Da ficção à realidade: estudo sobre formação e desenvolvimento das representações sociais da clonagem humana

• Ano de defesa: 2010
• Autor(a) principal: Espíndula, Daniel Henrique Pereira
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo; BR; Doutorado em Psicologia; UFES; Programa de Pós-Graduação em Psicologia
• Palavras-chave em Português: Social representation; Human cloning; Emergence of representations; Representação social; Clonagem humana; Emergência das representações; Psicologia; 159.9
• Link de acesso: http://repositorio.ufes.br/handle/10/3131

Scientific topics evoke major interest in general society. The term cloning, for example, passed from the medical and scientific reality to the reality of social conversations, to novels and films of fiction and to the usual vocabulary of ordinary people. Knowing how social actors appropriate and (re)construction the scientific knowledge in their everyday relationships is of interest to the theory of social representations. However, a large extent of studies on social representations focus constructed representational processes and a few has been studied about his process of emergence. This was the context that motivated the present work, which aimed to understand the process of formation and development of social representations of human cloning in Brazilian society. To reach this goal the research was designed to allow understanding the knowledge movement, since its formation in the reified universe until its fulfillment in the consensual universe. It was used three sources of data for analysis: the first one consists of books used for training professionals on biological and life sciences, the second one consisted of articles published in Folha de Sao Paulo and Veja magazine, in their print and online versions during the period from 1997 to 2007 and the third one consisted of the letters sent by readers of newspapers and magazines surveyed during the same period. The keywords used for searching were: clone, cloning, human cloning, therapeutic cloning, genetic engineering and cell therapy with stem cell. Altogether it was found 952 articles and 40 letters sent by readers. Each database was analyzed separately by the Alceste software. The results show a social representation of human cloning objectified in different figures: a cloned baby, man's desire to be God, the manufacture of tissues, sick people. This representation seems to be anchored in ideas of a religious nature, eugenics experiences and healing through science. It was noteworthy as a technical / scientific knowledge of something that does not exist (human cloning) or is still in early stages of study (therapeutic cloning) has been appropriated by the common sense to become something plausible, palpable, recriminated, and expected / or celebrated by others. These findings point to a structured representation among readers, featuring elements of cohesion and sharing of ideas. This opens a path for future research on knowledge acquisition coming from biotechnology and studies that take into account the reified universe as a research subject and focus on the emergence of new representations.