Notion anglais - Idea of progress

Sujet du devoir

Bonjour,
Je suis en classe de terminale S et je passe mon oral d'anglais la semaine prochaine et j'aurais besoin d'une petite correction et de vos avis sur mon travail. Je précise que tout n'est pas entièrement rédigé mais il s'agit d'un plan très détaillé où presque tout est rédigé.
Merci d'avance pour votre aide.

Où j'en suis dans mon devoir

I am going to talk about the idea of progress. The idea of progress can be defined as an improvement, a development or a change. It can be a technical, scientific or social advance which contributes to making the world a better place. To illustrate my notion, I will talk about the genetic progress. Genetic progress is a scientific progress which allows to modify the genetic program and to create a genetically modified organism. But we know today that genetic progress raises ethic issues. So, to what extent is the genetic progress in discord with moral principles? Firstly, we are going to see the positive effects of genetic progress and finally we are going to see its limits.

I.                   Positive effects

-          Genetic progress allows to know better about genes. Thus, it allows to know better genetic diseases and in this way, to know how we can cure them. It can also help many people to have better life. Indeed, genetic progress permits to avoid diseases that are incurable with medical treatments. It is the case for example for prenatal diagnosis which can detect genetic diseases and thus a pregnancy can be interrupted.

-          It also permits to cure genetic diseases thanks some technics, for example if a couple has a child who has a mortal genetic disease, they can choose to design a medicine baby who can save his/her brother/sister. The movie My Sister’s Keeper is talking about this subject, it is the story of a medicine baby named Anna who was designed to save her sister Kate who is suffering from leukemia.

-          Moreover, genetic progress allows to some couples who can’t have children, to have children indirectly, thanks to surrogate mothers. Indeed, a surrogate mother is a woman who can carry the child of a couple who was conceived in vitro. It can be a chance for couples if the woman can’t carry a child. In India, surrogacy is very current especially in poor families, because it allows Indian surrogates to earn a lot of money.

II.                Limits

-          Genetic progress has limits and raises many ethic issues. Indeed, it can cause eugenics, a genetic selection into the population, where all forms of handicap or difference will be rejected. It is the case when a couple decides to eliminate a baby after a preimplantation or a prenatal diagnosis which reveals that the baby has a genetic disease.

-          Eugenics favors one sort of genotype, always the same. It is the case for cloning where there is just only one model who serves for cloning and one kind of genotype is duplicated, it wipes all identity and creates impersonal and dehumanized people who are all similar to each other, consequently there is no genetic diversity. For example, in a cartoon named “Odd man out”, we can see men on a factory conveyor belt, they look alike, they are actually clones and they look perfects: they are all tall, muscular, they all have a tooth-baring grin… Among them, there is a small skinny boy which is about to be thrown into the trash because he doesn’t look like the clones and he doesn’t correspond to the criterion of beauty wanted. It’s a form of eugenics.

-          It’s can be also a form of eugenics when a couple designs their baby because naturally they will choose the perfect model of genotype which has any fault. à In an extract of the fiction novel Brave a new world of Aldous Huxley, a Director presents a room to students, a room which is called the “Fertilizing room” and where many babies are designed. We fell the atmosphere is very cold, scaring, students are surrounded by machines which design babies, there is no humanity.

-          In the case for medicine babies, they can feel themselves rejected, only useful to save their brother or sister. In the movie My sister’s keeper, Anna feels like that, and to stop the grafts’ operations, she appoints a lawyer to file a process to his parents.

To conclude, we can say that genetic progress can be very helpful to prevent or to cure genetic disease, but it raises many ethic issues like eugenics which select an only model of genotype and it prevents the genetic diversity. To me, genetically technics has to be used with precaution and for specific problems, not for anything like to design the baby’s sex etc.