Summary Of Flowers For Algernon By Daniel Keyes

One of the most dominant traits that all humans possess, is an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. A common way that researchers gather information in certain fields, such as medicine and human development, can only be done through tests on human patients. Often a dangerous and high risk operation, these investigations result in a sparsity of volunteers. History shows that subjects used for human experimentation were the most disenfranchised such as orphans, mentally impaired, prisoners & charity patients. These victims are defenseless against the researches who have little moral standings. It is imperative that scientists are able to restrain and inhibit their curiosity which could cause potential harm to innocent human subjects. It has been evident throughout the history of
The short story, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes provides us with a clear and honest idea of what being mentally disabled would be like through the mind of a cognitively challenged man named Charlie who is subject to undergo multiple mental experiments. One of the biggest issues in the story is that the operation put Charlie’s life at an unnecessary fatal risk. They took a chance with his life, purely as an experiment to see how the patient would react to such a dramatic change in their intelligence. They took advantage of the fact that Charlie so desperately wanted to be smart and in the story it is described that he was the “bestist pupil in the adult nite school becaus [he] tryed the hardist and reely wantid to lern” and “all [his] life [he] wantid to be smart and not dumb.” Charlie was a perfect candidate for an experiment, which would seem to him that he is getting all he ever wanted without any negative effects since he could not comprehend the extent of the risks at hand. Many researchers will struggle to see the boundaries of pushing science too far at the cost of human