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INTRODUCTION :
The notion I’m going to deal with is the idea of progress.
To begin with, I’d like to give a definition of the notion : progress means improvement, a movement forward. Whether it’s technological, scientific or social progress, the goal is to enhance the world, to make it a better place – at least, that’s the idea. Indeed, progress has also led to weapons, the atom bomb, fast food…
In relation to the notion, the subject of my presentation will be scientific progress because it’s a constantly evolving field with major improvements over the years.
So, we may wonder about the upsides and downsides of scientific progress, basically, is it always good ?

DÉVELOPPEMENT :
In order to answer this question, I have chosen two documents.
The first one is a cartoon entitled “odd man out” and the second one is an article from the Time, “My body, my laboratory”.

To my mind, the document that best illustrate the downsides of scientific progress is the cartoon “odd man out”. It shows some kind of factory which produces clones. On a conveyor belt, we can see a number of doll-like men who all look the same. All of them are well-built, muscular and tall. They’ve all got curly black hair, and are all wearing black shorts.
These similarities are possible thanks to eugenics, a science which studies methods of improving the genetic composition of the human race by selective breeding ; which is the phenomenon condemned by the cartoonist.
On the cartoon, we can see the odd man out : contrary to the others, he is short and blond and, unlike them, he’s wearing pink briefs. While the others look smug and self-confident, he has a look of shock and fear. Indeed, one of the metal pincers is lifting him off the conveyor belt. We can suppose that he will be thrown into the dumpster in the bottom-right corner with all the other rejected, as he doesn’t look like the clones and isn’t conformed to the regulation : he is flawed, like the three-eyed mannequin in the bin.
This document is a relevant illustration of the downsides of scientific progress as it shows the idea of perfecting human genetics and the resulting dehumanization.

After exposing an example of what may be the disadvantages of scientific progress through a cartoon, I’m going to talk about its benefits.

I strongly believe that progress is essential to evolve. History is made of progress and evolution that have allowed the world to be at its state today. Thanks to advances in sciences, medicine has become much more efficient and reachable for more and more people around the world. Science is now also able to achieve unbelievable things we could only dream about in sci-fi movies or books years ago. For instance, in the second document, the article “My body, my laboratory” from the Time, a wheeled doctor explains how he managed to connect his wheelchair to his brain by putting a chip with 100 spiked electrodes directly into his nervous system in his forearm : he’s now able to control his electric wheelchair with thoughts. This article is a good illustration of the bright side of scientific progress with medicine as it shows its efficiency by giving back things such as mobility, and we have other examples with the paralympics games, where a lot of athletes can run thanks to prosthesis.

CONCLUSION :
To conclude, I would like to say that scientific progress is great whenever it’s wisely accomplished and helps humanity by curing diseases or improving life, like in the article. However, we should keep in mind that it’s not always good and can have perverse effects as in the cartoon, especially if it falls into the wrong hands. That’s why we must prevent those effects in order to avoid awful consequences, and make sure that progress doesn’t end up wiping humanity off the earth.
In fact, progress is neither all positive or negative, it’s the applications of it that makes it one way or another.