ABSTRACT
The era of genetic engineering capabilities is now entering its fourth decade. By now, the gene has emerged as perhaps the quintessential icon of both scientific progress and popular imagination. Since 1970, new developments in recombinant DNA technology have appeared at a staggering pace, heralding radical transformations in medical, industrial and agricultural practices and in commonsense understandings of disease, kinship and identity.1 The gene itself has become, at once, a dominant cultural referent for processes of social and biological reproduction and a key cultural metaphor for the re-articulation of ‘race’, nation and otherwise imagined bodies and communities.2 Indeed, the entry of the language of genes into popular discourse has crossed most representational genres from documentary reportage to science fiction, from textbook to comic strip, from metaphor to gag.3 An emergent strand of critical writing about the interrelationships of professional and popular spheres of scientific common sense has emphasised the narrative character both of scientific discourse and of the role of the scientist as author in both contexts.4 Indeed, an examination of moments of popularisation with respect to particular scientific enterprises can reveal the ways in which the social relations and conceptual trajectories of scientific cultures shape and are shaped by broader popular discourses.5
