ABSTRACT
In the last years of the twentieth century and the early years of the twentyfirst century, human cloning captured global media attention. Hailed as the source of potential cures for a wide range of human ills and feared as a violation of nature and an abuse of human beings – cloning has been the subject of news reporting in the UK, the USA and South Korea, as well as in many other parts of the world. It has also featured in Hollywood films, in television dramadocumentaries and in notable best-selling novels. There is nothing surprising about this. After all, this decade has also seen celebrated, but also controversial, staged public media events pertaining to cloning: the 1997 announcement of the cloning of Dolly the sheep and the first declaration of the ‘completion’ of the HumanGenome Project in 2000. Due in no small part to these announcements, this has also been a period in which expectations about cloning have grown exponentially and dramatically. This book sets out to investigate the phenomena noted above: the flurry
of cultural productions and texts which appeared in the wake of these two important markers in the history of genetics and biotechnology, the changing expectations regarding human cloning, and the state of this technoscientific field in the early twenty-first century. Our particular interest is in tracing and analysing some of the processes of mediation which have been a crucial, though often neglected or misconstrued, feature of the making of genomics in its recent incarnations. The particular focus of our concern has been human cloning. By ‘human cloning’ we refer to the creation of a cloned human embryo
– whether for stem-cell research, or with the aim of creating a human baby. Human cloning is often presented differently depending on the intended outcome – with the cloning for stem-cell research being designated as ‘therapeutic cloning’ and that oriented for reproduction being labelled ‘reproductive cloning’. Indeed, ‘therapeutic cloning’ is sometimes simply referred to as ‘stem-cell research’, without any link with reproductive cloning being acknowledged in the terminology. At other times therapeutic cloning is represented as a sideline to the central project of embryonic stem-cell research. However, this distinction between ‘therapeutic’ and ‘reproductive’ human cloning is important and we investigate its significance in this book. There is, as we shall
show, a long-established tension between cloning as re-generation and cloning as re-production. Nevertheless, therapeutic cloning builds on the technologies of reproduction, and ‘reproductive’ cloning may be framed as a therapy for infertility, following the model of in vitro fertilisation. We begin our introduction by situating this book within a strong body of
insightful analysis of recent formations of biological technoscience which includes important cultural and media analyses. Hence, we will identify some of these key influences and draw attention to our indebtedness to other scholars for valuable concepts which we have borrowed and adapted. We continue with a short overview of the research project which generated
this book and sketch the parameters of the analysis offered here, including the time period covered and the scope of our investigation. We briefly review our materials, our methods and our approach to data.We also include a preliminary signalling of two key issues. The first of these is the foregrounding of the mediated nature of technoscience as a challenge to much scholarship within recent technoscience studies. The second is our concern to highlight global flows but also to address national specificities in the analysis of technoscientific developments. Finally, this introduction offers a brief overview of the structure of the volume and an outline of each of the chapters.
