Fictions, fantasies, and fears - The literary foundations of the cloning debate

From an article by Brigitte Nerlich*, David D. Clarke*, and Robert Dingwall+

Scientists and policy makers have tried to enhance the image of genetic engineering by splitting the discourse about cloning up into talk about therapeutic cloning (cloning for the sake of better medicine and health care, production of spare body parts, etc.), which is portrayed as a positive development, and talk about reproductive cloning (cloning of whole human beings, production of offspring, etc.), which is mostly portrayed as still being a long way off, if not completely out of the question.

But public scepticism remains high and has spilled over into the debate about genetically modified food, so called 'Frankenstein food'. The myth of Frankenstein became the most fundamental imaginary and metaphorical background for any talk about cloning, genetic engineering and genetically modified food.image of Frankenstein's monster was quickly showing through the picture of Dolly the sheep. And all the assurances by Dolly's creators that they would not like to engage in the cloning of humans did little to dispel this powerful image of a human monster lurking behind Dolly. This human monster soon turned into lots of human monsters.

In 1993 scientists at George Washington University perform the first artificial twinning using human embryos.

The same year Dino-clones appear in Steven Spielberg's film Jurassic Park, a subject that has fascinated the public ever since. Speculations about the possibility of resurrecting extinct species, such as the mammoth, through cloning have been rife ever since the cloning of Dolly the sheep.

On 23 February, 1997, The Observer breaks the story of Dolly the sheep, and when, on 27 February 1997, Wilmut et al. publish an article in Nature about the first adult clone of an animal generated by transferring the nucleus of an udder cell taken from a six-year-old sheep into an unfertilised egg cell which had his own nucleus removed (Wilmut et al. 1997).

Now science fiction meets reality head on.

Dolly: Dream come true or devil incarnate?

1. Dolly, the nightmare Dolly the cloned sheep was not heralded as a glorious piece of innovative science. Aghast, the newspapers of the world responded to this sensational scientific advance with a clamour of moral outrage.

Driven blindly by the search for the new, we were told, the Scottish scientists were careering toward disaster along that sinister path to damnation notoriously embarked upon by the demonic hero of Mary Shelley's famous novel, Dr Frankenstein. In no time at all we would face the nightmare scenario of genetically engineered armies of identical soldiers, bred to exterminate with ruthless efficiency.

Parents would shortly decide exactly what mental and physical characteristics they wanted for their offspring and order them tailor-made, off the shelf. n the following we shall explore the positive and negative images, feelings, and fantasies evoked by Dolly.

Creating Dolly was not so much a step into the direction of human cloning but a stepping stone towards opening up whole new avenues of medical research and medical intervention. Cloning was not so much seen as a way of creating new life, but one way of preserving and prolonging existing life.

As the spotlight of genetic engineering has gradually shifted from clones to genetically modified foods and crops, the fears about cloning have been backgrounded and the public imagination has latched onto Frankenfood, Frankenfish, and even Frankencells. Public fears about genetically modified foods, expressed in imaginative blends and metaphors, such as Frankenfood, have had a direct influence on the production and consumption of GM products.

*School of Psychology - +Genetics and Society Unit University of Nottingham, University Park Campus, Nottingham NG7 2RD - Mail: Brigitte.Nerlich@nottingham.ac.uk