Oral en anglais progress in medecine

Résumé du document

We can do more than curing, we have the power to alter life, therefore affecting society. Do we really want to take that risk to please our desires ?

Extraits

[...] Beyond the fact that in order to develop well, a child needs contact with his mother and not a machine in the first place, and will feel severed from his surrogate in the second place, comes the debate on who will pay. Social security systems have been created to help everyone support medical costs by making everyone fund it : would it be fair to make everyone pay for a medical act when it can be avoided ? This is one of the main concerns of commercial surrogacy. Same goes with frivolous artificial gestation, that cannot be compared with incubators because these are a palliative device. [...]

[...] In a universe where everything is based on the logics of cause and consequence, these people feel like disconnected. Moreover, there is a risk that two siblings might have an incestuous relationship without knowing. Science-fiction abunds with examples to warn us about sorcerer's apprenticeship : who would like to live in Gattaca ? And yet, decade after decade, people seem not to realize nor to care about these issues. At last, progress is a scientific achievement, but it does not mean it is always desireable. [...]

[...] This achievement is owed to the invention of the CRISPR-Cas9 tool, which basically consists in cutting small portions of a gene on a chromosome and replace them with others. The idea behind this is to eradicate hereditary diseases or weaknesses, such as Down's syndrome. Nevertheless the possibilities are endless, and the technology could be used to select certain traits, such as hair, eye and skin color, intelligence, strength or artistic talent. It is also possible to do so by selecting sperm or egg donors according to their profile, although chance still plays a role, or by selecting out cells or embryos directly. [...]

[...] One way to improve life is to battle diseases and traumas and we call it medicine. This art is old as humanity, but its real advent happened in the Early Modern Age and has further been developed since the 19th century. Today, life expectancy is highest, notably thanks to hygiene on the one hand, and high technology on the other. Today, we can work at the sub-celullar level, which allows us to intervene into the quintessence of life. And that perspective of reaching a demi-god status puzzles our ethics, hence the emerging resistance of certain social groups, not only religious by the way. [...]

[...] Here we will consider the progress achieved in medically-assisted procreation and genetics. The initial purpose of these two engineerings is to help infertile couples to have offspring (although the term may be improper in some cases ; we should rather say children to raise), and to improve, almost enhance a being's DNA. First, with infertility : there are several techniques available. The first one is when both partners can issue reproductive cells, but these cannot meet or blend : to resolve this problem, lab scientists resort to in vitro fertilization, which means « in glass » because the cells are taken from both donors, without sexual intercourse but, in the case of women, with a needle into the ovaries. [...]