单项选择题

Passage Three
The immediate response to the birth of dolly, the sheep, was a revulsion against the idea of using the same technique to clone human beings. But the news had just the opposite effect on an eccentric scientist named Richard Seed, who declared with an eerie bravado that he was going to produce "half-a-dozen bouncing-baby, happy, smiling clones" before the end of the decade.
Most scientists dismissed his plan as kooky; several U.S. states and 19 European countries outlawed it. But a year later, Seed insists that he is undeterred. He claims to have a partner, an obstetrician-gynecologist, but he won’t name him or the three other scientists who he says make up his team. When pressed, he concedes that his colleagues are currently spending no more than 10 hours a week on the project. After all, they have day jobs.
Not so Seed. The unemployed physicist, who has spent a lifetime dabbing in ill-fated ventures, is tying to build support and raise money; he claims to have commitments for $800 000. An impressive start, if true, but still far from the $2.5 million he says is necessary to clone the first human before 2000.
While virtually no mainstream scientist believes Seed will succeed, there has been a subtle shift in attitudes since the bearded, big-boned maverick limed into view. Seed put into words what many scientists were thinking, and few were surprised to learn last month that a team in South Korea had begun work on human cloning and even claimed to have produced a four-cell human embryo.
Seed is unconvinced. "The [Korean] results are highly suspect," he says. But he recognizes that the world is not waiting for him. "I’ll be devastated if someone else does it first," he says. "But I’ll get over it. I’d rather see somebody do it than nobody." That way, at least, Seed could pursue his next project-reprogramming DNA to achieve immortality—which he sees as the all-important successor to cloning. So here’s a conundrum: which would be stranger, a world full of Richard Seeds, or a world in which Seed never goes away To finish his plan of cloning the human, Seed still needs ______ more money.