We are all glad we found out.

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“Marrying Absurd” by Joan Didion Essay

“Marrying Absurd” is an editorial written by Joan Didion in 1967, for a publication named the Saturday Evening Post. Didion describes precisely how ridiculous the marriage “industry” has turned into in Las Vegas. The reader is lead to perceive the cheapness of the Las Vegas business. Las Vegas has managed to build a travesty of the purity of marriage. This city has managed to obtain something that should be holy and turned it into nothing further than a economic convenience.

Didion begins with this testimonial: “To be married in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada, a bride must swear that she is eighteen or has parental permission and a bridegroom that he is twenty-one or has parental permission.” The Joan puts across her worry about the need of rations needed to be married. It can be comparable to going to a fast food restaurant drive-thru, but, instead of leaving with a hotdog and chips, you’re leaving with a new partner. There is no need for a blood test or a waiting period. In reality it takes more evidence and time to become a new associate at a movie store.

Didion ironically goes on to utter that “Someone must put up five dollars for the license.” Not only is Joan letting us recognize the inexpensiveness of the marriage, but her choice of words allow us to feel the impersonal meaning. The words “put up” are an interesting word choice used by the author. Most of the time you hear “put up” placed in sentences like- “I put up X amount of dollars to bail so and so out of jail,” or “I put up X amount of dollars on that football team.” These are risky expenditures, not things that you’d like to purchase. Five dollars isn’t per say a whole lot to risk one way or another.

The Didion is entailing that there is a “cheapness” regarding Las Vegas weddings, not just in a truthful sense but a bodily sense also. A great deal of the Las Vegas wedding business is based on marketing, much like you would experience with a fast food joint. In approaching Las Vegas one billboard reads “Getting Married? Free Licensing Information First Strip Exit.” Buy one burger get one free. Get your coupons. Free marriages. It sounds crazy but the ideas are the same. One wedding chapel advertises “Sincere and Dignified Since 1954.” If the restaurant can lure someone into buying a burger, the customer will probably walk out with some fries and a drink as well. With the same idea, the chapels will marry a couple for free, but will charge the couple for flowers, rings, witnesses, music, and pictures, each for an additional cost.

Underneath usual conditions marriage is normally measured to be a sacred event. Didion guides us to think that on this meticulous day the services performed were not very sacred. “…between 9:00pm and midnight of August 26,1965, an otherwise unremarkable Thursday, which happened to be by presidential order, the last day on which anyone could improve his draft status by merely getting married.” One hundred and seventy-one couples were married, sixty seven couples married by one justice of the peace. Such mass amounts of weddings bring into question whether these individuals were uniting for love or as a means to avoid the draft. If this hypothesis is accurate, this could truly be viewed as marital convenience at its best.

On this same day, the justice of the peace, James Brennan, who married sixty-six of those couples said: ““I’ve got it (the ceremony) down from five to three minutes,” “I could have married them en masse, but they’re people, not cattle. People expect more when they get married.”” I find that these two quotes are highly contradictory to one another. If people expected “more” then probably wouldn’t be in Las Vegas and they certainly wouldn’t want a three-minute ceremony. Didion excels in explaining what should be viewed as two sincere concerns of the justice of the peace. Unfortunately, Mr. Brennan demeans the sanctity of holy matrimony by not honoring each ceremony, as it rightly should be. He spoke against marrying “en masse,” when in actuality the quality of the ceremonies would most likely have been strengthened.

Many citizens in our country prefer to marry in chapels, but when Joan launches her readers to “Strip chapels” a complete new viewpoint is established. “But what strikes one most about the Strip chapels,” Didion instigates. Strip chapels? By inserting the word strip in front of chapel, Didion captures any possibility of the word chapel sounding adequate. Going to a bar is suitable to most, but when the word strip is connected with bar, it turns into a social morés. It is commonly useless of for two persons to befall into one unit in a strip chapel. If the name strip chapel is not vulgar enough these “sacred places” chose to embellish their chapels with flashy “stained-glass paper windows and their artificial bouvardia.” Not only does it create one to question the customers, it makes you question the company as well.

“Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.” This is a very powerful quote that truly defines what Las Vegas stands for. The definition of allegory is a story, poem, or picture, which can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one. The definition of venal is showing or motivated by susceptibility to bribery. That brings into question what kind of hidden meaning does this picture have? When I look at the whole picture – the gambling, the bribery, the mob scene, the prostitution, and the weddings, I question their character, morals and values. Being that so many morally unacceptable acts are so widely accepted, I question how easily it would be to personally fall into these pattern, if part of that society constantly. Didion is trying to make sense and relate that this wondrous place is exciting and has a nonstop lifestyle, non-the-less also has its’ downfalls.

Throughout Didion’s whole essay, not one time was the significance of God talked about. As one offers themselves to another partner under the eyes of God, “until death do us part” the substance of the ritual should participate more of a part in the laws to be married. A promise that is “everlasting” shouldn’t be allowed to be taken, by a drunken woman, who needs to hurry home to “get the kids.” Didion was trying to let her readers to comprehend how tolerable the lack of morals is, in parts of our culture. Didion has done an outstanding job of effectively achieving her proposed meaning.

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ENC 1102 Miami Dade College Comparing Eve Babitz and Joan Didion Texts Questions

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*Use third-person objective writing rather than first-person writing. Since this is not personal writing, do not use such as I, we, you, my, etc.

Research Paper Process Checklist:

• Choose topic and research topic to find sources. (5 scholarly journal articles).
• Brainstorm topics to get some ideas. (Cluster, list, etc.)
• Organize ideas and develop an outline.
• Read sources and take notes and document where your information came from.
• Write you rough draft.
• Revise draft looking for ways to improve content, form, organization of information presented.
• Peer Review- Let someone else read your paper to see how you can improve your paper.
• Review draft and make any necessary corrections.
• Edit and proofread your draft looking for any errors in grammar, mechanics, usage, etc.
• Read and revise paper for the final time looking for any errors.

Research Proposal Questions

• What topic do you wish to research and write about?
• Specifically, what interests you about this topic?
• Formulate a thesis statement using the issue/claim format. (What is your position?)
• What are some things you already know about your topic?
• What do you expect to discover about the topic?
• What do others have to say about this topic? How will you refute the counterargument ?
• Conclusion ?

Unformatted Attachment Preview

Explanation & Answer

I am done, but to polished off while you review for possible revisions needed before submitting, i need to include the textbook into the appendices so please upload or provide that to me asap thanksfinishing up the outline now Last Name 1 Human Cloning Instructor Class Date Name Human Cloning Human cloning is a highly debated experiment where issues are raised both ethically and morally towards those who conduct them. The arguments for and against human cloning provides strong cases based on legitimate concerns related to ethical and moral reasoning for such procedures. To understand the issues surrounding human cloning, there must be a thorough understanding of what the process is and how it can affect people’s lives. Although cloning may be beneficial in terms of finding new medical procedures and research that can help cure diseases, this process takes away from the natural and biological order of life and allows humans to play God. Human cloning is asexual reproduction that enforces the clone not being related to the cloned individual, but rather just a relation of a clone that has been genetically modified from that being’s DNA. The process of human cloning must begin with a donation of a human cell that will be replicated into an artificial replica of that person. The donor’s cell is extracted from their DNA and then the nucleus from the organism will be inserted into the clone. The cell will Last Name 2 then combine with the DNA and create a cell form to be inserted into an eff. The insertion then stimulated by either electrical or chemical means is to force into division so that it would become an embryo. Once the cell becomes an embryo, it would then be implanted into a surrogate just as artificial insemination is conducted. Ian Wilmut conducted a cloning experiment in 1996 with a group of adult sheep. In his group, there was 276 procedures done that ended in failure until the success of one clone, Dolly, was finally successful (Elliott 219). The implementation of the nucleus from the mammary gland cell was stimulated with electricity so that the two could become fused together. After the cell divided, it was placed in the uterus of a sheep later resulting in the creation of Dolly. This experiment resulted into an indication that there are far too many implications concerning the cloning of animals that would be immoral to use on humans (Elliott 220). If one out of 276 experiments only resulted into 1 being successful, the process of cloning would be unacceptable to conduct on humans. Even if cloning would be found to be safe and effective on animals in the future, further research would have to be conducted before its use on humans. The risks to cloned human embryos would consist of mortality or destruction before the law or people would hold moral or protected views of life for them. With the procedures of IVF, there are known risks involved that the embryos could become destroyed or a non-successful implementation would happen to result in the death of the embryo (Elliott 229). It would be premature to suggest that confident assessments concerning these risks on human subjects would Last Name 3 be found in safety and effectiveness, but there are no unavoidable risks that are clearly apparent towards the research that would make it ethically impermissible. Following the experiment conducted by Wilmut on his adult sheep, the moral arguments against human cloning claim that it would be a violation of hum...

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