Synthèse séquence 2: design your baby (idea of progress)

SEQUENCE 2: DESIGN YOUR BABY

First of all I am going to talk about the notion “Idea of progress” through medicine and especially designed babies.

Since World War II, sciences made a lot of progress, particularly in genetic. DNA was discovered and it enabled scientist to improve their research. The first test tube baby was a girl born in 1978 in the UK and the first human embryo was developed in culture by J. Thomson in 1998.

But the science was quickly caught up by law and ethics. The United State President G. Bush restricted the funding for stem cells research on the belief that humanity is a “human” thing and not a sciences one. But a few years later, B. Obama decided to remove the restriction because it was crucial to improve the American medicine in DNA and to avoid any brain drain from the country. Lots of people were against this decision. However, he decided to keep on with the position.

One can wonder how far can we go in genetic selection ?

My presentation will fall in 3 parts. First I’ll speak about all the benefits of those improvements, then I’ll tell you more about some abuses of it and then I will present the debate about the pros and the cons.

I) The goods

Since the beginning of stem cells research, it had been about human medicine and how to cure very rare or strong diseases. A lot of money had been injected in that kind of research and sometimes without any results. This is why scientists keep going on with them. It’s their job to find treatments against illness and so they tried to make of our DNA the most fabulous medicine.

First they started with the human cloning in order to try some of the new medical handling procedures. The idea is to make exactly the same physical person twice, kind of reproducing someone. But they realized that even if the human was physically the same as the original one, they both had different way to think, so a different way to live. So now that kind of proceeds are used for animals (cats and dogs) from rich owners to have the same animal who died recently (or not).

But medicine babies are now considered as one of the most useful treatments. The principle is to make a test tube baby without any illness to treat other people. Most of the time those babies are made to cure their brother or sister if they have like bone marrow cancer or diseases which require the same blood group or the same kind of DNA. As a child they have their own life and they also help a member of their family to live or survive…

Since cloning and medicine babies, researchers also tried to make designer babies (or test tube babies). The point is to make the baby as the parents want. They can choose the physical traits of the future baby but the more important is that they can choose to protect him/her from any weakness like alcoholism, drug addiction… Parents can also choose to make him super smart/brilliant, bold or even both! We can see that kind of choose in the movie GATACA.

Although, medicine is sometimes going too far with experiences…

II) Some abuses

Now I’m going to explain what the abuse of doctors

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