Operation Death In Daniel Keyes 'Flowers For Algernon'

Daniel Wong
English
Shires
January 8
Operation Death

There have been many arguments involving the Ethics the scientific community should follow. In the book “Flowers for Algernon '' by Daniel Keyes, Charlie Gordon, a lonely guy with an IQ of sixty-eight just wants to be an average, intelligent person with friends. Charlie is highly motivated to become smart and tries the hardest in his classes where he gets taught by Ms. Kinnian. Two scientists named Dr. Strauss and Dr. Nemur need a human test subject to test their surgery that will triple the IQ of anyone it is performed on. They tried it on a mouse named Algernon and it worked and tripled Algernon’s IQ. Ms. Kinnian thought Charlie would be perfect for the experiment and told the Doctors

Charlie go to be smart for a week or two and that was all the benefits he got. Additionally, according to the Ethics of Fieldwork, this operation never should have happened. The Ethics of Fieldworks states that “Special care must be taken with people who are unable to understand or who are particularly susceptible to coercion.” Charlie, a person with sixty-eight IQ, is susceptible to coercion and can easily be manipulated. The doctors took advantage of his low IQ and high motivation to convince him to do the operation. The doctors did try hard to tell him what was happening and Charlie wanted this operation to happen. But the doctors never really got across the full potential danger this operation could have on Charlie as he did not understand what they were saying. The danger and risk of the operation are other reasons the operation never should have been done. The Ethics of Fieldwork also states “that the benefits should outweigh the risks”. The only benefit of the operation was the temporary intelligence. But there were many cons and now he’s even worse off than he was before. After the operation, Charlie starts experiencing some short periods of amnesia and he went back to 68 IQ. These prove that the operation should never have been done and was an awful bout of unluckiness for Charlie. But those are not the only cons, there is still one significant reason that the experiment was a bad thing for

In the book Algernon the mouse who got the same operation that Charlie did, died. His journal states “Algernon died two days ago(Keyes 302).” This is an enormous con to the operation. Due to the Charlie-Algernon effect and the operation, Charlie’s lifetime is limited. It could be said that he didn’t regret it and that he was happy, but there’s a lot of proof he wasn’t happy. He fell into a depressed state because he knew he was going to lose what he had just gained. Furthermore, there is no place that states he didn’t regret it but there is this in his journal ”Now that’s happening I don’t want it to happen.” Charlie states that he didn’t want the effects of the operation and that it has caused him to feel sad over what has been done. That seems a lot like regret even if he is just regretting the cons of the operation. Was it worth it? A week or two of being an intelligent person for death. This reason itself shows that the operation shouldn’t have been done on Charlie or