Idea of progress

IDEA OF PROGRESS

The notion I'm going to deal with is the Idea of Progress. The definition of progress is a gradual betterment, a development, a technical, social or scientific advance wich contributes to make the world a better place. I'd like to illustrate this notion using the theme of scientific progress and especially in the field of genetics and medecine.

        First of all, the first document we studied is a cartoon which represent the use of Eugenics wich is the science which studies methods of improving the genetic composition of the human race by selective breeding. In the cartoon we can see a man who is taken out and who will end up in the dumpster because he is unfit, he isn't well-built like the other men in the covery belt. This seem to be a large scale production, so we can think about the danger of humakind, there is no more diversity. At least, the cartoonist aims is to denounce the danger of selective breeding and Eugenics. This science was used by the Nazis when they wanted to create the perfect race and to get rid of the people who didn't fit with their ideology according to their religions (Jews), ethnic origins (Tsiganes), sexual orientation, their political opinion or mental and physical state. The progress of science is here seen as a negative aspect beacause it could be dangerous in the hand of dictatorship.

        Similary, we studied an  extract of an article that gives also an insight of medical advances. Here too, what should be a positive step (by preventing from genetic disesases) is today a negative one. Some people use pre-implantation embryo diagnosis (PGD) only for cosmetic purpose and therefore for gender selection. Now people can create perfect babies according to them and that creates a big debates about ethic.

        However, research on DNA and the use of PGD can also be useful and save lives. The article of USA Today raises the question of the babies conceived in order to save the life of one of their siblings. It's the case here, a bone marrow transplant from Adam (the newborn baby) saved the life of Molly, his sister, who suffered from a serious disease. Even if there is a lot of debate about it, this practise can cured people from lethal disease.

        This is for this sort of scientific progress that Barack Obama gave his speech at the White House in 2009. He delivered this speech to raaly support for public founding for scientific research, for instance for controversial stem cells researches. He reminds his audience of all the discoveries that have changed the life of a lot of people and improve life expectancy. These discoveries are possible thanks to the hard work of many people in labs. That cost a lot of money, that's why the US government wants to raise funds in order to keep the researchers in the country and continue to do more and more research.

        Progress can also be for technical, for instance on the twenty-first century, there is a new area with the improvement of intelligent machines which could even surpass human intelligence. Up to now, robots' ability to think and act autonomously has been limited because robots can't understand perfectly what they're seeing or what they're hearing even if they can see and hear better than us. However, progress have been done, a machine with object-recognition skills was created thanks to technical and scientific researches. This shows again the progress made by scientists, but this technological advance is also controversial, we can't know where the progress are going to stop, doing more and more intelligent robots could be one day dangerous if they become more independant an clever.

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