Synthèse d’anglais: The idea of Progress

Synthèse d’anglais

The idea of Progress

Science allows men to push away his limits. Science is directly related with the progress. Today, I am going to tackle the issue of the Idea of Progress, but first of all, I am going to explain what « progress » means. The progress is the idea that the world, the society, and all the things that you can find on Earth can evolve in a good way. There are many kinds of progress, we can find the scientific progress, the technological progress, … Generally, the progress is related with good things, I think that if you want to change something, to make it progress, it’s to improve it, not to make it worst that it was. Lots of robots, for exemple, have been created to improve life. But the idea of progress is still a debate, there are two kinds of thoughts about this : there are people who thinks that it can only make life better, and there are people who things that the progress is dangerous even harmful for us. The Internet is the perfect exemple of these thoughts : some will say that you can make friends all around the world, and others can say that you will isolate yourself behind your computer.

In relation to this notion, the topic of my presentation will be related with the scientific progress and more precisely about the progress of the genetic, we are going to speak about the designer babies. The designer babies are still an idea, but the opinions already diverge. With this you could choose all the caracteristics of your baby, his/her physical apparence, his/her intellectuals abilities. You will be able to « create » your perfect baby. The scientist would be able to modify the genes of the embryo, and after reimplant it in the uterus.

Thus we may wonder if the genetic progress could become harmful for humans ?

My presentation will fall into two parts, in a firt part, I will deal with the science-fiction stories, in which I will speak about the way are seen the scientists in science-fiction stories. And in my second and last part, I will emphasize on the current advance of the science.

As a first step I am going to speak about the scientists in science-fiction stories, and to support my ideas, I am going to deal with two documents we studied. The first one is the cartoon who speaks about the human cloning. The autor denounces the idea of the human cloning is really bad for us, indeed we can see that there are four man who are exact duplicates, with a specifical physical apparence, and there is an other one who is in a dumpster labelized « CLONES R US / REJECTED ». The cartoonist blames for perfecting human genetics. It is like if you were desumanizing the world, because humans are known to be all different. Instead of human cloning would that everybody is alike. He reaaly wants to show that diversity is really important in the world and human cloning is not the solution for the future of genetic progress. In a second part, I am going to explain my opinion of « Gattaca ». The extract we studied is really interresting because we are with a couple, Maria and Antonio while they are in an appointment with the geneticist. This extract shows lots of thing : The first one and the most remarquable is that the doctor insists to the fact that the couple could have the best baby ever. He wants implant the most of things to earn as much money as he can. A modification is really expansive and it is going to create lots of inagualities.

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