Idea of Progress LV1

Idea of progress

I am going to talk about the notion Idea of progress. First of all, I would like to give a definition of this notion. The idea of progress can be defined as an improvement, a development or a change - a technical, scientific or social advance which contributes to making the world a better place. We are going to look at Scientific Progress, medical advances, cures for illnesses and especially genetically modified organisms that’s why we must weigh the pros and cons of should modern medicine be allowed to design babies?

First, I will present positives aspect of modern medicine, then the negatives. To illustrates my arguments, I have chosen a document called Design your baby with 2 Text. The text A is a science fiction extract from CHS Globe Online published on the 29th January 2010 and the text B is a newspaper article from USA today in the 1rst October 2010 which deals with Molly Nash and her brother, the world’s first designer baby, Adam.

To begin it’s important to say that a designer baby is a person who playing with God in choosing all baby’s physical characteristics that the parents want. In the text A the Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is used by parents who want to make sure their child will not suffer from a severe disease, however they also ask for selecting certain physical traits. This technique represents a scientific breakthrough in so far as it can help eradicate some diseases and it can use for cosmetic purposes. The text B speak about Molly. She is a teenager who was born with a rare disease. Normally, Molly was destined to die before the age of 7 but in 2000, his brother Adam cured Molly thanks to a transplant. So modern medicine like PGD can prevent disease, save life, allow of make an ideal baby and also select the future children’s gender of the parents.

But some people object to the designer babies for moral reasons. Indeed, they ‘re afraid that the children became a commercial production because with the genetic manipulation we could choose cosmetic characteristics in order to create a human model of perfection that’s why in text A the trait’s selection is compare to a fast food, every person can choose every traits that he want. Of course the principal Scientific’s interest is to cure genetic diseases, but we know the human can be able to do terrible thing like the atomic bomb or Nazism. In this science fiction extract there is a picture which it is written “Nobody’s perfect, but we are working on it.” that mean everybody will be perfect and all the person who isn’t perfect will be considered like a second class in the society. Concerning Adam Nash, I think it's not good for the little boy because he has been created to donate cells to his sister, to cure her, all of his life, he will think that he is not loved, he is here only because they needed him for his sister. So design baby is against diversity, it’s unnatural and should dehumanize humans cause of the idea of perfecting human genetics.

We can make a link between both text, they both illustrate science and technology progress, an important step in the prevention of disease but they both impose limits, they prove us that design a baby is the future but they show us all the consequences that science and humans can realize too.

To conclude I will say that according to me modern medicine shouldn’t be allowed to design babies because even if medicine, technology progress can save life, improve living condition and maybe in the future eradicate some genetic diseases, the dark side of this sciences can defeat humanity to do terrible things and it’s too important and dangerous to allow this kind of practice even with limits and rules.

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