The Presidential Biomedical Committee - Essay Example

There are almost no points throughout the discussion, which I would disagree with. Especially, I liked the line in these debates, initiated by Prof. Meilaender. The participants have been discussing the contrasts between scientist Aylmer and his “earthly” assistant Aminadab, and the conclusion was: even “animal nature” has better intuition and can understand the danger and worthlessness of humans' involvement in “God’s business”.

Besides, I agree with the experts, that Aylmer’s perfectionism in the story is extremely aggressive, and his attempt to remove the birthmark is a very repulsive act. It is unbelievable, how can a birthmark of his loving and caring young wife, who is loyal and devoted to her husband, become such an annoying element. There are thousands of people among us, who live with much more ugly defects of skin or body, but it does not change their attitude and care for their loving relatives and true friends.

Only I do not quite share the position of Prof. Mary Ann Glendon and some other experts, who hesitated in Aylmer’s being “a man of science”. They called him a “magician” or “narcissist”. I suppose he was a good and very experienced scientist and alchemist because there were few opportunities for studying “real science” in those times.

To my mind, Aylmer got into a psychological trap and started hating his wife for her birthmark not because only of his scientific aspirations for perfection, but because of his subconscious motif. And, I guess, at the end of the story Aylmer realized that he took too big a risk to his wife’s health, having her involved with his scientific and psychological experiments. That is why he may seem to be “illogical” and “non-scientific” in his movements. But, in my opinion, it is impossible to underestimate his scientific knowledge, experience, approach to his work, and achievements (fail experiments and bad outcomes are also results).

I think that the main purpose of such a discussion could be attracting the attention of society to problems of science, and especially the dangerous consequences of pursuing “perfectionism” in science. This story shows that scientific experiments, especially on people, must be objective, secure, and harmless; they must be directed only at improving life standards and better satisfying all the vital needs of human beings, not on pleasing the psychological tricks of a particular scientist.

Besides, I would like to underline that importance of this problem increases every day in our times. Recently it became possible to correct the human body and face in special beauty saloons, and contemporary surgeons carry out extremely difficult and risky operations on correcting natural imperfections. Before making such decisions, every participant must understand the risk and danger of it, because there is nothing more priceless and valuable than human life.

Nowadays problems of genetic manipulations and cloning (especially issues of human cloning) receive huge resonance in public opinion. Of course, such scientific experiments have a lot of positive practice, because cloning opened a new horizon in medicine of artificial organs and allowed the reproduction of new healthy human organs for replacement. But in case cloning technology will be used with bad anti-humanistic intentions (like making a profit, etc.), a terrible disaster may happen. That is why such questions require very thorough regulations and tough control. Read More