Idea of progress: to what extent do scientists' progress lead to alternative ways of evolution for (our) society?

Idea of progress

Problématique : : To what extent do scientists’ progress lead to alternative ways of evolution for (our) society?

Texts: Page 22 - Designer Baby / Page 23 - Saviour sibbling / Page 11 - My Body, my laboratory

Introduction:

Within the notion of idea of progress, I am going to talk about scientists’ progress. First of all, I would like to give a definition of this notion:

Today we live in a world where scientific progress is mainly in the service of man and contributes to making the world a better place. To my mind, the theme wich best illustrates the notion is scientific progress.

I will try to answer the (following) question: To what extent do scientists’ progress lead to alternative ways of evolution for (our) society?

To illustrate the notion, I have chosen 3 documents wich are Baby, Saviour Sibling and My Body, my laboratory. And to answer this question I'm going to focus on the baby designer and the cybernetics...

I -Baby designer / Saviour sibling

First, birth by in vitro fertilization involves making a perfect genetic match to save a sibling. So, we can see in the second document, Jamie, who was born by IVF specifically to provide a tissue match which was used to save Charlie suffered a debilitating and extremely rare genetic condition. Now aged twelve, he lives a normal and healthy life thanks to Jamie.

In spite of what people think, Jamie’s mother thinks (that) her son saved Charlie. She sees him as/considers him as a savior and not as a “designer” or a “harvest baby”.

And we can see that the Whitaker family see Jamie as a second child and a saviour and not as the baby who was only designed to save Charlie.

However, there are problems of ethics... As we can see in the first document, sometimes the "designer" baby is against giving a kidney or an organ... Like Anna who has to give a kidney to save her sister Kate. (But) she knows perfectly that she is a child only designed to save Kate, and she disagrees. She complains about her parents deciding what happens to her in her place and she wants to take her parents to trial (in order) to ask for a legal emancipation for medical purposes. And to do that, she is going to hire a lawyer. This one did not ask questions for a long time and he accepted the case without asking much because he knows how this case will generate a ton of publicity for him. And as he says himself, "no court in its right mind would force her to give up a kidney", because the case affects human rights and particularly self-ownership.

II - My body, my laboratory

In the third document, Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics was wheeled by doctors into an operating theater for what has to be one of the world’s only cases of elective neurosurgery on a healthy patient.

The surgeons injected him with a silicon chip that had a hundred spiked electrodes (that went) directly into his nervous system via the median nerve fibers in his forearm. The goal was to fire electrical impulses into his brain to see

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