ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that gene stories have conscripted and transformed dominant cultural narratives, from origin to adventure stories, from the dystopian to the utopian. It examines imagery, metaphors and narratives that underscore the cultural primacy of the gene. The chapter articulates with broader interests in the narrative processes of and within science, and of science itself a story-telling enterprise. It focuses on three early cross-over genetics advocacy texts which occupy the wider generic literature described, and that both characterised and indeed set the terms for a proliferating field of progress-orientated texts on the topic of genes and genetics. Sontag intimately mapped what she identified as the conceptual and material preoccupations of modernity. Heroic narratives give a particular inflection in discourses of the nation generated since the emergence of the nation-state in early-modern Europe. The textual investment of genetics in analogies of colonial exploitation is not incidental to Jones and Van Loon's imagining of the biotechnology revolution.
