AUI Competitions

Winning Speeches

Zineb Bourchouk

Sorry to future generations. Sorry for being so caught up in our own ideas that we did not think of innovation as a way to save lives and make yours better. Cloning is an innovation that people have always considered as unethical, forbidden by the religion and harmful to the humankinds existence. And I understand, I myself was very skeptical about this topic at first and didn’t know how I could possibly advocate it. But after doing some research, I came to the conclusion that cloning could really be the solution to many of our problems.

 People tend to picture the process of cloning as that of putting someone is a machine and getting several copies of them.

When in reality, human cloning is a whole different process. It is the reproduction of a genetically identical copy of a human. It is not by any mean the birth of twins, but it is very close to it.

My speech today isn’t going to be about what is human cloning and how it works. I am going to walk you through the argument of WHY IT SHOULD BE LEGALIZED in the medical research field. With the hope that each one of you can see, by the end of this speech, the importance of it.

Before getting into details, let me tell you the story of OMAR, Omar is a 7 year old kid Syrian refugee. He left Syria with his mother and his brother to flee the war. At his age, he already lost most of his family members. The problem now is that his mom is in NEED of a kidney transplant. The other problem is that she is a refugee that only has a limited medical access. And even if she did, she will be less fortunate than other citizens. Finding herself LAST in the list.  This is due to the shortage of organ donations.

According to the WHO, by 2015, more than 119.000 people were in need of organ donations, when only 15.000 people were willing to donate.  People need organs, but cannot find them. This is when I need to remind you of a very big problem:  the BLACK MARKET of organs and human trafficking. Every day, thousands of people are kidnapped and killed so that their organs can be sold on this black market. This can be avoided if cloning becomes legalized. Cloning is the reproduction of cells, which means the reproduction of tissues. Now imagine being able to provide each person with the organ they need. Not only that, but this organ will be the PERFECT MATCH for their body type and structure.

Another problem that could be solved is blood shortage on the donation market. In 2015, 1600 million people were affected by anemia, this is sad. But do you know what’s even sadder? 48% of these people are children. Most of them need a large amount of red blood cells but could not find any. Cloning, again, could be the solution to that.

According to Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel Prize winner geneticist, cloning is a revolution for medical research.

Now there a last point I need to get into: Cloning is not threatening to the humankind existence, it isn’t physically harmful to any of the participants. To extract the eggs and the cells, doctors and researchers have developed several techniques that have been proved to be l safe. Also keep in mind that it would never take away the uniqueness of somebody.

I know that most of you can still be very skeptical about all of this. But before making up your mind, I want you to think about people like OMAR, a small kid who is probably going to lose his last family member in a country where he knows nobody. And there are millions of people out there like OMAR, and like his mom. Cloning is not as bad as we are used to hear, it is a revolution and a life-saving method.

Nada Cheddadi

           

I would prefer us to get into the topic of Human Cloning with a little story: one night, Sarah was waiting by the train station when she saw an exact copy of her throwing herself at the railway and killing herself. Quite unusual…After some research, she even found out that there were nine others, which made ten clones alive in total, completely unaware of each other’s existence. Don’t worry as this only happened in a TV show, yet it is undeniable that most series are but a reflection of humankind and its evolution, which is currently heading towards Human Cloning. So with a tiny possibility left for us to have a say in that, we better start exploring better options from now, as Pr. Knoppers highlighted, which is why today I want to propose to you to ethically frame Human Cloning, in order to make sure it receives the best implementation in all of scientific technologies history.

            The favorite argument of Human Cloning is “reproductive freedom”, that is to say the right or liberty for one to choose the way they want to reproduce themselves. Fair enough. Yet, using this perspective, they present Human Cloning as the only untraditional way of procreation. Should I remind you, as Pr. Havstad does, of in-vitro fertilization, oocyte donation or abortion? History proves sufficiently enough how people have suffered and fought, and still do nowadays to obtain, most time only partially these rights. For this reason, they should all become internationally allowed before we even start thinking of implementing this new policy. Otherwise, Human Cloning will end up creating social damages rather than creating people.          

            Speaking of rights, most of Human Cloning’s defenders stand up for “freedom of research”, without even fully endorsing its complete definition. In fact, according to the 1997 UNESCO Declaration on Human Genome, the application of this right is solely valid once it seeks “to improve humankind as a whole”, which includes both heterosexual as well as homosexual couples. With that being said, this is a step that should be crossed by all of humanity before anything else.

            Moreover, bringing back the dead is one of Human Cloning’s most irresistible, yet most dangerous promises. A simple illustration is the one given by Pr. Havstad : “ If a husband were to die before a couple had any children, the wife might wish to clone the deceased in order to have children with her husband’s genes”. Do you realize just for a second how traumatizing that would be? For the wife as equally as for the clone.

            This gets me to my second point: we, humans, are so focused on ourselves, we almost forget to include the most concerned ones into this debate, who are the clones.

            What we should be afraid of is the psychological effects that being a clone will have upon their lives. Surely, they will be different from their original donators, but in reality, as psychologist Morales emphasized on, they “would have been planned to be a copy from another person”. This sentence on its own accounts for the consequences of a lifetime. Basically, clones risk growing up in an environment that constantly expects from them to behave as exactly as their alter ego.

I’m pretty sure each one of you can get a sense of how expectation and comparison can be suffocating just by looking at some aspects of your own personal experience. So I’ll let you imagine what it would feel like to endure that throughout your entire life. Believe or not but some people don’t agree with these possible outcomes, as they believe any cloned child is better off living in these conditions than not existing at all. I wonder if these people have ever heard of suicide.

To get back to my little story, it ended up happily as all clones finally got control back over their lives. If we manage to orientate policymakers into ethically framing all these perspectives of Human Cloning, I’m pretty sure we should experience our own happy ending.

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 AUI Public Speaking Competitions

On Tuesday, May 2nd, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences organized its Public Speaking Competition, with the overarching theme of ‘Immigration.’ This competition is organized for students enrolled in Public Speaking courses at the University, as a means of highlighting the improvements they have made over the course of the semester.

In the competition, each student participant delivered a 5-minute impromptu persuasive speech addressing the statement: “Diversity is what makes a country beautiful.” The participants took different positions in each of their speeches, supporting their individual claims through use of various sources, facts and statistics.

SSE student Chaimae Hartout, SBA student Al Haytham El Mahir, and NDS student (from the United States) Alexis Criscuolo earned first, second, and third place respectively.

Chaimae Hartout praised the topic of the competition, having experienced immigration firsthand. Hartout stated that “this competition was an opportunity for me to speak how I felt inside, which is something I have been waiting to do for a long time…[speaking on this theme] allowed me to share my thoughts and feelings, and lead me to inform [the audience] that immigrants are not what people see and hear on the news.” Hartout also was able to defend the concept that immigrants are not predestined for poverty or ignorance, as her personal experience with her family immigrating provides such a different narrative.

Also speaking about the competition, Al Haytham El Mahir shared that “as an SBA student I expect to deliver many oral presentations in the future, and the class of Public Speaking has been a crucial factor to help me discover my abilities and also improve them thanks to the guidance of my instructor. This competition has been an unforgettable experience for me. I [was able to interact with] students from different majors and learn from them too. All the participants showed great skill and I am proud to have won second place. I think that we Business students need such classes to learn how to interact with others. There is no better way to transmit your ideas than to speak them, for words reach the soul and not just the brain.”

Finally, Alexis Criscuolo said that “after taking this class I feel more comfortable on stage and more confident…I can easily get up in front of a crowd now and deliver a speech [without extensive planning or practicing].”