Synthèse d'anglais, Idea of Progress

1. Idea of progress

The notion I am going to deal with is the idea of Progress. The idea of progress can be defined as an improvement, a development or a technical, scientific or social advance which contributes to making the world a better place. To my mind, the theme which best illustrates the best this notion is Genetic Engineering. The problematic  is : "Are progress in Genetic Engineering always a good thing ? ". First, I would first like to talk about the positive aspects of genetic engineering and then I would like to focus of the negative aspects.

I come now to the first part. Surrogacy is a method or agreement whereby a woman agrees to carry a pregnancy for another person, who will become the newborn child's parents after birth. Intended parents may seek an arrangement with a surrogate mother when pregnancy is medically impossible. We have studied the theme of surrogate mother through the text "a booming business" that tells us about their situation in India. The surrogate mother can give joy to the parents and can make a living through it.                                                                                                                                 The medicine baby is a baby designed to save the elder child. The document we studied is an extract from the novel "My sister's keeper".  Anna is a teenager who consults a lawyer in order to sue her parents. They want her to clonate a kidney to her sister Kate who has leukemia. Her parents gave birth to her in order to have a compatible donor for Kate. Anna is a medicine baby but she is fed up to donate all sorts of things.  I understand the parents have chosen this technique with the aim sick of saving the elder child. It was their only solution because no one from their family was compatible to donate organs.

I come now to the second part. Cloning is a genetic manipulation that allows to obtain identical living cells from a single cell. The document we studied is a cartoon called "the Odd One Out ". We can see five men on a conveyor belt, four of them are similar and one is a defective. There is a sharp contrast between the four clones who correspond to the expected norms ideals and the defective man who represents the risks of genetic progress.  This could be great to avoid diseases but it could also end up against Nature's laws. The cartoonist intend to denounce this risk. So the cartoon illustrates on the one hand cloning is a huge advance, but on the other hand, this cartoon is very critical. The message may be that we should use scientific progress more cautiously.                                                                                   In "My sister keeper", we have been able to see through this technique that there are sentimental consequences : the medicine baby can feel himself exploited and only created in order to save someone and not for love. We have to take into account the physical pain : the medicine baby will have to go through painful medical examen.

As a conclusion, I can say I have mixed feelings, one the one hand, the genetic engineering has positive aspects like surrogate mothers that give joy to couples or even the medicine babies who can save lives. But one the other hand, this also has some negative aspects like the clones that makes everyone become identical or also the medicine babies who can feel exploited, not loved and suffers.

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