Purposeful Summary Lecture/Demo

When I ask you to make purposeful summaries of articles that just happen to have counterintuitive themes, I want you to be able to read some examples, and at the same time, gain a better understanding of what I mean by counterintuitive.

A “purposeful summary” doesn’t bother to recount the entire subject matter of an article. It may in fact share very little of the content of the original source. It does, however, remain true to the original, or to a credible version of the original. It is possible, for example, to produce a summary of an article that proves the opposite of what a misguided author intended. A propaganda film might glorify war, but your purposeful summary of the film might prove that war is in fact the ultimate inhuman act.

Illustrations are always superior to explanations.

1) Ethics of a Three-Parent Baby

It seems counterintuitive that human life, which everyone knows gets DNA from two parents when male sperm fertilizes a female egg, could ever require, or even make use of, the DNA of three parents. But that’s exactly what is happening.

The UK will soon allow in vitro fertilization of female eggs that include contributions from a second woman’s healthy egg to replace defective mitochondrial DNA in the first woman’s egg. While the amount of DNA is small, it nonetheless permanently alters the DNA of all female children born to the (well we can’t say couple any more!) three parents.

The contribution of healthy mitochondrial DNA to the fertilized egg will prevent birth defects that could result in seizures and decreased muscle formation in the absence of the healthy DNA. As usual, critics worry that this first tiny advance in promoting healthy babies will open the floodgates to every sort of god-playing, frankenstein-creating unscrupulous experimentation imaginable.

Others fret that only the rich will be able to afford healthy babies. In all likelihood, both these scenarios will play out just as they fear.

2) Africa Should Screen Americans for Measles

It seems counterintuitive but is possibly true that Africans have more to fear from American visitors than we have to fear from them. Nigerian writer and lawyer Elnathan John earned 35,000 retweets or favorites by tweeting that he was concerned for “measles-ravaged” America and hoped Africa was screening American visitors.

His comment was a sly rejoinder to the demand heard often in the media during the Ebola scare that all Africans should be screened for disease before visiting America. While Ebola is certainly scary, measles is nine times as contagious, and while it isn’t usually fatal, it killed 430 children a day in 2011 worldwide.

Also counterintuitive are the rules for immunizations in the United States. All US immigrants are required to prove they’ve received the full protocol of immunizations, including one for measles. But many American jurisdictions permit US citizens to opt out of vaccinations, including the measles vaccine, on religious or philosophical grounds.

When tens of thousands of Central American children crossed the US border from Mexico last year, they were all forcibly immunized against measles, even though their countries of origin have higher immunization rates than the US (El Salvador, 94 %; Guatemala, 93%; United States, 91%).

Nevertheless, we remain as a country more irrationally afraid of “disease-carrying” immigrants and visitors than we do of our own “anti-vaxxer” citizens who could be immunized if they chose to but choose not to.

[Bonus Source: Here’s how Slate.com reports on the recent US measles outbreak, as part of a series of posts in which American events are described using the tropes and tone normally employed by the American media to describe events in other countries.]

3) Is this Photo Ethical?

When the sudden earthquake of January, 2010, killed 230,000 Haitians, nature was not the only killer. Collapsed buildings killed thousands. Lawless looters killed one another. And so on. Photographers rushed to Haiti in droves to record the chaos and devastation because it’s their job to record and report what happens. Many of them took pictures of 15-year-old Fabienne Cherisma, shot by police while crossing a rooftop. 

It seems counterintuitive that . . . that’s for you to decide. Read the accompanying story and Purposefully Summarize it in a few paragraphs, accomplishing several goals in a few hundred words.

1. Communicate enough of the background information so that readers who have not read the article will know what they need to know.
2. Decide for yourself what they need to know.
3. Tell the story faithfully, but not fully.
4. Be sure you persuade your readers to embrace whatever surprising truth is illustrated by the story, its counterintuitive nature.