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Charlie Gordon's Success In Flowers For Algernon By Daniel Keyes

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“The true method of knowledge is experiment.” — William Blake. Charlie Gordon was an adequate choice for the scientists, Dr. Strous and Dr. Nemur, to choose since Charlie’s gains from the surgery overrides his loses. The surgery was to try and triple Charlie Gordan’s IQ from 68 to 204, which was a success. Charlie indeed gained several things from his surgery including: understanding of true friendship, emotional maturity, and he finally got his dream come true. In Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, the doctors made a great choice for picking Charlie Gordan as their test subject.

One way that Dr. Strous and Dr. Demur did an amazing job in their decision for their test subject, was that Charlie Gordon started off doing whatever his friends, …show more content…

So, without the surgery he probably would not have gotten where he was with an IQ of 204 starting at only 68 in a matter of weeks. “What a dope I am! I didn’t even understand what she was talking about. I read the grammar book last night and it explanes the whole thing.”(Keyes page 192). People tend to think that this dream come true does not override the fact that a side effect of his decreasing intelligence is that he died. While dying is not a good thing alone it does not strain from the fact that he died finally achieving something that he spent his whole life trying to reach. So, instead of dying from a life searching but never really achieving. He died a life where he succeeded his dream. Other people say that this human sacrifice was unsafe and that no one knows about it since even the doctors told Charlie not to tell anyone that he was getting the surgery. Well, that is not true. “All human exposure studies conducted by EPA scientists are independently evaluated for safety and ethics, and the results are peer-reviewed. EPA is committed to ensuring the protection of study participants.” (Watchdog: EPA human test subjects not always told about lethal risks of studies, page 32). So not only was it safe but, it was also evaluated by other

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