Dalhousie University Genetic Determinism and Gene Therapy Discussion Paper

Final Writing Project (30%)

For your Final Writing Project, you have a choice. You can either write a research essay or a pitch for
a science fiction film of your own creation. Whichever kind of project you decide to write, it should
be between 2300 and 2700 words and should be submitted to Brightspace by Monday, March 28th.

There is an Essay Prize in this course, which you can learn more about here:
https://ukings.ca/programs/host-plus/essay-prizes/. Please note that only the students who choose
to write a research essay for their final project will be eligible to win it. (In other words, those who
opt to write a movie pitch instead will not be eligible.) In order to guarantee eligibility, you must clearly
include the words “Research Essay” in the title of your project.

In terms of topics, since this is a history of science and technology course rather than a film studies
or cultural studies course, your essays should focus on science and technology themes. But they need
not be limited exclusively to them. They could also discuss, for example, social and political issues, or
religious and philosophical questions, so long as those themes intersect with or are relevant in some
way to the portrayal of science and technology.

Research essays must include at least some analysis and interpretation of films (either the ones we
screened in this course or other, relevant, science fiction films, which we did not), and they must also
engage with at least two good quality secondary sources—that is, peer-reviewed academic journal
articles or books written by historians, film theorists, or other scholars about the films. Your essays
should be written in formal academic language and formatted in accordance with either the MLA
Handbook, 8th Edition (2016), 9th Edition (2021), or the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition (2017).

If you choose to write a Movie Pitch instead of an essay, you must include a synopsis of the plot or
story your imaginary film would tell and a description of its main characters. You must also include
explanations of what specific science and technology themes it would be exploring and what,
ultimately, your movie is trying to say about them. In other words, your pitch should indicate what
the point is that your movie is making about (some aspect of) science and technology. Science fiction
films often allude to one another or rework versions of the same stories (e.g., Blade Runner rewrites
some elements of Frankenstein; Interstellar contains visual references to 2001: A Space Odyssey). Your
pitch could also discuss how your movie is similar and/or different to one or two of the movies we
studied in this course, or how it puts a new spin on an old idea.

Note on Plagiarism: This course has a zero-tolerance policy. All submissions to Brightspace will
be automatically checked by a plagiarism detector (see “Ouriginal/Urkund” under “Policies”
below). Plagiarism means giving your reader the impression that someone else’s work is your
own. It is academic theft and it often occurs when students copy and paste sentences from a
website or similar source into their essays. Even slightly changing the words of the original
source (e.g., by substituting a word with its synonym) can constitute plagiarism. So can handing
in work you have already submitted to another course for credit (“self-plagiarism”).
Do not plagiarize. You will probably get caught. If plagiarism is suspected, a formal process
ensues in which I send the submission to the Academic Integrity Officer (AIO) at King’s, who
makes a determination about whether plagiarism has probably occurred and what an
appropriate penalty might be. In every case I have been involved with, the recommendation has
been a grade of “0” for the assignment

Your essay have to chose Frankenstein (1931), Metropolis (1929),Godzilla (1954), A Space Odyssey (1968),Stalker (1979),Blade Runner (1982),Gattaca (1997),The Host (2006),Interstellar (2014)