Ethnos

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Why dolly matters: Kinship, culture and cloning

Jeanette Edwards

To cite this article: Jeanette Edwards (1999) Why dolly matters: Kinship, culture and cloning,
Ethnos, 64:3-4, 301-324, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.1999.9981606

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Why Dolly Matters:
Kinship, Culture and Cloning

Jeanette Edwards
Manchester University, UK

ABSTRACT IN 1997, it was reported that a sheep had been successfully 'cloned'at the
Roslin Institute in Scotland. The sheep, named Dolly, attracted a great deal of attention
and the idea of 'cloning' appeared to generate, in much of the western world at least,
both anxiety and anticipation in equal measure. Discussion generated in the media
immediately turned to the advantages and disadvantages of cloningpeople. I focus
here on some of the responses to Dolly in the United States and in Britain. Drawing
on fieldwork, pre-Dolly, in the north of England, largue that the image of 'the clone'
acts as a conceptual brake, as a marker of limits, topossibilitiespresented through
new reproductive and genetic technologies. 'Cloning' provides an ethnographic window
through which specific cultural understandings of kinship can be discerned.

KEYWORDS Kinship, culture, cloning, social class, England

I
n February 1997t it was revealed that a sheep had been successfully Vloned'.
The sheep, named Dolly by its 'creator*, attracted a great deal of atten-
tion. Living and working in the United States at the time, I was struck not
only by the amount but also the kind oí interest this particular sheep, and the
idea of cloning in general, provoked. The United States seemed to be preoc-
cupied by Dolly on all accounts.1 I asked friends and colleagues in California,
Oregon and Washington about this preoccupation and was told that all sci-
entific research gets a more comprehensive media airing in the US than in
the UK. But I felt as if I was having a different kind of conversation about this
biotechnological innovation than I would have been having in Britain.2 A
suggestion which came up again and again3 was that human cloning was now
inevitable.4 I was considered naïve when I suggested otherwise. This led me
to think about whether existing frameworks of legislation which prohibit or
restrict research into human cloning in, for example, Britain, Spain, Germany,

ETHNOS, VOL. 6 4 : 3 , 1 9 9 9
© Taylor & Francis Ltd, on behalf of the National Museum of Ethnography, pp. 301-324
3O2 JEANETTE EDWARDS

Canada and Denmark provide a different set of premises which inform dis-
cussion. I was reminded of conversations I had had, seven years earlier, pre-
Dolly, in a small town in the north ofEngland, and was led to consider (again)
what is meant by the notion of'Euro-American'.5
My intention here is not to generalise a 'North American' preoccupation
with Dolly, nor do I wish to fall into the familiar trap of 'setting-up' the United
States as if it were 'the other' which is then mobilised to exemplify the ex-
treme and the bizarre. I do however want to draw on a few selected images
from the US at the time of Dolly's birth as a way into anthropological ques-
tions raised by a technological procedure which was immediately labelled
and referred to as 'cloning', In particular, I want to focus on the dismissal by
many experts in the field of reproductive medicine of the anxiety cloning ap-
peared to evoke. One response from the scientific and medical establishment
(not confined to the US) was that negative 'public' reaction to cloning was
due to ignorance, or lack of education, or shortage of information, or was an
'over-reaction' typical of the public. Another was that cloning raised no new
ethical questions, and the questions it did provoke had already been addressed.
Indeed, in 1982 the President's commission for the study of ethical prob-
lems in medicine and biomédical and behavioural research had concluded:
'genetic engineering techniques are not only a powerful new tool for manipu-
lating nature - including means of curing illness - but also a challenge to some
deeply held feelings about the meaning of being human and of family line-
age' (in Kevles 1995:290). But what are these deeply held feelings? What mean-
ing of being human and of being connected to other humans is being chal-
lenged? Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in the north ofEngland, I have
remarked elsewhere that the way in which people with no vested interest in
new reproductive technologies (NRT) explore their social implications is
through expertise in kinship. They mobilise knowledge about what consti-
tutes relatedness and ways in which intimate relations are created and sev-
ered. In their engagement with NRT, they formulate ideas about what makes
a 'proper person' and how they are 'grown' (Edwards et aï. 1993; Edwards
1995, 1999a).6 I return here to such expertise and ask what the concept of
cloning reveals about specific cultural understandings of kinship and why
cloning matters. Drawing on anthropological research (pre and post Dolly)
in a northern English town, which for present purposes I call Alltown,7 I ar-
gue that cloning acts as a conceptual brake to possibilities presented in new
reproductive and genetic technologies. First, however, a little about the pro-
cedures through which Dolly came to be.

ETHNOS, VOL. 64:3, I999

Why Dolly Matters: Kinship, Culture and Cloning 3 03

Dolly: A Natural-Technical-Cultural-Entity *
Dolly is a sheep whose fame rests on her origins, both genetic and techno-
logical. She is a product of technoscience, the offspring of what Donna Haraway
(1997:85) identifies as 'nature and culture spliced together and enterprised
up1.9 Dolly, or 61x3 to give her her proper name, was conceived in-vitro, in a
culture containing 10 per cent fetal calf serum, in a laboratory in Scotland, by
a team of researchers headed by Ian Wilmut. The research team was funded
partly by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and partly by PPL
Therapeutics, a biotechnical firm based in Edinburgh. Cells from the mam-
mary gland of a pregnant, six-year-old, Fin Dorset ewe were fused with oocytes
(immature egg cells) taken from a breed of sheep known as Blackface (Wilmut
etal. 1997). The nuclei from the oocytes had been removed.10 The trick, and
to what Wilmut and colleagues owe their success and the technique which
they eventually patented, was to put 'the donor cells' (cells from the mam-
mary epithelium) to sleep — in the words of the researchers: 'quiescent, dip-
loid donor cells were produced by reducing the concentration of serum in
the medium from 10 to 0.5 per cent for five days' (Wilmut etal. 1997:313). In
essence, what this means is that in order to create a sheep the amount of cow
had to be reduced. Fusion (that is, of the mammary gland cell and the denu-
cleated oocyte) was achieved, as many commentators noted, in true science-
fiction fashion by the application of an electric pulse. A second electric pulse
kick-started cell division. Some 277 fusions produced 29 'reconstructed' em-
bryos (Wilmut et al. 1997). The 29 embryos were transferred into another
group of Blackface ewes, one, two, or three at a time. One live Fin Dorset
lamb was born 148 days later. Wilmut is quoted as saying he named the sheep
'Dolly' after the singer and song-writer Dolly Parton because the cell used to
create her came from 'the impressive mammaries of another sheep' (Guard-
ian, 26 February 1997).

Anticipation and Anxiety

On the west coast of the US, the linkage between mammals, clones and
science spawned humour and anxiety, in equal measure. The event quickly
became a resource for popular culture and advertising. An advertisement on
prime-time television appeared within days. It showed a group of white-coated,
bespectacled, mad-looking scientists (coded as such by their white coats, tatty
hair and thick-lensed spectacles) jerking around uncontrollably in front of
floppy, inanimate sheep being flung through the air. The scientists are mum-
bling incoherently in what we are meant to assume is a Scottish accent. A

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304 JEANETTE EDWARDS

commentary is overlaid, 'Recently history was made through the miracle of

cloning' or, in another version, '1997 witnessed two miracles': the first we
know from the mad scientists and floppy, flying sheep, is Dolly 'made in Scot-
land', and the second is 'the amazing $6:99 — any pizza, any size' made in
Caesar's Pizza Palace.
Puns proliferated: A Time magazine special report on cloning (10 March
1997) asked 'will there ever be another ewe?' and quoted Dolly Parton, who
it describes as 'singer and eponym of first sheep clone', as saying, 'I'm hon-
oured — there's no such thing as baa-aa-aad publicity'. A commentary on the
findings of Wilmut and colleagues, published in the same edition oi Nature
(27 February 1997) entitled 'An udder way of making lambs', concludes: 'May-
be, in the future, the collective noun for sheep will no longer be a flock - but
a clone* (Stewart 1997)- And there were, inevitably perhaps, many 'Hello Dol-
ly's' along the way.
The special report in Time magazine is striking for its triumphalist rheto-
ric Charles Krauthammer enthused: 'Not since God took Adam's rib and
fashioned a helpmate for him has anything so fantastic occurred'. Drawing
on a by now familiar refrain, namely, 'nature needs a helping hand',11 he con-
tinued: 'Replicating Wilmut's work will elucidate what he along the way did
right that nature... does wrong' {Time, 10 March 1997). He reassures us, how-
ever, that Wilmut is an ordinary man:
One doesn't expect Dr. Frankenstein to show up in a wool sweater, baggy parka,
soft British accent and the face of a bank clerk. But there in all banal benignity he
was: Dr Ian Wilmut, thefirstman to create fully formed life from adult body parts
since Mary Shelley's mad scientist. The creator wore chinos (Time, 10 March 1997).

A conflation of fact and fiction, of science and myth, of women as helpmates,

and scientists as cuddly, marks the special report on cloning. And thinking
about who might be cloned in the future, Krauthammer mused:

You don't have to be mad to be tantalised... Every parent tries to endow his child
with the wisdom of his own hard-earned experience. Here is the opportunity to
pour all the accumulated learning of your life back into the new you, to raise your
exact biological double, to guide your very flesh through a second existence. Oh
the temptation to know what might have been. Or to produce an Einstein, a Dr
King (or ajefferson) for every generation.

And Jeffrey Kluger asks, rhetorically, whether it is not in our interest to re-
produce genius — physics laureates, for example (Time, 10 March 1997).12

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Why Dolly Matters: Kinship, Culture and Cloning 305

Even the most ardent egalitarians would find it hard to object to an Einstein ap-
pearing every 50 years or a Chopin every century. It would be better still if we
could be guaranteed not just an Einstein but the Einstein.13
From a different perspective, it might not be quite as difficult as Kluger imag-
ines objecting to the reappearance of an Einstein. Hilary Rose, for example,
drawing on a recently recovered biography of Mileva Einstein Marie, informs
us that Einstein failed to give his wife credit for the mathematical contribu-
tions she made to his work, he erased her name from joint publications, ap-
propriated her invention of a device for measuring electrical currents and
furthermore was mean with the alimony (Rose 1994).
An imaginative leap from cloning a sheep to cloning a human was made
almost immediately. In fact, a leap was hardly necessary, bridges were rap-
idly built. It was disclosed within a week that a laboratory in Oregon had
successfully cloned two rhesus monkeys. No matter that this was so-called
'old technology', it left little to the imagination - a sheep one week, monkeys
the following, we need only fill in the blank for the next. A scientist from Har-
vard University pronounced in The New York Times that cloning of humans
from adult cells would probably occur within ten years.
It could be argued from such selected and selective examples that some
commentators, mostly men, are imaginative about the potential of cloning
human beings, and when they are they envisage the reproduction of them-
selves or of other men. There is nothing new in this. Herman Müller, bril-
liant, albeit misguided, American biologist, Nobel prize winner and author
of Out of the Night: a Biologist's View of the Future (1936), was keen to use arti-
ficial insemination to enhance the talent and intelligence necessary for the
new socialist order. His heroes were Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur,
Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat-sen and Darwin (in Kevles 1995
[1985]; Stolcke 1998). Daniel Kevles (1995:190-191) remarks that the role of
women in Muller's vision 'amounted to little more than that of conceptual
vessels for the sperm of admirable men'.14 In Muller's own words:
How many women, in an enlightened community devoid of superstitious taboos
and sex slavery would be eager and proud to bear and rear a child of Lenin or of
Darwin! Is it not obvious that restraint, rather than compulsion, would be called
for (1936:122).
Is this an example of what bell hooks calls a 'dick-thing' (1984:110), or per-
haps the way in which 'science fathers itself (Franklin 1995 335) ?15 There have
been a number of powerful analyses of the gendered, sexed and raced represen-

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go6 JEANETTE EDWARDS

tations of new reproductive and genetic technologies (see for example, Duster
1990,1996; Fox-Keller 1995; Rose 1994; Harding 1993), and others are better
qualified than I to comment on the language and practices of biotechnology. I
am interested in the way in which people with no vested interest in the new
technologies make sense of their social implication. The focus of the remain-
der of this paper is on the way in which residents of a town in the north of
England talk about cloning. My interest is in the connections they trace and
the analogies they make.
Before I move on to Alltown, I want to mention the response in the US to
the intervention of President Clinton. He was prompted to act immediately
after Dolly and the Oregon monkeys appeared in the news. He banned the
use of federal money for research on human cloning, asking for a moratori-
um on privately funded research and demanding a report from the National
Bioethics Advisory Commission. His statements on human cloning and his
call for a ban on using federal funding for research on such procedures were
greeted with a fair amount of derision amongst the educated middle classes,
at least on the west coast of the US. While this may well have had more to do
with a cynicism about the ability of present-day politicians to govern (borne
out in more recently publicised presidential statements and practices) than it
had to do with cloning, the two are not unconnected: they are both about
possible futures and what kind of futures are imaginable. Underpinning my
conversations about cloning in the US was an explicit assumption that there
will be a demand and that anything technologically possible will be desired
bysomebody." LoriAndrews (New York Times, 5 March 1997) thought Clinton's
intervention useful symbolically but argued it would make little difference in
practical terms as human cloning will be driven by 'the market'. Roger Peder-
son, professor of reproductive science at the University of California, San Fran-
cisco, was concerned that regulation would hinder research but agreed that
a ban on using government money was probably necessary (for the moment)
in order to 'calm people's fears'. It would, he said, 'quell the sort of mob hys-
teria that attends this issue' {New York Times, 5 March 1997).17 The 'British
public' were also accused of over-reaction, over-exaggeration and of project-
ing unrealistic scenarios.
The media' and 'the public' are often conflated in assessments such as
these, and 'public opinion' read off from the way in which biotechnological
innovation and intervention are portrayed in the media. We need to ask what
kind of anxieties and concerns get subsumed under 'hysteria' and in whose
interest it is to construe them as such. Conversations I had with Alltown residents

ETHNOS, VOL. 64:3, IÇ99

Why Dolly Matters: Kinship, Culture and Cloning 307

in 1990, and later in 1998, about NRT revealed both anticipation and dis-
quiet. Some of my co-conversationalists raised the issue of cloning, and some
of their predictions and anxieties could be read as far-fetched, but one would
need to be looking for such a response in order to find it. My aim is to explore
the concept of cloning in the contexts in which it emerged in conversation
about NRT in Alltown. I want to argue that it acts as a conceptual limit to
possibilities presented by scientific intervention in human reproduction.
• The Alltown residents, whose words and ideas I borrow, are not a homo-
geneous population and there is no one Alltown view which might be concretised
into an opinion. What I say about Alltown cannot be generalised to Britain,
let alone North America, but there are, nevertheless, resonances between the
two. What those resonances are, however, needs to be investigated rather
than assumed. I have not the kind of data with which to make meaningful
comparison between Europe and North America, but I hope to provoke fur-
ther questions about what constitutes 'Euro-American*.

Alltown
Alltown is just north of the Greater Manchester conurbation in the north
of England. It grew up with the development of the textile industry in Lanca-
shire and from a hamlet comprising a few 'vaccaries' at the end of the 18th
century, it was a busy and industrious mill town by the middle of the 19th
century. Labouring individuals and families, predominantly from rural areas
of England and Ireland, moved to the area to work in the mills and in the
construction of factories, meeting places and dwellings. Many of their de-
scendants moved out and on with the collapse of the textile industry in the
region. It seems that the cotton mills, given their imputed impact on the re-
gion, were short-lived and as prone to short-time and redundancies as are
the present-day shoe factories which are smaller enterprises and employ fewer
workers. The last major cotton mill in Alltown closed down in 1920.
During the 1970s and 1980s, there was a small but steady influx of house-
holders from the nearby conurbation. This in-migration has continued at a
slower pace through the 1990s. The more recently established residents of-
ten remark that they left the cold and anonymous city to settle in 'the coun-
try* with its attendant friendlier and more relaxed atmosphere. And when I
lived and worked in Alltown between 1987 and 1988, those with whom I
spoke often commented on the beauty of the open spaces, the invigorating
fresh air, and the community spirit with which the town was imbued. They
are called and call themselves 'incomers' — a reference which distinguishes

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3o8
JEANETTE EDWARDS

them from 'Alltown bom and bred'. Today the population of the town is about
15,000 people and its residents are predominantly white and mixed in terms
of social class.
Alltown is often described in idioms which evoke remoteness: as the 'back
and beyond' (back of beyond), or a 'backwater'. Yet it is far from remote, de-
spite what people say. It is true there is no longer a railway station in the
town, and the motorway linking the east of the country to the west is four
miles away, and the temperature does drop perceptively one or two degrees
as you travel into the town, over the moors, from the outskirts of the nearest
city. But residents shop, and teenagers 'lounge', in the shopping malls of neigh-
bouring towns, and some residents holiday in Florida, others in Blackpool,
and some in both. Alltown residents visit relatives in Ireland, or Manchester,
or Australia, or South Africa, and many subscribe to Sky or cable television,
rent the latest videos from a number of outlets in the town, and many follow
the characters of televised soap-operas with interest and loyalty. Alltown is
no more remote than the urban conurbation from which many present-day
residents hail.
If one were looking for 'the public' or for 'public opinion' or 'public under-
standing', Alltown might serve as a good example. However, to depict a popu-
lation as 'the public' is a homogenising strategy, and there is no one public in
Alltown, just as there is no one 'public opinion'. Alltown residents explored
NRT in 1990 with ambivalence. On the one hand, they talked of how infertil-
ity is a terrible affliction and of how it causes great distress and 'heartache*.
They talked about how access to fertility services should not depend on wealth,
and doctors should not be the ones to decide who should and should not
have children. In the words of one woman: 'its not so much about how much
is in the bank, but how people are prepared to look after the kid'. She con-
tinued:
Love, patience and stability can't be bought Finances shouldn't come into it. You
can bring them up on bread and jam instead of turkey and pheasant.
From this perspective, infertile couples should be helped by whatever means
are available. On the other hand, Alltown residents continually placed limits
on medical and technological intervention in reproduction: not everything
possible ought to be allowed, I was told, and scientists cannot be trusted to
always know what is best Where Alltowners placed limits constantly shifted,
however, and they adopted different perspectives and explored NRT from
different angles.18

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Why Dolly Matters: Kinship, Culture and Cloning 309

Secrets and Lies

In 1990, the creative writing class met at the Unemployed Workers Centre
once a week. There were about six members of the class, all women between
the ages of fifty and sixty-five, and they were interested in writing autobiog-
raphy and committing to paper their memories of the town and its people.
One or two were interested in my PhD thesis on Alltown which had been
lodged in the public library. They were particularly interested in my treat-
ment of 'th'owd characters' (the old characters). Characters like Ailse O'Fusser,
Mad Ab, and Robert the Devil; quirky, idiosyncratic individuals who feature
large in narratives about Alltown and its past. Stories are told about the do-
ings of'th'owd characters' and such stories relay the authority from which
the narrator speaks. Knowing of'th'owd characters' is evidence of connec-
tion to the town and its past, and stories about them portray the present-day
distinctiveness of Alltown and its people. I was invited to the class to give a
talk, and class members corrected my, and each other's, historical 'facts', added
a few more characters to my repertoire, and elaborated on particular events
and people in a way that made it clear I still had a lot to learn.
We eventually got around to my 'new project'. I explained that I was working
on new reproductive technologies — 'things like IVF and egg donation and
sperm donation and surrogacy*. All the women immediately expressed an
em-pathy with what one of them called 'the heartache' of infertility. They
talked about the pressures on women to have children. 'As soon as they get
married', one woman said, 'everybody asks them when they are going to have
a baby'. They talked about the complexities of their own families and their
experiences of childbirth and the woeful lack of sex education they received
when they were younger. They suggested that secrets have a habit of reveal-
ing themselves, perhaps in an argument, in the heat of a moment, or in docu-
ments filed away; inevitably, they said, the truth will emerge and usually when
one least expects it. At the same time, they were firmly convinced that some
things are best kept secret, and it is often 'do-gooders' who compromise re-
lationships between parents and their children encouraging children to go
off and look for their 'real' parents when their 'real' parents are at home.
The women agreed it would be difficult to keep the facts of assisted con-
ception a secret in Alltown - people are nosey, they said, and people gossip.
According to one woman: They'd know in Alltown if somebody had had to
go and be fertilised — everybody would know'. At one point in our conversa-
tion, I was told Alltown people would tell children about their means of con-
ception, 'anyway'. In the words of one woman: 'I think in Alltown we'd tell

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nlo JEANETTE EDWARDS

'em anyway. Cause I think we are all straight, aren't we?' I ask her what she
means. 'Straightforward and... down-to-earth', she explains, and another class
member adds, 'a cob of coal's a cob of coal, you know?'
These are statements as much about social class as they are about NRT.
Distinctions are being made between ordinary Alltown people, down to earth,
sensible, 'a cob of coals a cob of coal', and middle-class do-gooders, intellec-
tuals and if not health food fanatics, at least vegetarians. This kind of distinc-
tion is made frequently and deploys an epistemological contrast between
cleverliness and experience - knowledge acquired through education or study
is compared and contrasted, implicitly or explicitly, negatively or positively,
with knowledge assimilated through experience. I argue that this is a cultur-
ally specific epistemology which entails a relationship between what is given
and what is acquired. It resonates with an understanding of kinship which
entails a relationship between nature and nurture: between what isfixedthrough
birth and variable through upbringing. In this model, kinship is constituted
by and constitutive of the interplay between 'born' and 'bred'. Social class
and kinship emerge from similar processes of inclusion and exclusion. In their
explorations ofNRT, many of my co-conversationalists in Alltown pondered
the effects of how people are conceived. For Mr Wilson, an Alltown man of
thirty whose girlfriend had recently given birth to their child, NRT raises a
major question, as yet for him unresolved, of whether children are affected
by their means of conception. 'Children are reflections', he says, 'of what they
are given - what affect will there be if they are nurtured in darkness and brought
into the light'. He later elaborates on his biblical turn of phrase: 'children are
reflections of what is given them through nurture and growth'.
'Cloning' conjures an image of an animal 'born and bred' in a laboratory (in-
deed, Dolly is far too valuable to ever leave the Roslin Institute): of a techno-
scientific procedure resulting in a technoscientific product; the creation, in
this case, of an animal useful for scientific research, but ill-equipped for any-
thing else. If it were a human animal, it would not have received the kind of
input required to make it a 'proper person'. Proper persons are constitutive
not merely of genetic material but of nurture. For Mr Wilson, 'proper per-
sons' are grown; they do not come ready-made. How children are reared, and
with what, and by whom, has an effect. The image of the clone is tied to the
laboratory, outside the kind of social relations necessary to grow persons.
Unpredictability and variation are necessary in the formation of persons.
Mrs Thomas, a young married woman with two small children, imagines the
predictability of laboratory life. What if, she asks, you could have an artificial

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Why Dolly Matters: Kinship, Culture and Cloning 311

womb — create babies, to be kept for two or three years then put up for adop-
tion — 'How would you do emotions in an artificial womb?' The child would
have no emotions, it would have experienced no love, hatred, joy or anger,
hence, 'it will have no feelings because no feelings are going through it'. From
this perspective a child gestated without the experience of emotion will itself
be emotionless, heartless and soulless.19 The spontaneity, then, of mothers, their
whims and their ability to act on what they fancy all have repercussions.
We miss the point if we dwell on whether an artificial womb is viable or
not, or if we pose questions in terms of what actually passes through the pla-
centa or the umbilical cord. Rather than analysing these words from Alltown
as overly-anxious responses to technoscience, or even as a symptom of tech- '
nophabia, we need to look at them, like cloning, in terms of what they reveal
about cultural understandings ofwhat constitutes persons and significant social
relationships.20 For Alltown residents, the social relationships in the creation
of children as offspring are integral to the kind of persons they become.
People in Alltown explored the implications of NRT through what they
know about the town and its people, and also through what they knew about
me. I was an incomer, working-class or middle-class, depending on the per-
spective taken; I was somebody who knew the town or somebody who did
not; I was a social anthropologist, or a student, or perhaps somebody who
worked in a university; the fact I was single parent, or from Liverpool, was
significant at times and irrelevant at others, I was made alternatively outsider
or 'just like us'. What Alltown people told me about new reproductive and
genetic technologies cannot be analysed, then, as discourse outside the so-
cial relationship in which it was generated. It is not a discourse which lends
itself to a textual analysis: it has no beginning and no end. People's views of
cloning can neither be extracted from the social milieu in which they are
given meaning nor from the ways in which people themselves contextualise
their ideas; and it is artifice to isolate them as opinion. The so-called 'facts'
people mobilise in their commentary on NRT are not static pieces of infor-
mation, pulled out intact and deployed to exemplify a particular point Knowledge
is itself construed in the process of discursive exploration. Alltown residents
who spoke with me about NRT were reminded of adoption, incest, 'step'
families, and cloning, amongst other things. Such analogies do more than
incorporate new forms of conception into pre-existing sets of ideas. They
also augment and diminish those ideas. Understandings of, say, adoption are
expanded by adding comparisons between it and, for example, surrogate moth-
erhood, but this also means that other comparisons are not made. Adoption

ETHNOS, VOL. 6 4 : 3 , 1 9 9 9
212 JEANETTE EDWARDS

becomes a different kind of option when there is possibility, perceived or

practised, of bypassing infertility and having a child of'your own* through
the donation of gametes or the services of a surrogate mother (see Bartholet
1993 for a vivid discussion of how adoption is 'downgraded' as an option in
this context). The making of certain connections, for example between adoption
and gamete donation, entails the 'not-making' of others, for example between
adoption and 'step families'. It would be a mistake, in my view, to read the
process by which people make sense ofNRT as assimilation, or as 'the views'
or 'opinions' of a particular population in a specific locality in Britain, to do
so would be to ignore the silences and to screen out the contradictions.

Reproducing Class
Many Alltown residents talked of the potential for stigma and gossip in
the context ofNRT. They spoke of secrets that have a habit of revealing them-
selves. One woman predicted a day when 'organically grown babies' will, like
vegetables, be a marker of status — people will say with their nose in the air:
'zc/edid it the natural way'. Cloning, like other reproductive technologies, has
the potential of reproducing social class.
I sat in Anne Williams* living room at the beginning of 1991, ostensibly to
talk with her about NRT. She told me about herself: about her childhood,
her parents, her own child and her grandchildren. She talked about her son
— Simon - and her four grandchildren - two 'little ones' and two 'big ones'.
The two 'big ones' are the children of her son's wife, Linda, by a previous
marriage. She said she is not 'as close' to the older children as she would like
to be and thinks this has something to do with them not calling her and Edward,
her second husband, grandma and grandpa. She thought that perhaps names
change 'the aura of things'. At the time of our conversation, Mrs Williams
was retired and her husband had recently died. She described her relation-
ship with her grandchildren like this:
When David and Lynden (Linda's older children)firstcame into our lives we didn't
have the two other children. They were quite, quite young then, around nine and
six, something like that - quite young when they came to the house with Linda.
That was before they (Linda and Simon) were married, and then, when they were
getting married, I said to the children 'would you like to call us grandma and grandad',
and they said 'no'. So they made the distinction then, really. They called us Auntie
Anne. Now if they'd have wanted to call us Grandma and Grandad, I just wonder
what would have happened then (pause). [They've] still got a separate life to what
I know of them, you know? With [their] father and [their] father's family and eve-

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Why Dolly Matters: Kinship, Culture and Cloning 313

1
rything - so I don't know [them] really well. Now, I've known these other babies
from day one. I mean, I first saw both of them at a few hours old. And held them
at few hours old. And I think Simon and Linda played their part in this because it
was immediately - 'look at your grandson* and 'diis is your grandma', you know?
And so diey included us. And Edward, although he wasn't their true grandad - so
that actually is another line of thought 'Cause actually they treated Edward as
grandad and those children thought the world of him and he thought the world of
them and yet he's got his own grandchildren. But he said, he used to say, that
these were his real grandchildren. They were the ones who cared about him. And
that's what we're getting to — the kids have been brought up to care about us and
we care about them.

Before telling me about her grandchildren, Mrs Williams spoke of her own
childhood. She told me her father was a gardener and worked for a millowner,
but when she was thirteen he fell and hurt his back and her mother had to go
to work. She remembers having to pick up her brother from the childminder,
make the fire and get the dinner ready. Money was always tight - a hand to
mouth existence - and the weekly bill at the Co-op was paid on Saturdays.
Mrs Williams told me about the legacy of her parents. In her words:

They were wonderful... they loved each other very dearly - which spilt over on to
us.... They took us about all over the place and never let us worry about their
worries... Mum had brains and Dad had worldly knowledge widiout being schol-
arly — gained not through books but through living. Father got on with everybody.
Mother was more reserved — she kept her own council.

Mrs Williams went to Art College for one year when she was fifteen years
old, and would like to have taken a degree but her family could not afford it.
She had to find a job: finances at home were tight and another income was
necessary.
Her first husband died of cancer when their son was young. These were
'nightmare days', she recalled, but she managed and not only managed, she
said, but she became 'a capitalist'. Eventually she remarried a man twenty
years her senior. They moved house and changed their car and she was pro-
moted from a textile design finisher to a textile designer in the space of five
years. From what Mrs Williams called 'humble beginnings' she became a suc-
cessful textile designer, ending up before she retired as the chief designer for
a well-known company and 'probably the best designer they ever had'. She
concluded, 'I came from nowhere and ended up at a reasonable level'.

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314 JEANETTE EDWARDS

Mrs Williams told me much more about her life. She told me about her
parents, about her own occupational and residential history, and about her
son. The 'only bother' in her life, she remarked, sadly, is her relationship with
her son, which is fraught.
He is very defensive. I would only like him to realise that I want the best for him,
and that I want a safe and comfy home for him and his family.
I relate these things Mrs Williams told me about herself and her relation-
ships because with them she contextualises her ideas about cloning. Through
her past, she locates herself in Alltown and conveys the authority from which
she speaks. She also draws on what she knows about me: my son and other
intimate relationships, my occupational and residential histories, my work;
things she knows from our earlier conversations, from what her son and daughter-
in-law have told her, from what she read in, and into, my PhD thesis about
Alltown, and so on. She conceptualised our affinity: for her, I too have 'moved
up in the world' from 'humble beginnings'; we share, as she sees it, a class
position and a class mobility and we are both 'experienced women', who have
a career and have brought up a son.
Mrs Williams went on to talk about why she did not like the idea of sur-
rogacy arrangements:21
AW She's succoured that child, hasn't she? In her womb for nine months — that
child is bonded to that mother and she's letting it go. I don't think that can be
good for the child. I mean, I would hate to grow up thinking that that was
what my background was. That I had been organised between different bodies
and prearranged, and - I've got this old-fashioned view me, I'd like to think I
arrived on this earth out of a great love. I think there is a lot of things better
left to chance meself (pause) (laughs). We're getting too clever for our own good.
JE There's certainly a sense of randomness — of chance - in who we turn out to
be. But if you, urn (pause), if ultimately you can decide -
AW Well take it right to the (pause), take it right to the ultimate. Or perhaps it's
not the ultimate, but, I mean, say I start off by saying, um, where I started off
in life and I mentioned class, didn't I?
JE Right.
AW Now today I don't think of class. I think now that, you know, I am as good as
anybody else and anybody else is as good as me and I like to think that every-
body's got a fairly reasonable chance in life to make what they will of it them
selves. But if it's all sort of prearranged — [if] they clone us, so we had - they'd
have a group of workers and a group of, you know, people giving the orders
and so on, and so on and you'd never get a chance to move out ofthat. You'd

ETHNOS, voL. 64:3, 1999

Why Dolly Matten: Kinship, Culture and Cloning 315

be — we'd be organised from the [beginning]. I like this freedom we've got to
— you've got your freedom to work through the system now, haven't you? I
diink if it was, if everything was taken to its ultimate, it would be worse than
Big Brother. You'd be treated bythebooktodo ajob in life and there'd be noth-
ing spiritual left in it. You wouldn't have a chance to, in my view you wouldn't
have a chance to make worthwhile relationships and affections, you'd all just
be zombies.
JE The same?
AW Yeah, you'd all be, you know, nobody could ever be an individual. And diat
way you might say, you might overlook a lot of genius as well.
JE mmm?
AW Anyway, half t h e - in fact more than half— die pleasure in life is taking a chance
and wondering how things will turn out, isn't it?
JE yeah?
AW If everytiiing was cut and dried, you'd know where you were at day one, and
you'd know where you were going to be put at day 99, wouldn't you?
JE mm.
AW There'd be no, there'd be nodiing in between it. Be no colour in your life, would
there?

Mrs Williams identifies blandness in predestination, predetermination and

prearrangement. A blandness born out of the inability of persons to creative-
ly construct and influence their own worlds. Like Mrs Thomas (above) she
sees variability and unpredictability as integral to forming whole human be-
ings. She contrasts what she sees as the spontaneity and closeness of love
with the artifice and distance of organisation. Mrs Williams' commentary on
NRT is again a comment on social class. She mobilises a similar model of the
social world to that Strathern (1981) identified for Elmdon in the 1960s — a
model comprising fixed hierarchical classes, but with individuals moving up and
down, between them. This is a particular cultural understanding of an imme-
diate social world which relies on notions of the individual and of society,
and posits a particular kind of relationship between the two. It is connected
to a particular kind of kinship thinking: a kinship thinking which relies on an
interplay between being born and being bred; between what is perceived as
given and what is acquired. It is analogous to the paradox of late twentieth-
century western thought which juxtaposes individual self-determination and
biogenetic destiny.

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<jl6 JEANETTE EDWARDS

Mutton or Lamb
In early 1998, eight years after our first conversations about NRT, and ten
years after my first fieldwork in Alltown, I sit once again with Mary Green-
wood (MG) and Paula Seddon (PS) at Paula's kitchen table. This time 'clon-
ing' dominates our discussion. Paula's two younger children, Neil (NS) and
Harriet (HS), now thirteen and eleven years old, move between the kitchen
and the front room, joining us for a while at the kitchen table when the con-
versation catches their interest (see Edwards 1999 eta/.).

HS It isn't fair.
JE Why isn't it fair?
HS Because poor little sheep won't be like the rest of them.
NS It won't have its individuality (pause) but I still think it's alright because you'd
be able to talk to someone about things you like because they like them.
MG Do you not thinking that would be boring?
HS It's stingy.
JE Why is it stingy? You said it was stingy, and snide, and it wasn't fair.
HS [laughs] poor little blighter won't have a parent, will it?
PS You think that's important?
HS Yeah! [incredulously]
NS But y* have still got parents.
ps Have you still got a parent if you're a clone?
NS Yes. You've got a mother, because they take your egg and then take the whatsit
out the person you're cloning and put it into that egg.
MG Do they [use] a female egg for cloning?
JE They need an egg, yeah.
PS It's right then, you don't have a parent.
NS You do have a parent (pause) well you've got a biological parent, but not as bio-
logical as other parents.

Thinking about 'cloning'. Neil and Harriet think what it means to be a parent.
They move from sheep to humans. The female who provides the ova (host
to the genetic material) is a mother: you can be a mother without shared
genetic substance. The conversation turns tojust how alike clones would actually
be. Paula notes that because of the age difference between the person whose
genetic material is reproduced (the donor in the terms of Wilmut and col-
leagues) and the ensuing clone, they will never be exact replicas. This leads
Mary to muse: 'So if you eat Dolly it might be old mutton when it should be
lamb'. And Paula responds as our laughter fades:

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Why Dolly Matters: Kinship, Culture and Cloning 317

How would anyone have the nerve to eat Dolly! Imagine all this technology and
money that's gone into Dolly and somebody kills it for lamb chops - would be
sacrilege, wouldn't it?

Around the table, there was agreement: producing exact replicas of people is
a problem. An exact copy, it was suggested, compromises individuality. An
individual is unique. They would not have, in Harriet's words, 'their own'
personality, and in Neil's they would not be 'their own person'. There is a
way around this, however, according to Neil.
Like if you were dying of something and they took it then and cloned you, you'd
be gone, so you wouldn't really be a clone would you? You'd be yourself, because
there is no one else like you then.
I must have looked quizzical, or perhaps confused, because I can hear, on the
tape, Neil patiently explaining to me:
You got a person — you clone them — they'd be classed as clones so they wouldn't
have their individuality. But if you took that person away and they died — cos they're
young, they're their own person, aren't they?

Perhaps I still looked dim, because Neil has another attempt at explaining;
this time a hint of exasperation creeps into his voice:
The person who is going to be cloned, say, is the age of 60 and has a heart attack,
and a blood sample [is] taken — cloned that person. They are their own person
then, because that person is not there (pause) 30 if, like, as that person died you
cloned them, then they'd be their man person then.

You are a clone if faced with your origins. A clone is connected (too) closely
to its origins and is imagined as a replicate, but it is not fixed in that posi-
tion.22 A clone might also be disconnected from its origins and, according to
Neil, a clone is not a clone when its clone does not exist. The ability to make
and break connections in this way is a function of what I am calling Born and
Bred kinship. One set of connections is mobilised through being born (na-
ture) and curtailed (cut across) by a different set of connections mobilised
through being bred (nurture). In asserting the individuality of persons, a clone
(without its clone) is 'its own person' - a bounded entity, disconnected from
its origins. Similarly, gametes are both bodily substance, alienable and de-
tachable, «tfi/non-substantial elements which carry relationships and identi-
ties and as such are not detachable.

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3i8 JEANETTE EDWARDS

' If, as Strathern puts it, '[cjulture consists in the way analogies are drawn
between things, in the way certain thoughts are used to think others' (1992b:
33), then it is exemplified in the way the relationship between the individual
(entity) and society (relational) is replicated in English kinship. The kind of
kinship which has been the focus of this article relies on a relationship be-
tween 'the biological' and 'the social': between, in its ubiquitous formulation,
nature and nurture. What is given in one's biology is countered by the vari-
ability of social experience. One needs to be bred as well as born. English
kinship thinking has it that the way in which children are brought up — 'up-
bringing' — is integral to their personhood. It is partly this that disquiet about
cloning addresses.
Assisted birth, in the context ofbiotechnology, renders visible ways in which
kinship recontextualises itself but not, I would argue, randomly. New repro-
ductive and genetic technologies add complexity but within parameters. The
English version of 'Euro-American kinship* which features in this paper in-
cludes ideas about biological and social connection, but not, I emphasise, in
the same way David Schneider (1968) argues for North American kinship.
For Schneider (1968), Euro-American kinship is premised on the biogenetic
tie, but the English version drawn upon here relies on an interplay between
the social and the biological. Rather than the biogenetic being the baseline
(the foundation) on which the social is elaborated, the biological and the social
(as powerful cultural symbols) require each other.23 This kind of kinship does
not rely on an idea of the biogenetic as the baseline on which the social is
elaborated, but it is nevertheless there. There is an interplay between the social
and the biological which means that one or other can be foregrounded at a
different moment and for a different purpose, but each requires the other for
its purchase (see also Edwards & Strathern 1999). This means that people
are perfectly capable of creating kinship, as anthropologists like Carol Stack
(1974) and Kath Weston (1991), amongst others, have shown, by links forged
and sustained through effort and desire. It also means that biogenetic connec-
tion, traditionally expressed in the symbolism of blood, increasingly now ex-
pressed in terms of the symbolism of genes, is also at a different moment and
for a different reason privileged.24

Postscript
To return briefly to Dolly: The imaginative leaps made between this sheep
and the inevitability of cloning human beings eclipsed discussion about the
reasons Dolly was created in the first place. Wilmut and his colleagues re-

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Why Dotty Matters: Kinship, Culture and Cloning 319

iterated at the time of Dolly's birth that they had no interest in research on
human cloning, even if it were allowed in the UK. Their interest was in trans-
genic research, and in mapping the bovine, chicken, pig and sheep genome.
One of their aims has been to develop ways in which transgenic animals can
be produced less expensively. So lean pigs without fat, and cows with human
proteins in their milk, are higher on their agenda than the cloning of human
beings. Since then, and since the birth of Polly (a sheep cloned from foetal
skin cells with an added human gene), Wilmut and his team have begun re-
search into the cloning of human tissue for transplant purposes.25
We know that capitalism works hard to disguise its mechanisms of exploi-
tation, and towards the end of the twentieth century certain inequalities in
wealth, health and opportunities are more entrenched than ever. By leaping
from Dolly to human cloning, we forget other discussions to be had and other
questions to be asked. How far, for example, will the genetic enhancement of
food and medicine improve future worlds, especially for those who at present
have inadequate or inappropriate food and medicine? Or how far will it merely
increase the profits and influence of multinational companies in a new world
order which for many must feel decidedly familiar. Perhaps these are not either/
or questions.
Concerns about human cloning draw on, reveal and reproduce cultural
understandings of personhood and relatedness. The image of the human clone
is tied to the laboratory and to the reproduction of life without the nurture of
human relations. Through 'the clone' predestination and predetermination are
imagined and the replication not only of individuals but also of social classes
and injustice. Cloning draws a conceptual limit to the possibilities present-
ed by technological and medical intervention in human reproduction. It is
pertinent to ask from which perspectives and in whose interest it is to dis-
miss concerns about 'cloning' as merely hysteria, or ignorance, or an 'over-
reaction' typical of'the public'.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to residents of Alltown and thank them for their generosity and
interest. Earlier versions of this paper were presented in the Department of
Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley at a seminar sponsored
by the Beatrice Bain Research Centre, to the London School of Economics de-
partmental seminar, and to the Centre for the Study of Health, Sickness and
Disablement at Brunei University. I am grateful to colleagues in these institu-
tions for their invitation, their engagement with the material, their suggestions
and their questions. I have been helped by the perceptive and thoughtful comments
of four anonymous Ethnos reviewers and the editors. The flaws that remain are

ETHNOS, VOL. 6 4 : 3 , IO.O.O.

32O JEANETTE EDWARDS

mine. The final version of this article was prepared while funded by the Economic
and Social Research Council as a Fellow in T h e Public Understanding of Sci-
ence* and I am grateful for their financial support in this and in earlier fieldwork
in Alltown.

Notes
1. One British commentator (Guardian, 26 February 1997) remarked that the sheep
had enthralled the US.
2. I was told for example that a clone was just like a twin, or just like a lizard. My
attention was drawn constantly to the kind of people who would want to be
cloned — more often than not men, powerful and despotic. I was asked to think
how interesting it would be to be born the same person but a different sex, and
I was thought naïve when I questioned the inevitability of human beings being
cloned or whether Dolly was, in fact, a clone.
3. Conversations that were with predominantly white, middle-class residents of
California, Oregon and Washington.
4. See Battaglia (1995) for a discussion of the response of American journalists and
bioethicists and the general public' to a report in The New York Times of 24 October
1993 concerning a research scientist at George Washington University Medical
School who had 'cloned' a human embryo.
5. The concept Euro-American is used, inclusively, to describe a particular kind of
discourse (perhaps hegemonic, for example of biomedicine) common across dif-
ferent European and North American contexts. In the United States, it is often
used in an exclusive sense to differentiate between European American and, for
example, African, Asian or Native American. It runs the risk of what Duden
(1993) calls misplaced concretism when deployed to refer to a place — 'Euro/
America' (Lock 1998), a people — 'EuroAmericans' (Strathern 1992a; Schneider
in Handler (ed.) 1995), a thing — 'EuroAmerican culture' (Franklin 1995), or
things - 'Euro-American cultures' (Carsten 1999). What is common across dif-
ferent North American and European contexts needs to be investigated rather
than assumed, and I take the point of an anonymous Ethnos reviewer that the
habit of collapsing Europe and the US is a particularly Anglo-Saxon one.
6. I use the term new reproductive technologies (NRT) loosely to refer to medical
and/or technological assistance of conception which includes artificial insemi-
nation (AI) and in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) with or without the use of donated
gametes or the help of women acting as surrogate mothers. Some of these techniques
are not very new, nor very technological (see, for example, Stolcke [1986] and
see Spallone [1997] for a discussion of the term itself). There is much thought-
provoking work, especially from feminist scholars, on the social and political em-
beddedness of fertility and infertility which is beyond the scope of this paper
(but see, e.g., Arditti, Klein & Minden 1984; Corea 1985; Stanworth 1987; Hubbard
1990; Pfeffer 1993; Ragoné 1994; Balsamo 1996; Price 1997; Hartouni 1997).
7. This article draws on anthropological fieldwork in the town between 1987 and
1988, and research in 1990 and conversations in 1998 specifically about NRT. I
am grateful to Alltown friends and associates who, with patience and generosi-
ty, continue to put up with me.
8. 'Natural-technical entities - human, technological and organic' (Haraway 1997:71).

ETHNOS, VOL. 64:3, I999

Why Dolly Matters: Kinship, Culture and Cloning 321

9. See Marilyn Strathern's discussion of 'enterprising kinship': where 'prescriptive

fertility....accompanies what one could call prescriptive consumerism' (1992b:36).
10. The Blackface ewes had previously been injected with gonadotropin-releasing
hormone (Wilmut et al. 1997).
11. As Sarah Franklin (1992:84) remarks on representations of assisted conception:
'Not only does nature need a helping hand, it sometimes appears nature would
not even get off the starting blocks without the aid of modern technology'. At
the time of writing this, I hear a commentator on a BBC radio discussion about
developments in new genetics remark: 'there are so many genetic mutations in
the genetic make-up [of humans] it's a wonder there are any people at all'.
12. Leon R. Kass (quoted in Kevles [1995] doubts whether Mozart, Einstein or Newton
would have consented to be genetically duplicated: 'Indeed, should we not assert
as a principle that any so-called great man who did consent to be cloned should
on that basis be disqualified, as possessing too high an opinion of himself and of
his genes? Can we stand an increase in arrogance?'
13. The geneticist in the film Boys from Brazil asks with feeling: 'Wouldn't you want
to live in a world of Picassos and Mozarts?'
14. Verena Stolcke (1986) has argued forcefully that debate around new reproductive
technologies revolves on the fragility of paternity, and that policy and legislation
act to protect and shore it up. But this she argues is a paternity defined physiologically
and symbolically as a begetting. Carole Delaney's (1991) analysis of western no-
tions of paternity resonates. For her, a monogenetic theory of reproduction prevails
with men as creators and women as vessels which nurture the male seed. Stolcke
has remarked more recently on the increasingly sophisticated techniques for en-
suring physiological paternity being developed. For example, intracytoplasmic
sperm injection (ICSI) entails the micro injection of one sperm directly into an
ovum. The sperm can be collected directly from the epididymus and allows men
with either abnormal or immature sperm to produce a genetically related child.
Steen Willadsen, a renowned fertility expert, currently working in Florida, is re-
ported to have suggested that a human clone may already have been produced
through techniques of ICSI (Kolata 1997). For Stolcke (pers. comm.) it is likely
that human cloning will be legitimated in those severe cases where no sperm at
all can be produced: clones of 'the father' will produce genetically related child-
ren and women will be cast in the familiar supporting role.
15. The moral of the achieved conception narrative emergent in contemporary Euro-
American culture is, quite simply, "science fathers itself". There is nothing new
about this definitive post-Enlightenment Baconian prerogative ... "nature" has
been subjected to "man's" purpose' (Franklin 1995:335).
16. On March 6th, USA Today reported a demonstration by members of the Clone
Rights United Front. Randolfe Wicker described as a New York businessman
and founder of the gay activist group is quoted as saying: 'we're fighting for re-
search, and we're defending people's reproductive rights ... I realise my clone
would be my identical twin, and my identical twin has a right to be born'.
17. It is not the first time, of course, that 'the masses' have been accused of hysteria,
exaggeration and over-reaction, and it is not only they who have been accused
in this way. As Raymond Williams once remarked, however, 'there are no mas-
ses ... only ways of seeing people as masses' (1989:11).

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222 JEANETTE EDWARDS

18. Where Alltown people placed limits depended on where they situated themselves,
which was never in one place only. To draw on a recent formulation of Bruno
Latour's (Stanford, March 1997), this is a 'somewhere, sometime' perspective;
the kind of perspective he wished to see replace the 'always, everywhere' or
'never, nowhere', perspective of science. In his analysis of the way in which
certain scientific events become theoretically significant while others get forgot-
ten, Latour argues for multiple, partial existences, and for replacing 'always,
everywhere, never, nowhere' with 'somewhere, sometimes'.
19. The masterpiece society' — an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation — has
the starship Enterprise in contact with a biosphere whose human inhabitants
have 'controlled procreation to create people without flaws'. Individuals were
bom destined to their careers — Captain Picard is tempted not to save them
from imminent destruction because he believes the society had 'given away its
humanity by breeding out the uncertainty, self-discovery, and acceptance of the
unknown that make life worth living' (cited in Nelkin & Lindee 1995:177). Gordi
La Forge, the chief engineer, saves them.
20. Carole Stabile (1994) identifies both technomania and technophobia in feminist
studies of science, and argues they are as limiting as each other.
21. The following is taken from the transcript of a tape-recording of a conversation
I had with Mrs Williams in her house.
22. Similarly, the concept of incest also acts as a conceptual brake to what can be
allowed in practices of gamete donation: there are some gametes 'too close' in
their origins to be joined (see Edwards 1999).
23. In this sense, kinship has always been a hybrid (see Latour 1993).
24. Biogenetic links are, however, made more and more explicit in discussion and
practices of new reproductive and genetic technologies (we have only to think of
the almost daily 'discoveries' spinning from the human genome project) and this
together with what has been a western tendency to venerate scientific explanation,
means they are readily privileged. Some commentators identify the late twentieth
century as an era cf 'genetic essentialism': 'the supergene' has become 'an almost
supernatural entity that has the power to define identity, determine human affairs,
dictate human relationships, and explain social problems' (Nelkin & Lindee 1995:
193).
25. See Lundin (1999) for a discussion of xenotransplantation, and in particular the
perceptions of patients receiving animal cells, tissues and organs.
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