If you could be a genius for about one week but then lost all of you learned would you do it? Would you do it if it had never been tested before and you didn’t know what would happen? These are the questions Charlie Gordon from “Flowers for Algernon” had to decide. Charlie Gordon was worse off at the end of the operation than he was at the beginning.

At the end of the surgery Charlie was thinking of suicide because he lost all of his intelligence and didn’t feel he was worth anything any more. He also learned how mean everyone was to him so when Charlie was smart and then after he had lost all of the friendships he had before the operation. Also, because the experiment had never been done before they didn’t know if Charlie would lose just what he learned or if he would lose all intelligence he ever had.

Someone that thinks that Charlie was better of at the end of the story might say he is better off because he got to experience what it feels like to be smart. Even if he was smart for about a week he just lost it and started thinking about killing himself. They might say he got to see the world as it really is instead of what he thought it was before the operation. The problem with this idea is that Charlie didn’t want to see what the world really was like and when he did he hated it and lost all of the friends he ever had.

Lastly, they might say he could help bring new advances in this area of science and have it be successful in the future. If the scientist really wanted to make sure it was safe and reliable they should have tested it on animals more and longer before testing on a human being.

It’s okay to be who you are instead of trying to change who you are and except who you are. For example, sometimes scientist make drugs before they know what they do to people and the people that take the drug end up worse off after taking the drug just like Charlie was after the surgery. One example of this is when scientists make weight loss drugs that make people have heart problems.

As you can see, Charlie was worse off at the end of the story than he was at the begging. After the operation Charlie had thoughts of suicide, all of his friendships were broken, and he lost all of his intelligence and might lose more than he had to begin with. I urge you to not let this fictional story come true and make sure that scientist check there experiments before they try it on a human being.