Alexandria Clarkson
Avc6h6
English Assignment 5
04 July 2016
Dying Young
In Susan McCarthy’s essay “On Immortality” she uses the three different appeals, ethos, pathos, and logos, to support her thesis on the scientific possibility of immortality. McCarthy states longevity is possible but not without consequences. She also states that the idea of longevity is something that is going to take time to achieve. She uses words like “unattractive” when talking about the idea of immortality to appeal to the audience’s emotions, Ethos, and tries to sway readers by choosing negative language. She appeals to Ethos and ensures her sources are credible and varied. She also is able to provide many different examples of experiments that are both for and against. The most effective appeal was the appeal to credibility or ethos. This is effective because it is difficult to make a scientific argument if you have people questioning you the whole time. By using credible sources, she is able to get her point across while informing the reader and providing facts to back herself up.
McCarthy chooses well known examples that enable the reader to recognize the material she is explaining. Specifically, she mentions an experiment by Dr. Francis Collins, a director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, involving a group of elderly Italian mice who were engineered to be deficient of a protein called p66sch (McCarthy). McCarthy chose one of the most well known human science research projects in the world. Most people recognize the Human Genome Project by name. They may not know the details, or much about the project, but they have heard its name in passing. Choosing something extremely well known establishes not only McCarthy’s credibility, but also the credibility of the person she is citing. Because the topic McCarthy’s essay discusses is broad, complex, and extremely technical when it comes to the details, it is important that she establish that credibility. It’s also especially important for McCarthy, because her essay was originally posted on Salon.com. Essays are less effective if the audience questions its sources after every sentence, so by choosing one of the most well know projects in the world, she establishes that she knows what she’s talking about. The reason she cites this project is because it is such a huge project and very well known in the scientific community. Not only is the project well known, but she is able to tie almost all of her sources back to this project. Similarly, the Salon.com readers don’t know much about genetic engineering, but they know the scientists working on the Human Genome Project do, so they listen to what they have to say. Projects as famous as the Human Genome project don’t become famous by faking research, and people realize this. McCarthy also brings in a view from another researcher who looks at longevity a little differently. Dr. Leonard Hayflick offers an argument in the case of longevity that it is a possibility but with serious consequences. His view is that it is possible to increase the cell lines and make them live longer, but the problem is that cells that live longer are cancerous (547). Hayflick has the credibility of being a professor of anatomy at the University of California at San Francisco’s school of medicine. He has been doing research on longevity for 30 years and has discovered what is now called Hayflick Limit. He has a limit named after him, if that doesn’t scream credibility than nothing does. Because McCarthy chose a credible source, it shows she knows what she’s talking about. By choosing Hayflick, she shows she didn’t pick some random person out of the blue because their opinion was easy to argue against. It shows she chose someone who knows what they’re talking about, and still argued with on an intellectual level. It is also important to note, that the textbook itself does a little bit of the work for McCarthy. Primarily because it is assumed that a textbook for college aged students will not publish an essay based on air, but also because the textbook provided a nice blurb summarizing all of her own accomplishments. All of her examples and ideas on can be credited due to the fact that she, herself, holds a degree in Biology and regularly contributes to Best American Science Writing. Knowing this before going into the essay is important because college is extremely difficult and biology is extremely hard. This being said, not only did McCarthy make it through alive, but she made it through with a degree in biology. As the essay appeared online, the readers from Salon.com did not know this information, and therefore, McCarthy had to make it especially apparent she knew what she was talking about. She was able to do this by first saying “Research that may bear on the practical end of these matters is proceeding with startling speed” (McCarthy 544). The fact that she has knowledge of the research picking up speed and becoming more of a reality shows that she has prior knowledge of the subject. She also goes on to site many sources including people in biological research programs showing that she has connections in the field. All of this would be hard to obtain without a previous education in the subject. All of the examples, experiments, and people that are brought to attention of the reader and McCarthy is able to make a good case as to why the idea of longevity is something that may occur even if it is farther down the road. She not only is able to pull from outside sources and outside knowledge to show why it is something that can be achieved, but she even is able to bring in a counter argument against the idea of it. The fact that she appeals to Ethos makes the amount and difficulty of the information easier to swallow because the audience cannot and does not question her about everything. Because of the credibility of her sources, and herself as well, the only thing the audience has left to question is whether or not they agree.