ABSTRACT
Ian Wilmut and his colleagues make dramatic claims for cloning as a technology. However, cloning captured popular attention long before news of the birth of Dolly the sheep in 1997 and before the announcement of the ‘completion’ of the Human Genome Project in 2000. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of these two announcements there has been a renewed and intensified interest in cloning. This chapter brings the contemporary concern with human cloning under scrutiny both by locating it in a set of genealogies and by analysing the distinctive features of its recent manifestations. (See Appendix I for a timeline that attempts to consolidate these genealogies to provide an overview of key events.) In this chapter, we draw on a range of accounts by scientists and social commentators on the development of the technology of cloning and provide a brief review of some of its key representations in Western popular culture. This sets the context for our analysis of the particular configurations of cloning discourses that have become dominant in the early twenty-first century. It is tempting at this point to offer a dictionary definition of cloning as our
starting point. For example, the Chambers Dictionary published the following definition for clone:
n a group of two or more individuals with identical genetic makeup derived, by asexual reproduction, from a single common parent or ancestor,
orig applied to plants, but later applied much more widely; any of such individuals; a person or thing closely similar to another, a copy or replica (colloq.). – vt to reproduce as a clone; to produce a clone or clones of… [Gr. klon shoot]
(1993: 324)
While this definition indicates some contemporary resonances of the term, it is our contention that, in the early twenty-first century, cloning has accrued a new set of meanings, associations, imagery and iconography that render this definition inadequate. This chapter provides an orientating introduction to the research on specific aspects of recent controversies about cloning that are explored in the rest of this book. It does this by offering both a longitudinal analysis of the diverse strands in the genealogy of cloning and a set of reflections about cloning in the contemporary cultural imaginary. Before moving on, it is worth noting that the practice of using Greek roots in the coinage of terminology can mislead the casual reader as to the antiquity of a term. The word ‘clone’ was not coined until the early twentieth century. In 1903, Herbert J. Webber of the US Department of Agriculture invented the term: ‘to describe a colony or organisms derived asexually from a single progenitor’ (Silver 2001; Webber 1903). Silver points out that Webber’s coinage ‘found quick acceptance among botanists and gained favour among biologists working with cells in culture’ (2001). In the discussion that follows we highlight some of the key boundary demar-
cations that have characterised more recent representations of cloning, focusing particularly on the distinction between human reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning that was instantiated early in the post-Dolly discourse.1
This account reviews a complex intersection of technoscientific developments, within genetic engineering, the Human Genome Project (HGP), and assisted reproductive technologies, all of which can be subsumed under the more general title of biotechnology/ies. But we also draw attention to other sites in which cloning is constructed and given meaning. Towards the end of this chapter we briefly outline the key elements of current legislation pertaining to the practices of cloning which have emerged in the countries which have been the focus of our research – the UK, the USA and South Korea. We draw attention to some of the implications of the distinctive national patterns in the global circulation of discourses about genomics, cloning and stem-cell research. We supplement this with a sketch of recent initiatives to provide international legislation and regulation in this field. Our review of specific national and international developments also includes the identification of the key discursive actors in recent public debates about cloning.
