Questões de Vestibular de Inglês

Anna Smajdor, an ethicist at the University of East Anglia, claims that people’s control over their reproductive choices will be dramatically altered if sperm and eggs can be created from stray skin cells. A woman could, for example, pick up a bit of bodily detritus from a prominent man, take it to a laboratory and give birth to his genetic child. Smajdor says that what has been termed ‘reprogrammable biology’ gives us the capacity to make cells act in new ways, blurring what we mean by an egg or sperm or even embryo. She points out that the boundaries between these categories have become very fluid, with the development of techniques that allow us to alter their genetic make-up or prompt them to behave in new ways. This raises very perplexing questions about ethics, law and regulation.

    Most religions would welcome ways of giving infertile men and women a possibility to produce sperm and eggs, although they might object if making gametes involved destroying human embryos. Research into the reproductive process has triggered debates among scientists about how far human reproduction should be altered. All agree that men should be capable of producing eggs: the fact that men have an X chromosome, like women, should make it possible. Thus, male gay couples could, with the help of a surrogate mother, have their own biological baby. But things are more complicated when it comes to women becoming fathers: some scientists believe that the Y (male) chromosome is so important to sperm that attempts to use female cells will be doomed. But on one point, everyone can agree: for women to father children and men to make eggs would be as significant a breakthrough as the birth of the first test tube baby 30 years ago.

Adapted from The Daily Telegraph, February 12th, 2008

TEXT D

PARAGRAPH 1: The payment of fees by students is widely seen as a novelty. In fact this ‘innovation’ marks a return to the medieval origins of universities. At that time student money meant student power on a huge scale. Medieval student power was focused on the University of Bologna. […] This power was based on their economic grip over their teachers.[…] Most university lecturers depended for their academic incomes on teaching fees collected from their students. […] The power which students derived from paying fees at Bologna led to extensive control over the lecturing system. […]

PARAGRAPH 2: For what was a lecturer punished? He was fined if he started the lectures a minute late or if he went beyond the approved time. […] The lecturer was also fined if he failed to cover the syllabus according to an agreed timetable. […]

PARAGRAPH 3: All students were encouraged to denounce lecturers who were absent without leave or who contravened the statutes in any other way. In addition, there was also an organized system of secret denunciations. Four students were elected in secret to spy on the lecturers. […]

PARAGRAPH 4: Student power at Bologna lasted a little over one hundred years […] As __ its rise, its demise is linked directly __ the subject __ student fees. By 1350 almost all the lecturers were appointed and paid __ the local commune. With changes in the payment of lecturers, control of the university passed __ the students to the commune and there it would remain.

PARAGRAPH 5: What does the situation in medieval Bologna have to say to us? Hopefully the return of student fees will not be accompanied by the return of student spies, secret denunciations and fines on lecturers. But, as ever greater emphasis is placed on research, the Bolognese case may be a timely reminder of the demands of students and of the importance of high quality teaching.

The West epitomizes individualistic, do-your-own-thing cultures, ones where the rights of the individual equal and often trump those of the group and where differences are valued. East Asian societies exalt the larger society; behavior is constrained by social roles, conformity is prized, outsiders shunned. […] But the reason a society falls where it does on the individualism-collectivism spectrum has been pretty much a mystery. Now a team of researchers has come up with a surprising explanation: disease-causing microbes. Societies that evolved in places with an abundance of pathogens, they argue, had to adopt behaviors that add up to collectivism, for reasons of sheer preservation. Societies that arose in places with fewer pathogens had the luxury of individualism, which is less effective at limiting the spread of disease but brings with it other social benefits, such as innovation. […]

    How might pathogen-fighting customs and attitudes arise, or fail to? Maybe people make conscious efforts to act in ways that inhibit the spread of pathogens, such as by shunning strangers and demanding conformity. Or maybe there are genes for behaviors that, at the level of a whole society, manifest themselves as collectivism or individualism, and genes for individualism get wiped out in diseaseplagued regions. But when East Asians move to the West or Westerners go East, […] they begin to see, think and behave like people in their adopted society. That would be hard to do if they were in the grip of collectivist or individualistic genes. The presence of pathogens also predicts cross-cultural differences in personality traits, not just shared cultural values. […] The physical world has shaped skin color and other superficial features. The next frontier is fathoming how it might have shaped our very thoughts and values. 

Sharon Begley, Newsweek, April 14th, 2008