Unit 3

P98-100

The Creative Spirit

IF creativity is a child’s natural state, what happens on the way to adulthood? Many of us will recognize ourselves in the sad tale of little Teresa Amabile, now a specialist in creativity.

“I was in kindergarten and my beloved teacher, Mrs. Bollier, had come to our home for an end-of-the-year conference with my mother. And, of course, I was eavesdropping(偷听) on this conference from the next room.

Teresa was thrilled to hear Mrs. Bollier tell her mother, “I think Teresa shows a lot of potential for artistic creativity, and I hope that’s something she really develops over the years.”

“I didn’t know what ‘creativity’ was,” she recalls, “but it sure sounded like a s good thing to have.

“When I was in kindergarten,” she went on, “I remember rushing in every day, very excited about getting to the easel(画架) and playing with all these bright colors and these big paintbrushes we had. And these was a clay table set up where we had free access to all these art materials every day, art became just another subject, something that you had for an hour and a half every Friday afternoon.”

Week after week, all through elementary school, it was the same art class. And a very restricted, even demoralizing one at that. “We would be given small reprints of one of the masterworks in painting, a different one every week. So, for example, I remember one week in second grade, we all got a small copy of da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi.

“This was meant for art appreciation, but that’s not how our teacher used it. Instead we were told to take out our materials and copy it. Second-graders being asked to copy da Vinci─with their loose-leaf paper and their Crayola crayons. An exercise in frustration!

“You don’t have the skill development at that age to even make all those horses and angels fit on the page, let them make them look like anything. It was very demoralizing. You could see yourself that what you were doing was very bad.

“We weren’t given any help developing skills. Worse, we were graded on these monstrosities that we produced, so we felt a heavy evaluation pressure. I was being completely wiped out. I no longer wanted to go home at the end of the day and take out my art materials and draw or paint.”

THE CREATIVITY KILLERS

The psychological pressures that inhabit a child’s creativity occur early in life. Most children in preschool, kindergarten─even in first grade─loving being in school. They are excited about exploring and learning. But by the time they in the third or fourth grade, many don’t like school, let alone have any sense of pleasure in their own creativity.

Dr. Amabile’s research has identified the main creativity killers:

●     Surveillance:hovering over kids, making them feel that they’re constantly being watched while they’re working. When a child is under constant observation, the risk-taking, creativity urge goes underground and hides.

●     Evaluation: making kids worry about how others judge what they’re doing. Kids should be concerned primarily with how satisfied they are with their accomplishments, rather than focusing on how they are being evaluated or graded, or what their peers will think.

●     Rewards: excessive use of prizes, such as gold stars, money or toys. If overused, rewards deprive a child of the intrinsic pleasure of creative activity.

●     Competition: putting kids in a desperate win-lose situation, where only one person can come out on top. Children should be allowed to progress at their own rate.

●     Over-control: telling kids exactly how to do thins─their schoolwork, their chores, even their play. Parents and teachers often confuse this kind of micromanagement with their duty to instruct. This leaves children feeling that any originality is a mistake and any exploration a waste of time.

●     Restricting Choice: telling children which activities they should engage in instead of letting them follow where their curiosity and passion lead. Better to lat a child choose what is of interest, and support that inclination.

●     Pressure: establishing grandiose(华而不实的) expectations for a child’s performance. For example, those “hothouse” training regimes that force toddlers to learn the alphabet or math before they have any real interest can easily backfire and end up instilling an aversion(厌恶) for the subject being taught.

  One of the greatest creativity killers, however, is more subtle and so deeply rooted in our culture that it is hardly noticed. It has to do with time.

    If intrinsic motivation is one key to a child’s creativity, the crucial element in cultivating it is time: open-ended time for the child to savor and explore a particular activity or material to make it his or her own. Perhaps one of the greatest crimes adults commit to a child’s creativity is robbing the child of such time.

    Children more naturally than adults enter that ultimate state of creativity called flow, in which total absorption can engender peak pleasure and creativity. In flow, some does not matter; there is only the timeless moment at hand. It is a state that is more comfortable for children than adults, who are more conscious of the passage of time.

“One ingredient of creativity  is open-ended time,” says Ann Lewin, Director of the Capital Children’s Museum in Washington,D.C. The children’s museum is an arena designed to draw children into the flow state. But, as Lewin sees there every day, there is a marked difference between the rhythms of the children who come there and the adults who bring them.

    “Children have the capacity to get lost in whatever they’re doing in a way that is much harder for an adult,” she says. “Children need the opportunity to follow their natural inclinations, their own particular talents, to go where their proclivities lead them.”

    Unfortunately, children are interrupted, torn out of deep concentration; their desire to work something through is frustrated. Lewin explains: “Adults have the compulsion to march through and see everything. But there are hundreds of things that can deeply engross a child here, things they can spend hours with. And you see the adults pulling them away, tugging at them and telling them, ‘Enough, stop it, let’s go.’

    “It’s a terribly frustrating thing to be stopped when you’re in the middle of the process. But we live in such a hurry-up way. So again and again children are stopped in the middle of things they love to do. They are scheduled. There isn’t the time for children to relax into their own rhythm.

 

P106

     Parents Seeking Cool Classroom for Son

1.          BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) -- School bells and the swelter of a waning Texas summer will greet children in Brownsville when they resume classes in a few weeks, but Raul Espino Jr. hopes that will not mean another semester of peering at his classmates from inside a plexiglass box that protects him from the heat.

2.         The 7-year-old’s parents asked a federal judge this week to order their son’s entire classroom air-conditioned to free him from the transparent cubicle. An auto accident when he was an infant left the boy a paraplegic and his body unable to control its temperature.

3.          NONE OF THE Brownsville Intermediate District’s 28 primary or junior high schools, which open Aug. 25, have air-conditioning. The district’s solution to Raul’s problem was to put him in the box.

4.         U.S. District Judge Filemon Vela said he would decide by AUG. 15 whether to grant the request from Ana and Raul Espino.

5.         “Other alternatives have not been considered,” Vela said. “We may be able to find a solution with the present setting.”

6.         The accident damaged the hypothalamus gland in Raul’s brain that controls the body’s temperature and some movement. He is confined to a wheelchair and must stay in an environment between 72 and 78 degrees.

7.         Doctors say the injury did not affect his intelligence, and teachers call him an above-average student.

8.         WHEN HE transferred last year from a school for the handicapped to Egly Elementary School, the box with a portable air-conditioning unit was built for him to use when temperatures climbed above 78 degrees. A two-way sound system was installed so he could converse with his teacher and classmates.

9.         Mrs. Espino testified Monday that she was overjoyed to hear her son would be with normal children last school year, bit then she became dismayed to learn that he would be confined to the cubicle.

10.       After failing to persuade the Texas Education Agency and the state Board of Education to order classroom air-conditioning, the Espinos took their case federal court, arguing that the district is violating a law that requires handicapped children be educated in the “least restrictive environment.”

11.        Local Superintendent Raul Besteio testified that he decided to build the box instead of air-conditioning the room for fear of jealousy among other parents and teachers. Besteio said he  turned down a woman from Pennsylvania who offered to pay for air-conditioning because that would have been “discrimination.”

12.       THE DISTRICT, with a relatively low tax base in the Rio Grande Valley, cannot afford to air condition the classroom, he said.

P115

The Stereotype of Stereotype

1.        Psychologist Yueh-Ting Lee received an electronic mail massage several years ago that included some barbed observations about the quality of life in several countries. “Heaven is a place with an American house, Chinese food, British police, a German car, and French art.” Lee’s correspondent wrote, “Hell is a place with a Japanese house, British food, German art, and French car.”

2.        While these national stereotypes fall short of absolute truths, asserts Lee of Westfield (Mass.) State College, they are accurate enough to give the aphorism its humorous punch. Houses in the United States indeed boast more space, on average than Japanese dwellings. A Chinese inn probably holds greater culinary potential than a British pub.

3.        In this respect, stereotypes, rather than representing unjustified prejudices, typically function as thought-efficient starting points for understanding other cultures and social groups, as well as the individuals who belong to them, Lee holds.

4.        “Stereotypes are probabilistic beliefs we use to categorize people, Objects, and events,” Lee proposes. “We have to have stereotypes to deal with so much information in a world with which we are often uncertain and unfamiliar.”

5.        Many psychologists find this opinion about as welcome as a cut in their research grants. They view stereotyping as a breeding ground for errant generalizations about others that easily lead to racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry.

6.        In the realm of stereotypes, intelligence gives way to misjudgment, maintains of Charles Stangor of the University of Maryland at College Park. People employ stereotypes mainly to simplify how they think about others and to enhance their views of themselves and the groups to which they belong, Stangor holds. In the hands of politically powerful folks, stereotypes abet efforts to stigmatize and exploit selected groups, he adds.

7.        Strangor’s argument fails to give stereotypes their due as often helpful, if not absolutely precise, probes of the social world, Lee responds. He contends that a growing body of research suggests that in many real-life situations, serotypes accurately capture cultural or group differences.

8.        For more than 60 years, scientists have treated stereotypes as by definition erroneous, illogical, and inflexible. This view was noticed in journalist Walter Lippman’s 1922 book Public Opinion, in which he argued that stereotypes of social groups invariably prove incomplete and biased.

9.         In the 1950s, psychologist Gordon W. Allport characterized stereotypes as invalid beliefs about all members of a group. Allport treated the opinion “all Germans are efficient” as a stereotype, but not “Germans, on average are more efficient than people in the other countries.” Debate arose as that time over whether some stereotypes encase a “kernel of truth.”

10.      Lippman’s fear that stereotyped cause social harm gained particular favor after 1970, as psychologists rushed to expose errors and biases in social judgments. Recently, however, psychologists have shown more interest in delineating the extent to which decision making proves accurate in specific contexts.

11.      Lee’s approach stereotypes falls squarely within the focus on accuracy of judgment. His interest in how people comprehended ethnic and cultural differences intensified after he emigrated from China to the United Stated in 1986 to attend graduate school. At that point, he began to suspect that a keener scientific understanding of stereotypes might have valuable applications. For instance, Lee asserts, efforts at conflict resolution between ethnic groups or nations may work best if both sides receive help in confronting real cultural differences that trigger mutual animosities.

12.      “Group differences, not prejudice, are the root cause of tension and conflict between various cultural and racial groups,” he contends. “The most effective way to prove intergroup relations is to admit and to discuss frankly the existing differences at the same time explaining that there is nothing wrong with being different.”

13.      Bridge-building efforts of this kind counteract the natural tendency to emphasize negative features in stereotypes, argues Reuben M. Baron of the University of Connecticut in Storrs. Humans evolved in groups that negotiated a dangerous world, he states. Our ancestors must have relied on stereotypes to marshal quick responses to potential threats, such as distinguishing predators from prey, friends from enemies, and fellow group members from outsiders, Baron asserts.

14.      The ability to categorize individuals into “types” may also have been crucial for communicating with others as groups grew in size and complexity, Baron proposes. In large communities, stereotypes capitalized on people’s propensity to fill social roles that match their own personal qualities. Warriors in an ancient society, for instance, might reasonably have been stereotyped aggressive and unemotional, while story tellers and musicians were accurately tagged as expressive and friendly.

15.      Despite their handiness, even accurate stereotypes can result in mistaken beliefs about others, according to Barron.

16.      Consider the misunderstandings over punctuality that develop between Mexican and U.S. businesspeople. Lee says that north of the border, Mexicans get stereotyped as “the mañana people” because of their tendency to show up for meetings considerably after prearranged times and to miss deadlines for completing assigned tasks. U.S. officals may see this trait as unforgivable deal breaking, whereas their Mexican counterparts─who do not dispute their own tardiness─deride Americans as “robots” who rigidly reach conclusions by specified dates before gathering all relevant data and fully grasping the issues.

17.      Businesspeople from each culture perceptively categorize the behavior of those in the other group but misunderstand the cultural roots of their different time perspectives, Lee says.

18.      Such subtleties of stereotyping have gone largely unexplored, remarks David C. Funder, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside. Most research of the past 25 years has tried to catalog the ways in which expectations about social categories distort a person’s judgment, usually by placing the individual in laboratory situations intended to elicit racial or sexual stereotypes.

19.      This approach neglects to ask whether people in a wide array of real-life situations incorporate accurate information into their stereotypes, Funder holds.

 

20.      “We desperately need to know which of the judgments we make of each other and of ourselves are right, which are wrong, and when,” Funder contends.

Unit 6

Smoking in Public:

Live and Let Live

Ours is a big world, complex and full of many diverse people. People with many varying points of view are constantly running up against others who have differing opinions. Those of us who smoke are just one group of many. Recently, the activism of nonsmokers has reminded us of the need to be considerate of others when we smoke in public.

But, please! Enough is enough! We would like to remind nonsmokers that courtesy is a two-way street. If you politely request that someone not smoke you are more likely to receive a cooperative response than if you scowl fiercely and hurl insults. If you speak directly to someone, you are more likely to get what you want than if you complain to the management.

Many of us have been smoking for so long that we sometimes forget that others are nor used to the aroma of burning tobacco. We’re human, and like everyone else we occasionally offend unknowingly. But most of us are open to friendly suggestions and comments and quite willing to modify our behavior to accommodate others.

Smokers are people, too. We laugh and cry. We have hopes, dreams, aspirations. We have children, and mothers, and pets. We eat hamburgers with everything on them and salute the flag at Fourth  of July picnics. We hope you’ll remember that the next time a smoker lights up in public.

 

 

AMERICA’S NEW MERCHANTS OF DEATH

·In Germany, three women in black miniskirts set up a table beside a Cadillac in the center of Dresden. In exchange for an empty pack of local cigarettes, they offer passersby a pack of Lucky Strikes and a leaflet that reads: “You just got hold of a nice piece of America. Lucky Strike is the original...a real classic.” Says German physician Bernhard Humburger, who studies youth smoking, “Adolescents time and again receive cigarettes at such promotions.”

·A jeep decorated with the yellow Camel logo pulls up in front of a high school in Buenos Aires. The driver, a blond woman, begins handling out cigarettes to 15- and 16-year-olds during their lunch break.

·In Malaysia, a man responds to a television commercial foe “Salem High Country Holidays.” When he tries to book a trip, he is refused; the ＄2.5-million-a-year operation exists only to advertise Salem cigarettes without breaking the law.

·At a video arcade in Taipei, free U.S. cigarettes lie atop each game. “As long as they’re here, I may as well try one,” says a high-school girl in a Chicago Bears T-shirk. Before the United States entered the Taiwanese cigarette market, such giveaways were uncommon at places frequented by adolescents.

A Reader’s Digest investigation covering 20 countries on five continents has revealed that millions of children are being lured into nicotine addiction by U.S. cigarette makers. In several nations, U.S. tobacco companies have being fighting laws that curtail cigarette use by young people and are cleverly violating the spirit of the curbs on advertising. Their activities clearly show a disregard for public health.

But the most shocking finding is that children are being lured into smoking in the name of the United States itself. In some countries, tobacco companies never would have gotten a start without the help of a powerful ally: the U.S. government.

Although domestic sales have dropped for eight straight years, and by the year 2000 only one in seven people in the U.S. will likely smoke, sales outside the U.S. have more than tripled since 1985. Smoking rates in developing countries are climbing more than two percent a year. Most troubling is the rise in youth smoking. In the Philippines, 22.7 percent of people under 18 smoke. In some Latin American cities, the teenage rate is a shocking 50 percent. In Hong Kong, children as young as seven are smoking.

Why are the young so important? Because millions of adult smokers either kick their habit or die each year, the cigarette industry depends on attracting new customers. Most smokers begin between ages 12 and 16; if a young person hasn't begun by 18, he or she is unlikely ever to smoke.

“Tobacco is a growth industry, and we’re gaining in volume and share in markets around the world,” Philip Morris assured stockholders in its 1991 annual report.

“Growth prospects internationally have never been better,” reported Dale Sisel, chief executive officer of R.J. Reynolds (RJR) Tobacco International at last summer’s international tobacco conference in Raleigh, N.C. “We all produce and sell a legal product that more than one billion consumers around the world use every single day.”

Unmentioned at the conference was the fact that smoking is one of the leading causes of premature death, linked to cancers of the mouth, lung, esophagus, kidney, pancreas, bladder and cervix, as well as to heart disease. Or that, according to the World Health Organization, tobacco will prematurely kill 200 million who are now children and eventually wipe out ten percent of the world’s population. This grim prospect is due in no small part to the spectacular U.S. invasion of international markets.

“The American people need to know precisely how their companies and government are promoting smoking among the world’s children,” says Dr. Carlos Ferreyra Nunez president of the Argentic Association of Public Health. “If they knew the full story, I believe they would stop this outrage.”

Here is that story.

 

Pervasive Influence

  Tobacco advertising is more pervasive in other parts of the world than in the U.S. African merchants can get their shops painted to look like a pack of Marlboros. The Camel logo appears on store awnings(雨篷) and taxis in Warsaw. Christmas trees in Malaysian discos are decorated free by Kent—with balls and stars bearing the Kent logo. In Mexico, one in five TV commercials is for cigarettes. On an average day, 60 spots for U.S. brands appear on Japanese TV, many of them during programs watched by teens.

  Although their marketing budgets are secret, tobacco companies have increased their spending for international advertising, adding substantially to the $4 billion spent yearly in the United States. “It’s crucial for them,” says Richard Pollay, professor of marketing at the University of British Columbia. “Familiarity in advertising leads to trust.”

  Tobacco spokespeople insist that cigarette advertising draws only people who smoke. But an ad executive who worked until recently on the    Philip Morris account disagrees. “You don’t have to be a genius to figure out what’s going on. Just look at the ads. It’s ridiculous for them to deny that a cartoon character like Joe Camel isn’t attractive to kids.”

  Dr. John L. Clowe, president of the American Medical Association, says, “It is clear that advertising encourages tobacco-industry denials, ads like Joe Camel are especially appealing to adolescents, equating smoking with sex, athleticism, even success.”

  Numerous independent studies support this view. Time and again they have shown that cigarette advertising creates an environment in which young people are more likely to smoke. That may explain why the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control found that smokers between ages between 12 and 18 prefer Marlboro, Newport and Camel—three of the most advertised brands.

 

Brand-Stretching

  Like the United States, some developing countries have banned cigarette commercials on TV and radio. This doesn’t stop the tobacco companies, however. To keep their logos before the public, they use “brand-stretching”—advertising nontobacco products and services named after their brands. Most of these items have special appeal to young people: Marlboro jeans and jackets, for example.

  In Malaysia, a music store called Salem Power Station wraps customers’ tapes and CDs in plastic bags bearing the Salem logo, and television carries an MTV-like show called “Salem Power-hits.” A Budapest radio station broadcasts a rock program called the Marlboro Hit Parade, and in China, Philip Morris sponsors the Marlboro American Music Hour. Rock concerts are especially effective.

  Sports sponsorship is more insidious(狡猾的), for it implies that smoking and fitness mix. Tobacco logos appear at events of every description, from cycling in Morocco to badminton in Indonesia. There's the Salem Open tennis Tournament in Hong Kong and the Kent International Sailing Regatta, to name just two. U.S. Tobacco companies spent $100 million sponsoring sports last year.
  Tobacco companies regularly skirt(避开) laws against TV commercials. In Shanghai, Philip Morris sponsors spots for "The World of Marlboro." Except that cigarettes aren't mentioned, they are identical(同一的) to a Marlboro commercial: the Marlboro man and his horse splash across a stream,t he man dismounts and gazes toward mountains that look like the Rockies.
  Unfortunately, many of the children who succumb to brand-stretching find habits that being as cobwebs end up as steel cables. At a McDonald's in Malaysia, Sunil Ramanathan, 16, finishes off a Big Mac, lights Marlboro and inhales(吸) deeply. He says He's smoked since he was ten, “I know smoking is bad for me, but I can't stop. I try to quit, but after one day I start again.”
Easy Access

  Just off Taipei's busy Keelung Road, high-school students begin arriving at the Whiskey A Go-Go disco about 9 p.m., and soon the room is a sea of denim. On each table are free packs of Salems. Before long, the place is full of smoke.
  “American tobacco companies spend more that a quarter of a billion dollars every year giving away cigarettes, many of which are smoked by children and teenagers,” says Joe Tye, editor of the newsletter Tobacco Free Youth Reporter, “if they can get a youngster to smoke a few packs, chances are he'll be a customer for life.”

  Of the seven under-18 students assembled at the Beltram High School in Buenos Aires, five say they have been offered free Camels. None was asked his age. One, Ruben Paz, 16, said he got his from a "blond, American-looking girl" handing out cigarettes from "the Camel Jeep" at the school door.

 

Sell America

  “Many African children have two hopes,” says Paul Wangai, a physician in Nairobi, Kenya. “One is to go to heaven, the other to America. U.S. Tobacco companies profit from this by associating smoking with wealth. It's not uncommon to hear children say they start because of the glamorous lifestyle associated with smoking.”

  Cigarette advertising outside the United States focuses heavily on U.S. lifestyles; indeed, the ads are seen as a way of learning about the United States itself. A letter from secretarial students in China appeared in the Petaluma, California, Argus - Courier：“Every day we listen to the Marlboro Music Hour. We enjoy Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. We smoke American cigarettes and wear American clothes. We are eager to more information about American life.”

  To hear the children of the rest of the world tell it, everyone in the U.S. smokes. The truth is, the United States has one of the lowest smoking rates—25.5 percent of the population.
  Yet because of advertising, U.S. cigarettes are considered a sign of style and sophistication. In Bangkok, young Thais sew Marlboro logos on their jackets and jeans. At the city’s Wat Nai Rong, High School, 17-year-old Wasana Warathongchai says smoking makes her feel “sophisticated and cosmopolitan, like America.” She associates Marlboros with “jeans and denim jackets, Pizza Hut, everything we like about America.”

 

Friends in High Places

  The theme of last summer’s Raleigh conference was “The Tobacco Industry to the Year 2000,” and on hand were two experts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help the industry sell tobacco overseas.
  ...Wait a minute. Didn’t the U.S. government decide in 1964 that cigarettes are a major cause of death and disease, and doesn’t the U.S. government discourage its own citizens from smoking? Then how can we encourage people of other nations to smoke?
  For many years, Japan, Korea, Taiwan (China) and Thailand imposed strong trade restrictions on imported cigarette. But U.S. tobacco companies joined forces with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to enter these Asian markets.
  The weapon Washington has used was Section 301of the old Trade Act of 1974. It empowers the USTR to retaliate—with punitive tariffs against any nation thought to have impose unfair barriers on U.S. Products.
  Here is a recent example. When the USTR began an investigation of Japanese trading practices, a U.S. senator stepped in on behalf of the tobacco industry. He sent a letter to the Japanese prime minister suggesting he could not support a substantial U.S. military presence in the Pacific or help change anti-Japanese trade attitudes in Congress unless Japan opened its cigarette market.
  “I urge that you establish a timetable for allowing U.S. cigarettes a specific share of your market,” the senator wrote. “I suggest a total of 20 percent within 18 months.” Three months later agreed to open its markets more.
  The results have been devastating, before the U.S. tobacco companies arrived. Smoking rates were declining slightly in Japan, but in the past five years, cigarette consumption by minors has increased 16 percent. Among Taiwanese high-school students, the smoking rate climbed 14 percent. The number of Thai smokers ages 15to 19 increased 24 percent, with similar increases for Korean school boys.
  “We were making progress in discouraging smoking, but all has been washed away by the flood of American advertising,” says David D. Yen, chair of an antismoking group in Taiwan. “We want your friendship, but not your tobacco.”
  The U.S. cigarette business is booming. Exports are soaring, factories being built. And at the end of the rainbow lies China, with 300 million smokers—30 percent of the world market.
  “This vastly larger marketplace means a whole new world of opportunities,” RJR’s Dale Sisel told the Raleigh conference. Expansion abroad, he continued, would “pave the way for a bigger and brighter future.”
  That kind of talk makes Argentina’s Dr. Ferreyra Nunez shake with anger. “U.S. tobacco companies know their product causes death. Yet they promote smoking among children. What must these people think? Don’t they have children of their own?”

You Can Stop This Outrage(暴行)
  Public opinion is more powerful than the tobacco lobby. If you agree that it’s wrong for the United States to promote the sale abroad of a health hazard that we discourage at home, write a letter to the President. Ask him to order the United States Trade Representative to stop helping the tobacco companies open cigarette markets overseas. Urge him to support curbs on tobacco advertising in other countries like those already in place here. And send copies of your letter to your Representatives in Congress.
  The president’s address in The White House, Washigton, D.C. 20500. (Fax Nnmber: 202:555-2461)
   Conjugal   Prep    

The bridegroom,dressed in a blue blazer and brown suede Adidas sneakers,nervously cleared his throat when his bride,in traditional white,walked down the classroom aisle.As the mock misiter led the students--and ten other couples in the room--through the familiar marrige ceremony,the giggles almost drowned his out.But it was no laughing matter.In the next semester,each "couples" would buy a house,have a baby--and get a divorce.

Allen’s course,which has "married" 1,200 students since its inception five years ago,is widely endorsed by parents and students.Some of the participants have found the experience chastening to their real-life marital plans."Bride" Valerie Payne,16,and her "groom" David Cooper,19,still plan to marry in July,but,said Cooper,the course pointed out "the troubles you can have".The course was more unsettling to Marianne Baldrica,17,who tried "marrige" last term with her boyfriend Eric Zook,18."Eric and I used to get along pretty well before we took the course together," Marianne said."But I wanted to live in the city,he wanted the country.He wanted lots of kids,I wanted no kids.It’s been four weeks since the course ended and Eric and I are just starting to talk to each other again."

 

 Gene mapping may foster discrimination

█ Employers could reject new hires predisposed to(易患) disease.

WASHINGTON—Mapping the human genome opens a new era for medical science—and a new frontier for potential discrimination.

  No genetic research may make it possible to identify an individual’s lifetime risk of cancer, heart attack and other diseases. Experts worry that this information could be used to discriminate in hiring, promotions, or insurance.

  Employers and insurers could save millions of dollars if they could use predictive genetics to identify in advance, and then reject, workers or policy applicants who are predisposed to develop chronic disease.

  Thus, genetic discrimination could join the list of other discrimination: racial, ethnic, age and sexual.

  Genetic discrimination is drawing attention this week because of the first publication of the complete human genome map and sequence(序列). Two versions, virtually(实际上) identical, were compiled(编译) separately by an international public consortium(财团) and by a private company,

  The journal Nature is publishing the work of the public consortium and the journal is publishing the sequence by Celera Genomics, a Rockville, Md., company.

  Fear of such discrimination already is affecting how people view the medical revolution promised by mapping the human genome. A Time/CNN poll last summer found that 75% of the 1,218 Americans surveyed did not want the insurance companies to know their genetic code, and 84% wanted their information withheld from the government.

  “There has been widespread fear that an individual’s genetic information will be used against them,” said Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn. “If we truly wish to improve quality of health care, we must begin taking steps to eliminate patients’ fears.”

  The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed its first lawsuit challenging genetic testing last week in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Iowa.

  Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad was charged in the suit with conducting genetic testing on employees without their permission. At least one worker was threatened with dismissal unless he agreed to the test, the agency charges.

  The EEOC said the genetic tests were being run on employees who filed for worker’s compensation as the result of carpal(腕骨的) tunnel syndrome, a type od repetitive motion injury common to keyboard operators. Some studies have suggested that a mutation(变异) on chromosome 17 predisposes to the injury.

  A survey of 2,133 employers this year by the American Management Association found that seven are using genetic for either job applicants or employees, according to the journal Science.

  Many experts believe the only solution to potential discrimination is a new federal law that specifically prohibits it.

  “Genetic testing has enormous potential for improving health care in America, but to fully utilize this new science, we must eliminate patient’s fears and the the potential for insurance discrimination,” said Frist, the only physician in the Senate.

  Frist and Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, are introducing legislation that would prevent insurance companies from requiring genetic testing and ban the use of genetic information to deny coverage or to set rates.

 

  Writing this week in the journal Science, Senators James M. Jeffords, R-Vt., and Tom Daschle, D-S.D., say they both favor legislation prohibiting genetic discrimination. “Without adequate safeguards, the genetic revolution could mean one step forward for science and two steps backward for civil rights,” they write. “Misuse genetic information could create a new underclass: the genetically less fortunate.”