当代研究生英语下册课文原文

UNIT 1 PASSAGES OF HUMAN GROWTH (I)

1 A person’s life at any given time incorporates both external and internal aspects. The external system is composed of our memberships in the culture: our job, social class, family and social roles, how we present ourselves to and participate in the world. The interior realm concerns the meanings this participation has for each of us. In what ways are our values, goals, and aspirations being invigorated or violated by our present life system? How many parts of our personality can we live out, and what parts are we suppressing? How do we feel about our way of living in the world at any given time?

2 The inner realm is where the crucial shifts in bedrock begin to throw a person off balance, signaling the necessity to change and move on to a new footing in the next stage of development. These crucial shifts occur throughout life, yet people consistently refuse to recognize that they possess an internal life system. Ask anyone who seems down, “Why are you feeling low?” Most will displace the inner message onto a marker event: “I’ve been down since we moved, since I changed jobs, since my wife went back to graduate school and turned into a damn social worker in sackcloth,” and so on. Probably less than ten percent would say: “There is some unknown disturbance within me, and even though it’s painful, I feel I have to stay with it and ride it out.” Even fewer people would be able to explain that the turbulence they feel may have no external cause. And yet it may not resolve itself for several years.

3 During each of these passages, how we feel about our way of living will undergo subtle changes in four areas of perception. One is the interior sense of self in relation to others. A second is the proportion of safeness to danger we feel in our lives. A third is our perception of time—do we have plenty of it, or are we beginning to feel that time is running out? Last, there will be some shift at the gut level in our sense of aliveness or stagnation. These are the hazy sensations that compose the background tone of living and shape the decisions on which we take action.

4 The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our own distinctiveness.

Pulling Up Roots

5 Before 18, the motto is loud and clear: “I have to get away from my parents.” But the words are seldom connected to action. Generally still safely part of our families, even if away at school, we feel our autonomy to be subject to erosion from moment to moment.

6 After 18, we begin Pulling Up Roots in earnest. College, military service, and short-term travels are all customary vehicles our society provides for the first round trips between family and a base of one’s own. In the attempt to separate our view of the world from our family’s view, despite vigorous protestations to the contrary—“I know exactly what I want!”— we cast about for any beliefs we can call our own. And in the process of testing those beliefs we are often drawn to

fads, preferably those most mysterious and inaccessible to our parents.

7 Whatever tentative memberships we try out in the world, the fear haunts us that we are really kids who cannot take care of ourselves. We cover that fear with acts of defiance and mimicked confidence. For allies to replace our parents, we turn to our contemporaries. They become conspirators. So long as their perspective meshes with our own, they are able to substitute fo r the sanctuary of the family. But that doesn’t last very long. And the instan t they diverge from the shaky ideals of “our group”, they are seen as betrayers. Rebounds to the family are common between the ages of 18 and 22.

8 The tasks of this passage are to locate ourselves in a peer group role, a sex role, an anticipated occupation, an ideology or world view. As a result, we gather the impetus to leave home physically and the identity to begin leaving home emotionally.

9 Even as one part of us seeks to be an individual, another part longs to restore the safety and comfort of merging with another. Thus one of the most popular myths of this passage is: We can piggyback our development by attaching to a Stronger One. But people who marry during this time often prolong financial and emotional ties to the family and relatives that impede them from becoming self-sufficient.

10 A stormy passage through the Pulling Up Roots years will probably facilitate the normal progression of the adult life cycle. If one doesn’t have an identity crisis at this point, it will erupt during a later transition, when the penalties may be harder to bear.

The Trying Twenties

11 The Trying Twenties confront us with the question of how to take hold in the adult world. Our focus shifts from the interior turmoils of late adolescence—“Who am I?”“What is truth?”—and we become almost totally preoccupied with working out the externals. “How do I put my aspirations into effect?” “What is the best way to start?” “Where do I go?” “Who can help me?” “How did you do it?”

12 In this period, which is longer and more stable compared with the passage that leads to it, the tasks are as enormous as they are exhilarating: To shape a Dream, that vision of ourselves which will generate energy, aliveness, and hope. To prepare for a lifework. To find a mentor if possible. And to form the capacity for intimacy, without losing in the process whatever consistency of self we have thus far mustered. The first test structure must be erected around the life we choose to try.

13 Doing what we “should” is the most pervasive theme of the twenties. The “shoulds” are largely defined by family models, the press of the culture, or the prejudices of our peers. If the prevailing cultural instructions are that one should get married and settle down behind one’s own door, a nuclear family is born.

14 One of the terrifying aspects of the twenties is the inner conviction that the choices we make are irrevocable. It is largely a false fear. Change is quite possible, and some alteration of our

original choices is probably inevitable.

15 Two impulses, as always, are at work. One is to build a firm, safe structure for the future by making strong commitments, to “be set”. Yet people who slip into a ready-made form without much self-examination are likely to find themselves locked in.

16 The other urge is to explore and experiment, keeping any structure tentative and therefore easily reversible. Taken to the extreme, these are people who skip from one trial job and one limited personal encounter to another, spending their twenties in the transient state.

17 Although the choices of our twenties are not irrevocable, they do set in motion a Life Pattern. Some of us follow the locked-in pattern, others the transient pattern, the wunderkind pattern, the caregiver pattern, and there are a number of others. Such patterns strongly influence the particular questions raised for each person during each passage through the life.

18 Buoyed by powerful illusions and belief in the power of the will, we commonly insist in our twenties that what we have chosen to do is the one true course in life. Our backs go up at the merest hint that we are like our parents, that two decades of parental training might be reflected in our current actions and attitudes.

19 “Not me,” is the motto, “I’m different.”

UNIT 2 AIDS IN THE THIRD WORLD A GLOBAL DISASTER

1 In rich countries AIDS is no longer a death sentence. Expensive drugs keep HIV-positive patients alive and healthy, perhaps indefinitely. Loud public-awareness campaigns keep the number of infected Americans, Japanese and West Europeans to relatively low levels. The sense of crisis is past.

2 In developing countries, by contrast, the disease is spreading like nerve gas in a gentle breeze. The poor cannot afford to spend $10,000 a year on wonder pills. Millions of Africans are dying. In the longer term, even greater numbers of Asians are at risk. For many poor countries, there is no greater or more immediate threat to public health and economic growth. Yet few political leaders treat it as a priority.

3 Since HIV was first identified in the 1970s, over 47 million people have been infected, of whom 1

4 million have died. Last year saw the biggest annual death toll yet: 2.

5 million. The disease now ranks fourth among the wor ld’s big killers, after respiratory infections, diarrhea disorders and tuberculosis. It now claims many more lives each year than malaria, a growing menace, and is still nowhere near its peak. If India and other Asian countries do not take it seriously, th e number of infections could reach “a new order of magnitude”, says Peter Piot, head of the UN’s AIDS programme.

4 The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), is thought to have crossed from chimpanzees to humans in the late 1940s or early 1950s in Congo. It took several years for the virus to break out of Congo’s dense and sparsely populated jungles but, once it did, it marched with rebel armies through the continent’s

numerous war zones, rode with truckers from one rest-stop brothel to the next, and eventually flew, perhaps with an air steward, to America, where it was discovered in the early 1980s. As American homosexuals and drug infectors started to wake up to the dangers of bath-houses and

needle-sharing, AIDS was already devastating Africa.

5 So far, the worst-hit areas are east and southern Africa. In Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe, between a fifth and a quarter of people aged 15-49 are afflicted with HIV or AIDS. In Botswana, children born early in the next decade will have a life expectancy of 40; without AIDS it would have been near 70. Of the 25 monitoring sites in Zimbabwe where pregnant women are tested for HIV, only two in 1997 showed prevalence below 10%. At the remaining 23 sites,

20-50% of women were infected. About a third of these women will pass the virus on to their babies.

6 The region’s giant, South Africa, was largely protected by its isolation from the rest of the world during the apartheid years. Now it is host to one in ten of the world’s new infections—more than any other country. In the country’s most populous province, KwaZulu-Natal, perhaps a third of sexually active adults are HIV-positive.

7 Asia is the next disaster-in-waiting. Already, 7 million Asians a re infected. India’s 930 million people look increasingly vulnerable. The Indian countryside, which most people imagined relatively AIDS-free, turns out not to be. A recent study in Tamil Nadu found over 2% of rural people to be HIV-positive: 500,000 peopl e in one of India’s smallest states. Since 10% had other sexually transmitted diseases (STDS), the avenue for further infections is clearly open. A survey of female STD patients in Poona, in Maharashtra, found that over 90% had never had sex with anyone but their husband; and yet 13.6% had HIV.

8 No one knows what AIDS will do to poor countries’ economies, for nowhere has the epidemic run its course. An optimistic assessment, by Alan Whiteside of the University of Natal, suggests that the effect of AIDS on measurable GDP will be slight. Even at high prevalence, Mr. Whiteside thinks it will slow growth by no more than 0.6% a year. This is because so many people in poor countries do not contribute much to the formal economy. To put it even more crudely, where there is a huge oversupply of unskilled labour, the dead can easily be replaced.

9 Other researchers are more pessimistic. AIDS takes longer to kill than did the plague, so the cost of caring for the sick will be more crippling. Modern governments, unlike medieval ones, tax the healthy to help look after the ailing, so the burden will fall on everyone. And AIDS, because it is sexually transmitted, tends to hit the most energetic and productive members of society. A recent study in Namibia estimated that AIDS cost the country almost 8% of GNP in 1996. Another analysis predicts that Kenya’s GDP will be 14.5% smaller in 2005 than it would have been without AIDS, and that income per person will be 10% lower.

The cost of the disease

10 In general, the more advanced the economy, the worse it will be affected by a large number

of AIDS deaths. South Africa, with its advanced industries, already suffers a shortage of skilled manpower, and cannot afford to lose more. In better-off developing countries, people have more savings to fall back on when they need to pay medical bills. Where people have health and life insurance, those industries will be hit by bigger claims. Insurers protect themselves by charging more or refusing policies to HIV-positive customers. In Zimbabwe, life-insurance premiums quadrupled in two years because of AIDS. Higher premiums force more people to seek treatment in public hospitals: in South Africa, HIV and AIDS could account for between 35% and 84% of public-health expenditure by 2005, according to one projection.

11 At a macro level, the impact of AIDS is felt gradually. But at a household level, the blow is sudden and catastrophic. When a breadwinner develops AIDS, his (or her) family is impoverished twice over: his income vanishes, and his relations must devote time and money to nursing him. Daughters are often forced to drop out of school to help. Worse, HIV tends not to strike just one member of a family. Husbands give it to wives, mothers to babies.

12 The best hope for halting the epidemic is a cheap vaccine. Efforts are under way, but a vaccine for a virus that mutates as rapidly as HIV will be hugely difficult and expensive to invent. For poor countries, the only practical course is to concentrate on prevention. But this, too, will be hard, for a plethora of reasons.

Sex is fun... Many feel that condoms make it less so. Zimbabweans ask: “Would you eat a sweet with its wrapper on?”

... and discussion of it is often taboo. In Kenya, Christian and Islamic groups have publicly burned anti-AIDS leaflets and condoms, as a protest against what they see as the encouragement of promiscuity.

Poverty. Those who cannot afford television find other ways of passing the evening. People cannot afford antibiotics, so the untreated sores from STDS provide easy openings for HIV.

Migrant labour. Since wages are much higher in South Africa than in the surrounding region, outsiders flock in to find work. Migrant miners (including South Africans forced to live far from their homes) spend most of the year in single-sex dormitories surrounded by prostitutes. Living with a one-in-40 chance of being killed by a rockfall, they are inured to risk. When they go home, they often infect their wives.

War. Refugees, whether from genocide in Rwanda or state persecution in Myanmar, spread HIV as they flee. Soldiers, with their regular pay and disdain for risk, are more likely than civilians to contract HIV from prostitutes. When they go to war, they infect others. In Africa the problem is dire. In Congo, where no fewer than seven armies are embroiled, the government has accused Ugandan troops (which are helping the Congolese rebels) of deliberately spreading AIDS. Unlikely, but with estimated HIV prevalence in the seven armies ranging from 50% for the Angolans to an incredible 80% for the Zimbabweans, the effect is much the same. Sexism. In most poor countries, it is hard for a woman to ask her partner to use a condom. Wives who insist risk

being beaten up. Rape is common, especially where wars rage. Forced sex is a particularly effective means of HIV transmission, because of the extra blood. Drinking. Asia and Africa make many excellent beers. They are also home to a lot of people for whom alcohol is the quickest escape from the stresses of acute poverty. Drunken lovers are less likely to remember to use condoms.

How to fight the virus

13 Pessimists look at that situation and despair. But three success stories show that the hurdles to prevention are not impossibly high.

14 First, Thailand. One secret of T hailand’s success has been timely, accurate

information-gathering. HIV was first detected in Thailand in the mid-1980s, among male homosexuals. The health ministry immediately began to monitor other high-risk groups, particularly the country’s many heroin addicts and prostitutes. In the first half of 1988, HIV prevalence among drug injectors tested at one Bangkok hospital leapt from 1% to 30%. Shortly afterwards, infections soared among prostitutes.

15 The response was swift. A survey of Thai sexual behaviour was conducted. The results, which showed men indulging in a phenomenal amount of unprotected commercial sex, were publicized. Thais were warned that a major epidemic would strike if their habits did not change. A “100% condom use” campaign persuaded prostitutes to insist on protection 90% of the time with non-regular customers.

16 Most striking was the government’s success in persuading people that they were at risk long before they started to see acquaintances die from AIDS. There was no attempt to play down the spread of HIV to avoid scaring off tourists, as happened in Kenya. Thais were repeatedly warned of the dangers, told how to avoid them, and left to make their own choices. Most decided that a long life was preferable to a fast one.

17 Second, Uganda. Thailand shows what is possible in a well-educated, fairly prosperous country. Uganda shows that there is hope even for countries that are poor and barely literate. President Yoweri Museveni recognized the threat shortly after becoming president in 1986, and deluged the country with anti-AIDS warnings.

18 The key to Uganda’s success is twofold. First, Mr. Museveni made every government department take the problem seriously, and implement its own plan to fight the virus. Accurate surveys of sexual behaviour were done for only $20,000-30,000 each. Second, he recognized that his government could do only a limited amount, so he gave free rein to scores of

non-governmental organizations (NGOS), usually foreign-financed, to do whatever it took to educate people about risky sex.

19 Third, Senegal. If Uganda shows how a poor country can reverse the track of an epidemic, Senegal shows how to stop it from taking off in the first place. This West African country was fortunate to be several thousand mil es from HIV’s origin. In the mid-1980s, when other parts of

Africa were already blighted, Senegal was still relatively AIDS-free. In concert with

non-governmental organizations and the press and broadcasters, the government set up a national AIDS-control programme to keep it that way.

20 Contrast these three with South Africa. On December 1st, World AIDS Day, President Nelson Mandela told the people of KwaZulu-Natal that HIV would devastate their communities if not checked. The speech was remarkable not for its quality—Mr. Mandela is always able to move audiences—but for its rarity. Unlike Mr. Museveni, South Africa’s leader seldom uses his authority to encourage safer sex. It is a tragic omission. Whereas the potholed streets of Kampala are lined with signs promoting fidelity and condoms, this correspondent has, in eight months in South Africa, seen only two anti-AIDS posters, both in the UN’s AIDS office in Pretoria.

UNIT 3 NEW FINDINGS OF HIV

1 For almost four years, research into HIV has been dominated by a single theory about how the virus causes the catastrophic collapse of the immune defences that leads to AIDS. But the consensus on this theory is now crumbling, thanks in part to the work of a Dutch team led by immunologist Frank Miedema. If the Dutch team is right, the consequences will be profound. People with HIV may hope for new types of treatment. And some of the most cherished dogmas of

a multibillion-dollar research industry may be overturned.

2 The prevailing view about how HIV causes AIDS is that every day the virus makes billions of copies of itself and, in doing so, kills billions of the key defence cells that it infects, a class of T cell known as CD4 cells. These vital cells orchestrate the body’s immune response. Every day the infected person’s immune system attempts to replace these cells. After years of waging this immunological war, the body eventually fails to keep pace with the virus and the numbers of CD4 cells become dangerously low, leaving the body unable to defend itself against microorganisms and cancerous cells.

3 But Miedema and his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam see things differently. They agree that the number of CD

4 cells ultimately dwindles, but not because the virus is killing them off. In t heir view, the virus impairs the body’s ability to produce new CD4 cells, and—critically—it traps existing cells in lymph nodes and other tissues, preventing their movement in and out of the bloodstream. As large numbers of CD4 cells become trapped in this way, and the body fails to produce a sufficient number of new ones, the dwindling population of circulating cells becomes increasingly restricted in its range and ability to respond to different invading microbes.

4 Naturally, the champions of the prevailing theory dispute the Dutch ideas. David Ho, chief architect and proponent of the accepted view, at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, has told colleagues that “the whole field would have to be turned upside down if they were right”. But elsewhere, the controversial Dutch theory is gaining ground. Indeed, it builds on ideas that have been circulating since about 1990, among researchers such as Yvonne Rosenberg at

TherImmune, a company in Maryland, and John Sprent, at the University of California, San Diego. Earlier this month, Miedema’s latest findings were aired at a major international meeting in Glasgow on new therapies for HIV—a sign that the ideas are attracting interest from those at the sharp end of AIDS treatment.

5 The widely accepted view, that HIV is a mass murderer of cells, first took hold in 1995, when Ho and his colleagues in New York, and another group led by George Shaw of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, published two seminal papers in the journal Nature. These papers reported that there was a large and rapid turnover of CD4 cells in people with HIV infection, and that therapy with a powerful cocktail of antiviral drugs brought about huge and immediate increases in the numbers of these cells. The fact that the cells bounced back so quickly was due, Ho and Shaw reasoned, to the effects of the antiviral drugs. By stopping HIV from building new copies of itself, the drugs stopped the virus from killing (or “lysing”)cells, while new cells continued to be produced at a rapid rate. This compelling idea offered a simple explanation for how HIV could wreak such havoc. Overnight, the theory became dogma.

6 Then, in November 1996, Miedema proposed an alternative view. His work at that time centred on telomeres. These are the small sections of DNA at each end of a chromosome that are shortened with each cycle of cell division. Miedema and his colleagues reasoned that if CD4 cells were being constantly destroyed, then the unremitting cell division needed to supply the new cells would wear away their telomeres.

7 Yet the length of the telomeres turned out to be stable. “This means that cells are not being turned over in massive numbers,” Miedema said at the time. “Our data cannot be interpreted any other way.” He sugges ted that if the cells are disappearing but not being destroyed, then HIV must be hitting their production instead.

8 Ho disagreed. He said that an enzyme called telomerase, which rebuilds telomeres in cells that need to carry on dividing indefinitely, such as reproductive cells, is overactive in people with HIV. The enzyme is active in their immune cells, where normally it is absent. He argued that this overactivity could explain why the telomeres do not shorten. But Miedema’s group has tested T cells from people with HIV and has found no evidence of increased telomerase activity. Ho retorts that their tests are not sufficiently sensitive, and that special assays are needed.

9 Ho’s views find support from Tomas Lindahl, a telomere specialist at Britain’s Imperial Cancer Research Fund. “I don’t think the telomere argument... is very strong,” he says. “Telomerase activity is notoriously difficult to measure.”

10 Indeed, other researchers now suggest that Miedema may have misinterpreted his original results. They believe that he found the average length of telomeres to be stable because he missed those cells that were disappearing most rapidly—the very cells that would have the shortest telomeres if they were turning over at the rate Ho suggests.

11 Whether the telomere research is significant or not, a growing number of researchers now

believe that HIV does prevent the production of new T cells. Mike McCune at the University of California, San Francisco, suggests that the site of this inhibition could be the thymus, the organ where CD4 cells develop. But the Dutch group and others were increasingly convinced that there was another possibility. If T cells were disappearing from the blood, perhaps it was not just because new cells were failing to appear. It could also be that existing cells were being hidden away in other tissues. Miedema and his colleagues were puzzled by the flood of CD4 cells rushing into the blood that Ho and others had observed when infected people start to take antiviral drugs. They knew that the rise was rapid and then reached a plateau, and so they argued that it could not be due to the production of new cells because this would lead to a slow, more sustained increase. Instead, it must be due to the release of existing CD4 cells trapped in lymph nodes and elsewhere.

12 Their own experiments supported their hunch. When they analysed T cells in the blood of people with HIV as they started antiviral treatment, they found the same steep rise of CD4 cells, reaching a plateau within three weeks. The findings also appear to explain a phenomenon that has puzzled doctors, namely that the more advanced a person’s HIV infection, the greater the initial rise in their CD4 cell count when they start antiviral therapy. This, says Miedema, is because more and more cells become trapped as infection persists. If Ho and Shaw were right, the increase in CD4 cells should be modest in such people, because the virus would have killed so many of their cells.

13 But the nature of the newly appeared cells gave the Dutch team further support. They were virtually all so-called CD4 memory cells——that is, cells that had already come into contact with antigens from specific invading microbes. What is more, so-called naive CD4 cells——those that have not yet met an antigen—did not immediately appear. These findings strengthen the argument that antiviral drugs were not preventing HIV from killing cells, but simply releasing into the blood mature CD4 cells that had been trapped elsewhere.

14 An obvious response to the suggestion that CD4 cells are disappearing from blood into lymph tissue might be: “ Why not count them?” Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Removinglymph tissue is awkward and unpleasant—and may be unhelpful to patients whose immune systems are already disrupted. Equally important, researchers would not know exactly how many CD4 cells a patient had in the first place, and therefore would have no baseline figure with which to compare their estimate. Finally, even in healthy individuals, the number of CD4 cells in the bloodstream is a tiny proportion—between 1 and 2 per cent—of the total. So even if the researchers measured their decline in the bloodstream and estimated their numbers in the lymph nodes over a period of time, the margin of error would probably be too wide for the counts to be meaningful.

15 The Dutch group now has the backing of a growing number of immunologists. Brigitte Autran at the Pitié-Salpetrière Hospital in Paris has found that, in people with HIV who take powerful drug cocktails, the immune system appears to be able to take a break from the damaging

effects of the virus and boost its numbers of naive CD4 cells. This implies that the unchecked virus does indeed prevent the production of new CD4 cells. And, in the latest move, also reported at the Glasgow meeting, Miedema found that the immature “progenitor” cells that eventually mature into T cells are also disrupted. When his team took progenitor cells from people with HIV and from uninfected people, and put them into mice to mature in the thymus, they found that cells from HIV-infected people matured more quickly——suggesting that the virus is cranking up the immune system into excessive activity from the earliest stage.

16 Taken together, says Mario Roederer of Stanford University, who studies T-cell dynamics, these findings are “the final nails in the coffin” for the theory put forward by Ho and Shaw. Roederer believes the virus completely “rearranges” the immune system, rendering it ineffective and drastically reducing the repertoire of CD4 cells available to fight off infections.

UNIT 4 WHO’S IN CHARGE OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY?

1 Driven by the telecommunications revolution, the global economy is like a speeding train that keeps getting faster, says Thomas Friedman1, the New York Times foreign policy columnist. “What’s worse,” Friedman writes, “no one can slow the train down, because the world economy today is just like the Internet: everybody is connected but nobody is in charge.”

2 The idea that the global economy is out of control has a certain appeal to those who feel left in the dust by corporate mega-mergers, down-sizing, monolithic chain stores, ever-morphing financial markets, and an emerging culture that seems alien to human values.

3 But unlike Fried man, I have a pretty good idea who’s in charge. They are trade and finance ministers of the wealthy nations, leaders of multi-national manufacturing and finance firms, and high-level staff of institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization (WTO). A good number of them will be meeting in Seattle at the end of November, when the WTO holds its third ministerial meeting. High on the agenda will be the decision whether to launch a new “millennium” round of comprehensive trade nego tiations. Many people who are concerned about the impact of globalization will have their eyes on Seattle.

4 There are lots of reasons to be concerned. When leading policy-makers and economists speak about the booming global economy and the benefits of free trade, they too often ignore the people who are losing out. The CEOs of Microsoft and Boeing, co-chairs of the Seattle Host Committee for the WTO meeting, are among the winners. But the form globalization has taken has increased the gap between rich and poor nations. According to the United Nations Development Program, “the income gap between the richest fifth of the world’s people and the poorest fifth, measured by average national income per head, increased from 30 to one in 1960 to 74 to one in 1997.” Nearly 90% of all economic activity takes place in the rich nations where only 20% of the world’s population lives. The result of globalization, says the UNDP in its latest Human Development Report, is “a grotesque and dangerous polarization between people and countries benefiting from the system and those that are merely passive recipients of its effects.”

5 Inequality is also growing within nations, and globalization is a key factor. Since 1977, according to a new study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the income of the wealthiest one percent of Americans has risen 120%, while the income of the poorest sixty percent has actually declined over the same period. Forbes reports that the richest 400 Americans now control more than $1 trillion in personal wealth. The Economic Policy Institute concludes that globalization and related shifts from industrial to service employment account for about one-third of the growth in U.S. wage inequality over the past generation.When employers are free to site their activities anywhere in the world, it is no surprise that jobs shift to locations with lower wages, less respect for human rights, and weaker environmental and public health protections. “Ideally, you’d have every plant you own on a barge,”was the way General Electric’s CEO put it, describing how his company moved a factory from Mexico to Korea in only 45 days.

6 And when large corporations are as big as medium-sized governments (GE’s annual sales are about the same as Australia’s and Brazil’s federal budgets), it is no surprise that global commerce is organized to meet corporate requirements.

7 Without rules in place that create enforceable procedures to protect workers’ interests, the environment, and human interests that do not appear on corporate balance sheets, the global economy runs like a race to the bottom for the vast majority of people in the United States and throughout the world. That is why the World Trade Organization, where the rules of the global economy are set, is such a crucial institution.

8 Established in 1995 as the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the WTO is an international organization that is “writing the constitution of a single global economy”, according to former WTO Director General Renato Ruggiero. The WTO aims to increase global trade by reducing restrictions on cross-border commerce, such as tariffs (taxes on imports). According to classical theory, an international economy works most efficiently if each nation produces those goods it is most suited to produce, and trades them for goods in which other nations have a “comparative advantage”.

9 But in the new global economy, international trade is not just cross-border sales of cars, bananas, sneakers, and other products. It includes dealings as diverse as:

international currency transactions, which amount to more than $1.5 trillion a day;

stock and bond markets in major cities that attract global speculators;

the sale of images and ideas, also known as “intellectual property”;

sales of services like insurance and banking; and

transfer of goods from a corporate subdivision in one country to its subdivision in another, which accounts for some 40% of all trade in goods.

10 And in the new “free trade” philosophy, laws th at regulate any business activity in order to protect public health, the environment, human rights, or local community interests may be considered “non-tariff barriers to trade”, and be prohibited.

11 It is at the WTO where the people in charge of the global economy set the rules for what can be protected, what can be regulated, and what punishments can be imposed on whoever breaks the rules. When the WTO met in Singapore three years ago, it rejected a proposal to incorporate labor standards, such as th e right to organize unions and prohibit child labor, into the “free trade” rules. It did, however, agree to allow nations to protect intellectual property, such as patents and trademarks. Following that summit, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions noted that “Mickey Mouse has more rights than the workers who make toys, because the WTO covers trademarks but not labor standards.”

12 In general, the WTO has adopted rules which are in the interest of trans-national business and rejected rules opposed by business. WTO policies have been protested by representatives of “civil society”, such as unions, consumer activists, environmentalists, indigenous people, and women’s groups. In Mexico, where a currency crisis threw the nation into depression shortly after implementation of NAFTA, small business owners were in the streets, too, opposing “free trade”. Poor countries of the global south, which disagree with northern unions over labor protections, agree the WTO is not working in the interests of most people.

13 Since the 1996 Singapore summit, which concluded the “Uruguay Round” of negotiations, the WTO has ruled against provisions of the U.S. Clean Air Act, which would have blocked the use of dirty, imported gasoline. The WTO ruled against European laws which banned the sale of beef raised (in the U.S.) with artificial growth hormones. Laws that ban the import of products made by child labor could be ruled illegal as well.

Unit 5 ANYTHING BUT BEEFS

1 Distraught callers jammed Germany’s consumer hot lines with “mad cow” questions all week. Is milk safe to drink? (Yes.) Can you catch the disease from sitting in leather chairs? (No.) In London, where the panic began, an insurance company introduced customized coverage for humans who are worried about contracting the illness. For a ￡40 annual premium, Millennium Insurance Management promises a ￡40,000 payout to any policyholder upon diagnosis. Shoppers in Britain and across the Continent developed a sudden appetite for spring lamb and veggie burgers—anything but steak. Sales of beef tumbled by a third in France, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium. In Germany, they plunged 40 percent and slaughterhouses sent their workers home on forced vacations. The World Health Organization announced an emergency meeting to be held in Geneva this week.

2 At the center of the storm, Prime Minister John Major flung blame in all directions. “What has happened is collective hysteria—partly media, partly opposition and partly European,” the British prime minister declared. Yet even in the ranks of his own Conservative Party, some members are openly critical of the way Major’s government has handled the crisis．“It has been at best clumsy, at worst catastrophic,” says Edwina Currie, a Tory member of Parliament and former health minister. Two weeks ago press leaks forced the health minister, Stephen Dorrell, to make a

hasty disclosure.

3 Scientists had found 10 individuals dead or dying from a new strain of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease(CJD)，a rare but lethal degenerative brain condition. Worse yet, they suspected that the infection might have come from cattle infected with mad-cow disease. That was frightening news in a country where roughly 160,000 cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) have been reported since 1985. It scared other Europeans, too. They consume roughly more than half of Britain’s exported beef—considerably more than 250,000 metric tons in 1995 alone.

4 Early last week the European Union imposed a worldwide ban on exports of British beef and byproducts, from gelatin to cosmetics. Major howled that the prohibition was illegal, but it scarcely mattered. International demand for British beef had already dropped to just about zero. The ban remained. Farmers and butchers unions in Germany and France applauded. They had complained for years about being undersold by British farm products, and they hailed the Health Ministry’s disclosure as a backhanded vindication.

5 By midweek that attitude began to change. The ban was supposed to protect the European market against fears of tainted beef. Instead, the public regarded the move as an official confirmation of the mad-cow threat. Europe’s homemakers quit buying beef of any sort, whether British or domestic. The unions began complaining of a “crisis of consumer confidence”. France’s President, Jacques Chirac, and Germany’s chancellor, Helmut Kohl, phoned Major and offered their support. Kohl recalled that the European Union had come up with about $300 million to help Germany and Belgium halt an epidemic of swine fever a decade ago. Last year the European Agricultural Fund produced an unexpected surplus of $5 billion. Some of that money could help compensate Britain’s stricken beef farmers. On the eve of the EU’s Inter-Governmental Conference, such a move might even convince the British that Europe could actually be useful.

6 Indeed, at the conference that opened on Friday in Turin, the continent’s leaders turned the summit into a pep rally for Major, for Britain—and for beef. Little business was on the schedule, so the leaders were free to set their own agenda. Chirac insisted there was “not a shred of scientific evidence” that mad-cow disease can infect human beings. Major, noticeably more cautious, proclaimed British beef “safe in the ordinary meaning of the word”. Jacques Santer, the European Commission’s president, called for “a return to consumer confidence” and hinted that Britain’s export ban might be lifted “very soon”. Others denounced the “mass hysteria” sweeping Europe. “Instead of mad cows,” cracked Austria’s chancellor, Franz Vranitzky, “we should be talking about mad reporters.”

7 But the crisis is no tabloid fantasy. On the contrary, it’s just as serious as the money the summit leaders pledged to rescue the beef industry. They earmarked up to $2.5 billion in EU funds to support beef prices and to compensate British farmers for livestock that may be destroyed in order to eradicate the mad-cow threat. They also ordered a series of emergency round-the-clock talks between Britain’s agriculture minister, Douglas Hogg, and representatives of the European

Commission. The assignment is to draw up a plan for how to eliminate the disease and how to pay for the job. The plan is supposed to be presented at a full-dress meeting of Europe’s fa rm ministers this week. If the EU’s Standing Veterinary Committee approves, Britain’s beef embargo may be lifted within days.

8 Europe wants results for its money. “There are no blank checks, nor should the impression be given that we are just waiting to pay out,” declared Franz Fischler, the EU’s agriculture commissioner. Last week Britain made a few token gestures, such as outlawing the use of cattle feed containing any kind of mammalian meat or bone meal. The country’s mad-cow problems are thought to have originated from the use of cattle feed containing the remains of sheep that were infected with scrapie, a similar brain disease. The practice was discontinued in 1988, and the incidence of BSE has declined dramatically. About 2,000 cases a month were reported in 1994; so far this year the rate has been about 300 a month.

9 That’s still 300 cases a month more than the Europeans want to see. They are expected to demand that Britain’s farmers destroy significant numbers of their cattle, especially o lder animals that may have been exposed to tainted feed. Last week the British government said it was considering that step for as many as 4.5 million cattle; some officials have even spoken of killing some of the country’s nearly 12 million beef and dairy animals—a grisly project that would cost as much as ￡10 billion. Even to dispose of that many carcasses would be a herculean task. Burying them in landfills might put drinking-water supplies at risk from dangerous diseases. Burning them on open-air pyres wouldn’t reach temperatures hot enough to kill all pathogens. The safest method is cremation, but in all of Britain there are only 10 facilities licensed for the incineration of livestock carcasses. By one estimate, those crematories would need 70 years to process 12 million head of cattle.

10 Many Britons balked at the idea of even a limited culling of the country’s herds. “What we are talking about is slaughtering healthy animals at the taxpayers’ expense, not to protect the public but to restore their confidence,” complained Sir Jerry Wiggins, chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Agriculture. Erik Millstone of the Science Policy Research Unit added, “There is no way in which you can calculate how many cattle you need to put in the incinerator be fore confidence is restored.” Some commentators found the very notion absurd. Simon Jenkins, a columnist for The Times, wrote: “Like some primitive tribe we are expected to immolate our property to propitiate the raging gods.”

11 What’s strange is that the Europeans are hardly raging. The British government didn’t even bother to give advance warning to the European Commission before issuing its mad-cow news two weeks ago. And many Europeans think British cows, British feed and British carelessness are r esponsible for spreading BSE on the Continent. After Britain, Switzerland has Europe’s highest incidence of BSE—more than 200 cases, all told. Unlike the British, the Swiss have taken aggressive steps to fight the disease, such as spot checks on feed manufacturers. In France and

Ireland, the entire herd is eliminated when a single case is discovered. Yet despite all qualms, Europe continued to import beef until last week’s ban. Many other trading partners have been far less obliging. The threat of BSE has prompted a U.S. ban against British beef since 1989 and a similar ban in Australia since 1988．

12 In Turin, the summit leaders were still looking for a solution. Meanwhile, they tried to head off the consumer stampede with confident smiles and bold speeches. No matter how many British cows are destroyed, European beef sales are not likely to return to their pre-scare levels for a long time—if European beef sales are ever likely to return to the pre-scare levels. Like many Americans, Europeans have been cutting down on their intake of beef in recent years, and

mad-cow panic will probably intensify that trend. Even so, the leaders gamely battled on. “At lunch, they served us veal,” Chirac told reporters in Turin. “Every one of the presidents and prime minist ers ate it with gusto.”

13 While the dining and talking continue in Turin, scientists in Britain issued more bad news. The new strain of CJD was implicated in another case，bringing the total of suspected victims to 13. The 29-year-old woman died in February at a hospital in Kent. Further tests are needed to confirm the diagnosis. Meanwhile the hospital’s menu continues to feature beef—imported from Argentina.

UNIT 6 FROM POPPING THE QUESTION TO POPPING THE PILL

1 There have been major changes in attitudes toward courtship and marriage among those middle-class, educated Americans who are celebrated in the media and who are style setters for American life. Courtship was once a regular part of American life; it was a long period, sometimes lasting for many years, and also a tentative one, during which a future husband or wife could still turn back but during which their relationship became more and more exclusive and socially recognized. Courtship both preceded the announcement of an engagement and followed the announcement, although a broken engagement was so serious that it could be expected to throw the girl into a depression from which she might never recover.

2 There were definite rules governing the courtship period, from the “bundling” permitted i n early New England days, when young couples slept side by side with all their clothes .on, to strict etiquette that prescribed what sort of gifts a where expensive presents were customary. Gifts had to be either immediately consumable, like candy or flowers, or indestructible, like diamonds—which could be given back, their value unimpaired, if there was a rift in the relationship. Objects that could be damaged by use, like gloves and furs, were forbidden. A gentleman might call for a lady in a cab or in his own equipage, but it was regarded as inappropriate for him to pay for her train fare if they went on a journey.

3 How much chaperoning was necessary, and how much privacy the courting couple was allowed, was a matter of varying local custom. Long walks home through country lanes after church and sitting up in the parlor after their elders had retired for the night may have been

permitted, but the bride was expected to be a virgin at marriage. The procedure for breaking off an engagement, which included the return of letters and photographs, was a symbolic way of stating that an unconsummated relationship could still be erased from social memory.

4 The wedding day was the highest point in a girl’s life—a day to which she looked forward all her unmarried days and to which she looked back for the rest of her life. The splendor of her wedding, the elegance of dress and veil, the cutting of the cake, the departure amid a shower of rice and confetti, gave her an accolade of which no subsequent event could completely rob her. Today people over 50 years of age still treat their daughter’s wedding this way, prominently displaying the photographs of the occasion. Until very recently, all brides’ books prescribed exactly the same ritual they had prescribed 50 years before. The etiquette governing wedding presents—gifts that were or were not appropriate, the bride’s maiden initials on her linen—was also specified. For the bridegroom the wedding represented the end of his free, bachelor days, and the bachelor dinner the night before the wedding symbolized this loss of freedom. A woman who did not marry—even if she had the alibi of a fiancé who had been killed in war or had abilities and charm and money of her own—was always at a social disadvantage, while an eligible bachelor was sought after by hostess after hostess.

5 Courtship ended at the altar, as the bride waited anxiously for the bridegroom who might not appear or might have forgotten the ring. Suppliant gallantry was replaced overnight by a reversal of r oles, the wife now becoming the one who read her husband’s every frown with anxiety lest she displease him.

6 This set of rituals established a rhythm between the future husband and wife and between the two sets of parents who would later become co-grandparents. It was an opportunity for mistakes to be corrected; and if the parents could not be won over, there was, as a last resort, elopement, in which the young couple proclaimed their desperate attraction to each other by flouting parental blessing. Each part of the system could be tested out for a marriage that was expected to last for life. We have very different ways today.

7 Since World War I, changes in relationships between the sexes have been occurring with bewildering speed. The automobile presented a challenge to chaperonage that American adults met by default. From then on, except in ceremonial and symbolic ways, chaperonage disappeared, and a style of premarital relationship was set up in which the onus was put on the girl to refuse inappropriate requests, while each young man declared his suitability by asking for favors that he did not expect to receive. The disappearance of chaperonage was facilitated by the greater freedom of middle-aged women who began to envy their daughters’ freedom, which they had never had. Social forms went through a whole series of rapid changes: The dance with formal partners and programs gave way to occasions in which mothers, or daughters, invited many more young men than girls, and the popular girl hardly circ led the dance floor twice in the same man’s arms. Dating replaced courtship—not as a prelude to anything but rather as a way of demonstrating popularity.

Long engagements became increasingly unfashionable, and a series of more tentative commitments became more popular. As college education became the norm for millions of young people, “pinning” became a common stage before engagement. The ring was likely to appear just before the wedding day. And during the 1950’s more and more brides got married while pregnant—but they still wore the long white veil, which was a symbol of virginity.

8 In this conservative, security-minded decade love became less important than marriage, and lovers almost disappeared from parks and riverbanks as young people threatened each other: “Either you marry me now, or I’ll marry someone else.” Courtship and dating were embraced by young people in lower grades in school, until children totally unready for sex were enmeshed by the rituals of pairing off. Marriage became a necessity for everyone, for boys as well as for girls: Mothers worried if their sons preferred electronic equipment or chess to girls and pushed their daughters relentlessly into marriage. who felt their marriages were failing began to worry about whether they ought to get a divorce, divorce becoming a duty to an unfulfilled husband or to children exposed to an unhappy marriage. Remarriage was expected, until finally, with men dying earlier than women there were no men left to marry. The United States became the most married country in the world. Children, your own or adopted, were just as essential, and the suburban

life-style—each nuclear family isolated in its own home, with several children, a station wagon and a country-club membership—became the admired life-style, displayed in magazines for the whole world to see.

9 By the early sixties there were signs of change. We discovered we were running out of educated labor and Divorce became more and more prevalent, and people under the heading of self-fulfillment educated married women were being tempted back into the labor market. Young people began to advocate frankness and honesty, rebelling against the extreme hypocrisy of the 1950s, when religious and educational institutions alike connived to produce pregnancies that would lead to marriage. Love as an absorbing feeling for another person was rediscovered, as marriage as a goal for every girl and boy receded into the background.

10 A series of worldwide political and ecological events facilitated these changes. Freedom for women accompanied agitation for freedom for blacks, for other minorities, for the Third World, for youth, for gay people. Zero-population growth became a goal, and it was no longer unfashionable to admit one who did not plan to have children, or perhaps even to marry. The marriage age rose a little, the number of children fell a little. The enjoyment of pornography and use of obscenity became the self-imposed obligation of the emancipated women. Affirmative action catapulted many unprepared women into executive positions. Men, weary of the large families of the ‘50s, began to desert them; young mothers, frightened by the prospect of being deserted, pulled up stakes and left their suburban split-levels to try to make it in the cities. “Arrangements”, or public cohabitation of young people with approval and support from their families, college deans and employers, became common.

11 By the early 1970s the doomsters were proclaiming that the family was dead. There were over 8,000,000 single-parent households, most of them headed by poorly paid women. There were endless discussions of “open marriages”, “group marriages”, communes in which the children were children of the group, and open discussion of previously taboo subjects, including an emphasis on female sexuality. Yet most Americans continued to live as they always had, with girls still hoping for a permanent marriage and viewing “arrangements” as stepping-stones to marriage. The much-publicized behavior of small but conspicuous groups filtered through the layers of society, so that the freedoms claimed by college youth were being claimed five years later by blue-collar youth; “swinging” (mate s) as a pastime of a bored upper middle-class filtered down.

12 Perhaps the most striking change of all is that courtship is no longer a prelude to consummation. In many levels of contemporary society, sex relations require no prelude at all; the courtship that exists today tends to occur between a casual sex encounter and a later attempt by either the man or the woman to turn it into a permanent relationship. Courtship is also seen as an act in which either sex can take the lead. Women are felt to have an alternative to marriage, as once they had in the Middle Ages, when convent life was the choice of a large part of the population. Weddings are less conventional. There is also a growing rebellion against the kind of town planning and housing that isolate young couples from the help of older people and friends that they need.

13 But the family is not dead. It is going through stormy times, and millions of children are paying the penalty of current disorganization, experimentation and discontent. In the process, the adults who should never marry are sorting themselves out. Marriage and parenthood are being viewed as a vocation rather than as the duty of every human being. As we seek more human forms of existence, the next question may well be how to protect our young people from a premature, pervasive insistence upon precocious sexuality, sexuality that contains neither love nor delight.

14 The birthrate is going up a little; women are having just as many babies as before but having them later. The rights of fathers are being discovered and placed beside the rights of mothers. Exploitive and commercialized abortion mills are being questioned, and the Pill is proving less a panacea than was hoped. In a world troubled by economic and political instability, unemployment, hijacking, kidnapping, and bombs, the preoccupation with private decisions is shifting to concern about the whole of humankind.

15 Active concern for the world permits either celibacy or marriage, but continuous preoccupation with sex leaves no time for anything else. As we used to say in the ’20s, promiscuity, like free verse, is lacking in structure.

UNIT 7 The Rise of Intellectual Property Protection in the American University

1 Intell`ectual property scarcely existed in the vocabularies of U.S. academic researchers and administrators even 15 years ago. Now it is an ever-present part of discussions on research

policies and directions. This new importance of intellectual property in academia reflects a changing view of the relationships of research universities to the surrounding society. Until recently, research at universities has been relatively isolated from demands of economic utility, and education of graduate students has emphasized a career in academic research as the final goal. The university’s contentment with this relative isolation was affected by two major events of the late 1980s and early 1990s: the fall of the Berlin wall, leading to an expected decrease in military funding of research, and the emphasis on balancing the federal budget—both producing a fear of

a decline in federal funding of university research. The reaction on the part of the university has been to emphasize the benefits of taxpayer funding of research and to seek increased research support from industry. Intellectual property plays an important part in both of these efforts.

2 The impact of the Bayh-Dole amendment. Economic development through exploitation of intellectual property is now widely touted as one of the major benefits of federally sponsored research. This effect was given a major boost by the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act (Public Law

96-517), implemented in 1980. The primary intent of this law was to foster the growth of technology-based small businesses by allowing them to own the patents that arose out of federally sponsored research.

3 Universities and other nonprofit recipients of federal funding were included in the definition of “small entities” benefiting from the Bayh-Dole Act, largely as an afterthought. Under the

Bayh-Dole Act, the universities themselves would not develop the patented technologies, but would license the patents to industry. A provision of the law allowed the universities to retain royalties from such licensing and specified that a fraction of the royalties would be shared as personal income to the inventors. By law, the university’s share of the royalties must be plowed back into its research and educational activities.

4 A key aspect of university licensing of their inventions under Bayh-Dole was the granting of exclusivity. How could the federal government justify allowing a single company to be given the advantage of intellectual property developed under taxpayer funding? The universities pointed out that exclusive licenses were imperative for the development of early-stage technology. The commercial licensee must devote substantial time and money to attempt to develop the technology, with no guarantee that it will be successful. Exclusive licenses are an inducement and reward for a company willing to step forward and take such a risk—knowing that if it succeeds in the development, the exclusive license will protect it from more risk-averse competitors.

5 Now almost all research universities in the United States have technology licensing operations. The number of U.S. patents granted to American universities in a year rose from about 300 in 1980 to almost 2,000 in 1995. A survey of university licensing activities documents 5,39

6 licenses granted by universities between 1991 and 1995. More than 250 new companies were formed directly through university licenses in 1996—and a total of more than 1,900 companies since the inception of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Hundreds of products are already on the market

that were developed under license—ranging from new vaccines to computer security systems, electronic music chips, chemotherapeutic agents, and low-pollution industrial burners.

6 The direct economic impact of technology licensing on the universities themselves has been relatively small (a surprise to many who believed that royalties could compensate for declining federal support of research). Although a very f ew, and highly visible, “blockbuster” inventions such as the Cohen-Boyer gene-splicing patent from Stanford University and the University of California, the fax patent owned by Iowa State, and the cisplatin patents of Michigan State University have made tens of millions for universities, most university licensing offices barely break even. In contrast, the impact of university technology transfer on the local and national economies has been substantial, and leads to the conclusion that the Bayh-Dole Act is one of the most successful pieces of economic development and job creation legislation in recent history. It has been estimated that more than 200,000 jobs have been created in the United States in product development and manufacturing of product from university licenses, with the number increasing fairly rapidly as the licenses mature.

7 These results of university licensing have been noted with great interest by local communities, state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, and many policy-makers abroad. Locally, some universities have noted a lessening (and even “sweetening”) of the “town/gown” conflict, as cities such as Cambridge to see new companies and jobs springing up out of the universities in their communities. State governments are setting aside moneys specifically to fund technology transfer offices and new-company incubators in their universities. The phrase “Bayh-Dole” is heard frequently in Japan and Germany as their educational ministries seek to emulate the U.S. university technology transfer system.

8 Industrial support of university research. Parallel with the development of the university infrastructure for protection and licensing of intellectual property has come an increased interest in research partnerships between industry and universities—from both partners. Universities see industrial support as potential replacement for funds cut by the federal government. Industry has many reasons for increased interest: Technology is they developing too rapidly for in-house development to be sufficient; central research laboratories with cutting-edge scientists were closed down in the draconian down-sizing of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and companies are reluctant to rebuild them; universities have specialized facilities and staff that cannot readily be obtained elsewhere; and companies can experiment with new technologies and approaches at universities without committing to hiring permanently the expertise that will be needed to develop these technologies.

9 Intellectual property terms have become vitally important. The company wants to be assured that it can use the results of the research—and that these results will not be available to their competitors. But most universities insist that dissemination of research results is key to their identity and mission and will not agree to keep the project results secret. The key to resolving this