ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the use of metaphors as common points of reference that establish relationships between the sciences, the mass media, and their publics. In particular, we discuss public debates about genetics and genomics from the 1990s to the 2000s in order to offer insights into the politics and ethics of metaphorical framing. Our argument is that metaphors, such as ‘clones are copies’, play an important role in the public communication of science and technology, just as they do in science itself. As Dupre´ pointed out, ‘it has long been argued that all science depends on metaphors. Understanding grows by the projection of a framework through which we understand one kind of thing onto some less familiar realm of phenomena’ (Dupre´ 2007). Metaphors in science have constitutive, explanatory and communicative functions. In this chapter we focus on the communicative function of metaphors in public debates about science and technology. For more than half a century, public debates on developments in biotechnology in
particular, and life sciences in general, have been dominated by two narrative frames. On the one hand, advances in genetics and genomics have been covered in terms of sensational breakthroughs in the progress of a science the aim of which is often said to be to reveal the secrets of the book of life and to provide a key to curing common diseases. On the other hand, specific applications of biotechnology, such as cloning and stem cell research, have been framed as scientists playing God, opening Pandora’s Box, and creating Frankenstein’s monsters. Both narratives are grounded in a view of scientific and technological progress as a linear movement in space, a journey either to map unknown territory, or to enter the darker regions of the manipulation of life, the consequences of which may become monstrous. These seemingly opposite narratives on science’s progress both frame scientific and technological progress in terms of a journey (Hellsten 2002: 1-3; 133-5; Ceccarelli 2004). Such entrenched metaphorical framings are not easy to shift and can blind our imagination to other possible ways of grasping developments in science and technology.
