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If not now, then later. If not here, then elsewhere... A political group can only impede,
it cannot
stop. ("Physicist Impossible," p. A3)
These are the words of Dr. Richard Seed, the Chicago physicist who in January 1998 shocked the world by declaring he would soon open a clinic to clone human babies. Media around the globe responded with a flurry of coverage.
As one commentator wryly noted,
So, who was Richard Seed and what does his
fleeting identity as a media event tell us about current
understandings of
biotechnology and genetic
scientists, the mediation of those in our culture, and how
biotechnology is being rendered an object of governance?
His early scientific career had been uneven, as he moved from project to project and did not settle at a single institution. In 1970 he turned from physics to biology, founding Embryo Transplant Corporation, which sought to produce super milkproducing cows.
After that project collapsed financially, he set up Fertility and Genetics Research Inc. with his surgeon brother, Randolph Seed, to offer commercial embryo transfers from fertile to infertile women.
This project also failed when the technology was superseded by current techniques of in-vitro fertilization. He turned to the financial realm in the early 1990s, establishing a mortgage financing business, which was also unsuccessful.
In 1998, he founded the Human Cloning Foundation and served as one of its directors, although he is no longer affiliated with the organization.
However, it was not until they were broadcast on National Public Radio on Tuesday, January 7, 1998, that national and international media picked up the story.
Seed claimed that he intended to clone a human baby, needed $2 million, and hoped to produce 500 babies per year at his clinic using the same technique that had been used to produce Dolly the cloned sheep.
According to Seed, four childless couples had already volunteered to participate. As time passed, his audacious claims shifted.
He had been roundly criticized for taking advantage of couples desperate for a child and responded by suggesting he would clone himself instead. His critics then labeled him an egomaniac, so he decided he would clone his wife, Gloria.
The amount of money required grew as time went on, and he indicated a willingness to move his clinic to whatever jurisdiction would host it.
Initially characterized as a "mad scientist" for even suggesting the possibility of human cloning, Seed was quickly rewritten as a "bad scientist," namely one working outside the mainstream scientific community.
In this shift, we suggest, can be seen the containment of the risk of an unruly member by the scientific community.
Even more significant than the transformation from mad to bad scientist, however, was the role that Seed played as a biogovernmental event.
Biogovernance is the means by which biotechnologies are rendered objects of governance by a conjuncture of sociocultural processes and then managed accordingly (Gerlach, 2004).
As a biogovernmental event, Seed invited a response from regulators, as Dolly did before him. Yet, what became visible in the ensuing debate were the tensions, paradoxes, and limits of biogovernance as a governmental practice.
A number of theorists of late modernity have argued that a significant part of a broader transformation to "risk society," is an increasing public reflexivity toward the authoritative status of science (e.g., Beck, 1992, 1999; Giddens, 1991, 2003).
The inherent indeterminacy of science as a mode of knowledge production, its failure to deliver on its utopian promises, and its contributions to new global environmental, military, and medical risks have produced a condition of what Gerlach (2004) drawing on Giddens (1991) has called "ontological insecurity."
As Nelkin (1995) noted with respect to science in general, citizens' primary knowledge of biotechnology comes from the mass media and popular culture. The public lacks the scientific expertise to evaluate that information and counter it with other information. Second, the catchall term "biotechnology" often encompasses existing, emerging, and imaginary scientific techniques and technologies.
As a result, the referent of biotechnology is always unstable, always emergent. Third, biotechnologies are disrupting some of what have been our most fundamental social categories and boundaries.
The boundaries between human and animal, life and death, natural and artificial, reproduction and replication, which have previously come under theoretical challenge, appear now to be under material and symbolic assault as well.
The contingent nature of scientific knowledge and the limited access the public has to it, require a relationship of trust between scientific communities and members of the public.
For that to be established, scientists must contribute to a sense of ontological security around new scientific developments by demonstrating that they are acting to manage their attendant risks. Scientists, therefore, have a role to play in public debate.
They have a necessary politicized relationship with the public, one that often plays itself out in the mass media. 1
At the same time, the analysis of science in media, more generally, continues to be dominated by the public understanding of science (PUS) approach. In general, the PUS literature remains concerned with the accuracy of scientific information in the media and degrees of scientific literacy in the public.
Science and media become reduced to the project of science communication as a pedagogical enterprise. Science is seen as a relatively homogenous, unconflicted body of knowledge that can be transparently transmitted to a waiting public.
Despite some attempts to rethink these underlying assumptions (Lewenstein, 1995; Wynne, 1995), there is still a tendency to attribute public reflexivity toward science as an outcome of inaccurate or distorted scientific information from popular culture and media sources.
She explored the influence of scientists on science journalism as they seek to control the language and content of press accounts and considered the sources of tension between science and journalism.
In this vein, there are a number of interesting studies focusing on how biotechnology has been treated in the mass media (Brown, 2000; Conduit, 1999; Conrad, 1997, 1999; Einsiedel, 1992; Hopkins, 1998; Hornig Priest, 1999, 2001; Miller, 1995).
In general, these works examine the representation of scientific knowledge, focusing on actual media practices, on audiences, and on the frames through which the representations are constructed. Often, however, the authors do not go on to link these practices or their individual case study to broader social or theoretical formations.
Although the mass media remain a somewhat understudied site of scientific cultural production, there is a growing body of work taking up genetic science, in particular, in popular and public culture. In their groundbreaking text, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as Cultural Icon (1995), Nelkin and Lindee treated multiple sites of discourse, drawing out a variety of themes in which the gene has been framed.
In particular, they were examining the production of genetic essentialism. The role of genetic scientists, per se, is not something they took up to any great extent.
Van Dijk's 1998 text, Imagenation: Popular Images of Genetics, explored changing public discourse about the gene since the 1950s, focusing primarily on science and business communication and to a more limited extent, some fiction and popular culture.
It was Turney, in Frankenstein's Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture (1998), who most directly contributed to a consideration of the biologist in mediated culture. He offered a three-part typology of the shifting image of the biologist, suggesting that from the latter half of the 20th century, the scientist became more distant from everyday experience as scientific knowledge became more abstract.
He, like Weingart et al. (2003), suggested that this reflects, in part, an ambivalence toward science, rather than an outright critique.
Turney illustrated well the ubiquity of the Frankenstein myth in current representations of biotechnological science and scientists, highlighting modernity's profound ambivalence toward biology in general and the body in particular.
Turney suggested,
In other words, Seed has been placed in the canon of real and fictional "mad scientists."
The mad scientist as a cultural figure has seen some scholarly treatment, almost exclusively as he (and he is almost always a "he") is represented in literature and film. 2
The mad scientist as a trope offers comment on our society's relationship with science at any given historical period.
For a majority of analysts, the mad scientist reveals our anxieties or fears about new and untried technologies and scientific methods (Haynes, 2003; Mulkay, 1996; Skal, 1998; Toumey, 1992).
Tudor (1991) and Skal (1998) both explored the mad scientist in horror and science fiction films, but drew somewhat different conclusions in relation to the mad scientist's relationship with science.
Tudor suggested that in periods that focus on the mad scientist as the cause of social disorder, he was treated as an individual, volitional actor. There are other periods, he went on to claim, when science itself was framed as the cause of the disorder. 3
Skal suggested, on the other hand, that the mad scientist figure may be more linked to our concerns with science as an institution.
From the various reviews of the figure of the mad scientist in popular and public culture, we draw out a set of characteristics that define the archetype.
The mad scientist is distinguished by his personal characteristics, his particular scientific practices, and the resulting knowledge claims. The mad scientist is an arrogant individual obsessed with knowledge, power, and/or notoriety.
Often paranoid, he is characterized by his overwhelming hubris, which frequently takes the form of delusions of grandeur, including a God complex. He shows a lack of concern for the social consequences of his actions, feeling himself above or beyond conventional standards of morality.
As Weingart et al. (2003) suggested:
As a result of the personal characteristics of the mad scientist and his specific scientific practice, the knowledge that he produces is illegitimate, immoral, and often illegal.
Rehmann-Sutter (1996) specifically defined this as "Frankensteinian knowledge," suggesting that it has four characteristics.
Thus, the mad scientist as a cultural figure marks the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate science, simultaneously offering ground for the critique of science, but often individualizing that critique to the particular scientist.
It was not only the media, however, that used this language, but also other scientists (e.g., "Scientist Pushes," 1998), and even then-U.S. Health Secretary Donna Shalala (Rhodes & Macintyre, 1998).
Other oft-repeated notions evoked madness, including "nutty" (Kirkey, 1999, p. A1), "eccentric" (Plans, 1998, p. A18), "clearly unhinged" ("Cloning Proponent," 1998, p. A13); and "fruitcake" (Weingarten, 1998, p. F01).
The casting (and castigating) of Seed as a mad scientist did not end with labeling, however; in fact, he is robustly represented within the terms of the archetype we mapped above.
His large, cumbersome, and untidy appearance was interpreted as a manifestation of his personal characteristics.
Seed was portrayed as holding many of the personal characteristics of the archetypical mad scientist.
He was repeatedly represented as paranoid, unwilling to reveal the location of his research or the identities of his research subjects and financial partners.
In a response to a request by a journalist for a progress report on his research, he replied,
Other scientists were quick to dismiss him as someone obsessed with his own notoriety.
For example, Lord Winston, the London-based fertility expert who helped produce the world's first test-tube baby, has been repeatedly quoted as saying,
He is frequently accused of hubris, most notably in his decision to clone himself.
A God complex is apparent in his desire to eliminate death, produce the road to eternal life, and bring man into his proper role as creator of life (Coren, 1998; "Hello Dolly," 1998; Miele, 1999; Palmer, 1998; "Put Controls," 1998).
He has been repeatedly very open about his need for investment dollars and has made future claims that he knows cannot be scientifically justified at the present time.
Yet, the issue is larger than Seed himself; he
has been framed as a representative of our fears around human
cloning. Kendall and Kotulak (1998) wrote:
On Wednesday, his face, trimmed with a prophet's
beard, was beaming around the globe via satellite as he uttered
aphorisms about God, science and reproduction. Overnight, he had
become the embodiment of the world's fears about human cloning. (p.
H2)
The Montreal Gazette reported:
At first glance, it might seem odd that such a quirky man, making a completely unsubstantiated and grandiose claim, could cause such a media furor.
The appearance of Richard Seed, we argue, catalyzed a set of public fears that were already present (at least since the cloning of Dolly). This reflexive context preexisted the appearance of Seed. These public concerns are then easily mapped onto a regularity as well known as the mad scientist - Seed becomes Frankenstein. However, it is not that simple.
Although the discourse of Richard Seed as mad scientist has considerable rhetorical flare, enabling such wild claims as,
...it is not the only framing of the scientist at work in the public discourse.
A second, and we suggest, more powerful discourse is also present:
One of the consequences of the mad scientist trope, as a number of scholars have noted, is that it opens the door to a broader critique of science.
This risk was contained, in part, through the second discourse running through the coverage, and that is the "defanging" of Seed through his characterization as merely a bad scientist.
This was achieved through close attention to his troubled personal, and erratic professional, life.
Once again Seed was described disparagingly, only this time it is not his sanity in question, but his credibility.
He is labeled an "oddball" (Kendall, 1998, p. A43), a "penniless scientist" ("Medical Experts," 1998, n.p.), a "repellent self-publicist" (Gurdon, 1998, p. 22), "greedy" ("Medical Experts," 1998, n.p.), an "entrepreneur" (Sternberg, 1998a, p. 01A), as engaging in "showboat science" (Hilton, 1998, p. A26), and repeatedly as a "rogue" or "maverick" physicist.
Readers were repeatedly told about his three marriages, his failed companies, the foreclosure on his $333,000 loan, his eviction from his upscale home and relocation to a modest bungalow, and his $27,000 debt for federal back taxes (e.g., Kendall & Kotulak, 1998, p. H2).
This exposι of the person suggests that someone who cannot manage his personal life and finances is incapable of responsible scientific practice.
Examples abound.
...suggested a news wire, while another journalist wrote,
The Washington Post claimed,
His appeal for funds was viewed as vulgar:
Most significant to the effective characterization of Seed as a bad scientist, was his marginalization from his community of peers. He was reported as being "disowned" by the scientific community (Ruane, 1998, p. 11), and experts in the field were said to have reacted with "immediate revulsion" to his claims ("Cloning Proponent," p. A13).
He was described as a loner (Wadman, 1998, p. A18) and a freelancer (Varadrajan & Murray, 1998, p. 1). Visible scientists from the Dolly media event were inevitably asked to comment on Seed's claims.
Dr. Lee Silver labeled Seed as "seriously nutty" (Kirkey, 1999, p. A1), and Ian Wilmut dismissed him contemptuously: "He's just a silly old man" (Ballantyne, 1999).
The media sought out comments from scientists who were once his colleagues, and overwhelmingly they were quick to distance themselves from Seed.
For example, an Australian scientist is quoted as saying,
The comparison of choice was with Ian Wilmut. Wilmut was the staid, plodding Scottish farmer who took an animal husbandry approach to the science of cloning, versus the American maverick and entrepreneur cloning human babies for profit.
There is an express contrast between the bad and the good scientist.
The bad scientist works alone, without peers, unable to obtain funding, without institutional endorsement, and for rewards in the press and the marketplace.
The good scientist, on the other hand, works with a team, circulates his or her research in peer-reviewed venues, has research funding from the public and private sector, is affiliated with high profile institutions, and quietly pursues research for the greater good of humanity.
A good researcher, like Wilmut, self-imposes limits on his scientific pursuits - Wilmut favors a ban on human cloning, whereas Seed does not (Evenson, 1999, p. A1; Healy, 1999, p. 176).
Science, in fact, operated as it should. If a scientist does not meet the requirements for rigorous scientific method, he is not respected within the community, not funded, not hired, and so on.
Seed was far less threatening as a bad scientist who has been pushed to the margins by fully functioning scientific norms and institutions than as a mad scientist. A bad scientist remains under the control of the scientific community, whereas a mad scientist, working in secret, does not.
When considering the more scientifically credible claims of Italian fertility specialist Severino Antinori in relation to human cloning, one journalist asked:
Seed became a point of reference, a figure for comparison, but not a real scientific concern.
Although not a risk to actually clone a human being, Seed was acknowledged as having opened up an important debate. "Why is it that the biggest debates on bioethics tend to be triggered by oddballs?
In early 1998, eccentric physicist Richard Seed ignited a furor when he vowed to clone a human being. (He hasn't been heard from since)" (Lemonick, 1999, p. 56).
Now that he was no longer a mad scientist, he was acknowledged as being a leader in considering the issue of human cloning:
More importantly than opening up a general public debate, we suggest, Seed opened up a biogovernmental debate.
For it was not only pundits and the scientific
community that responded to his remarks; governments around the
world were caught off guard by Seed's claims and hastened to produce
a coherent governmental response.
Increasingly, the activity of governance is focused on managing and alleviating public anxiety with respect to the risks of the future attendant upon global technical systems.
This is a necessarily future-looking activity, with the risks of the future being controlled through the mobilization of strategies and techniques in the present. Biotechnology, as a new, ill-defined, and category-breaching domain of technoscience, is particularly risky.
Gerlach has argued that what emerges from this context are modes of governance targeted specifically toward the management of biotechnological risks (2004). Currently states are engaged in developing an emergent governmental rationality that he describes as biogovernance.
In the case of Seed, there was very little direct regulation aimed specifically at human cloning. Seed stepped in to fill that gap, at least symbolically.
Governments clearly had not anticipated that this issue would be a scientific potentiality so soon. They had not adequately anticipated the risk
In this way, Seed became an interesting biogovernmental event.
Gerlach argued that there are five broader social processes that enable the emergence and operation of biogovernance.
Although these are not unique to the biotechnological arena, they play themselves out there in specific ways. The five processes include privatization, politicization, objectification, normalization, and responsibilization.
This secrecy is enabled by the scientific and legal mechanisms of bioprospecting and biopatenting, respectively.
These conflictual processes are characterized by the absence of an appropriate forum for negotiating them and often play out in incompatible language games.
For example, social movements employ a language of natural rights, whereas the biotech industry and government deploy a language focused on the diffusion of responsibility for risk.
The absence of formal governmental venues means that these conflicts often play out in the courts and the media.
There are a number of implications to objectification. New biotechnologies promise to bridge the divide between nature and culture by subjecting both to the same industrializing techniques.
The resulting epistemological frame can be
described as a "molecular optic," to borrow Novas and Rose's term
(2000), which distills complex behaviors into a singular logic of
information.
Rather than politicization, which occurs once a conflict has emerged in the public sphere, normalization is a strategy aimed at controlling meaning-making before it produces conflict.
It includes specific techniques of expert and public consultation, social marketing, and legislating.
Authorities attempt to produce an ethos of biotechnological optimism, the effects of which include frames for understanding social impacts and limiting public debate.
Responsibilization operates to individualize social responsibility for managing the risks of biotechnology. Increasingly, individuals are expected, not to discipline themselves, but to manage themselves and the risks that they pose to the wider social good, through accessing and mobilizing the resources and expertise at their disposal in the genetic marketplace.
The material body is increasingly rendered irrelevant; what is important is the control of one's genetic information.
The resulting form of genetic subjectivity does not necessarily lead to fatalism, but rather to an imperative to act in the present to manage future risk.
The absence of a more formal political forum moved the debate to the media, complete with all the shortcomings that this site entails.
The short life-cycle of issues of front-page news discourages a robust public consideration of the issues. In part for this reason, concerns about the objectification of the human play out primarily in the comments of bioethicists and antiabortion advocates. Clearly, the meanings around human cloning had not yet settled.
Authorities - governmental, industrial, and scientific - had not successfully normalized the idea of human cloning. As a result popular culture motifs filled in the gaps in meaning, resulting in the initial mad scientist discourse.
This unruliness of Richard Seed as a biogovernmental event suggested that responsibilization was not yet a completed process; as a result, responsibility for the risks of human cloning could not yet be downloaded onto the individual.
Scientists and governments were actively
involved, we demonstrate in the subsequent sections, in the
negotiation of human cloning as a biogovernmental object.
The media expressed concern over both the absence of legislation in this area and the lack of clarity in existing regulation (e.g., Gough, 1998). In some reports, this took on almost crisis-level proportions.
Calls quickly emerged for the American government to fill this lacunae.
imes suggested that Richard Seed was "just the kind of brash scientist that the federal government needs to rein in with legislation" ("Confronting," 1998b, p. B7).
The Economist asserted that the regulatory issue was not that complicated:
Experts echoed the call for a governmental response - well-known bioethicist Arthur Caplan was quoted as saying,
A sense of urgency for policy intervention
emerged.
Answering the Call
In response to the cloning of Dolly in 1997, President Clinton had already banned the use of federal money to experiment with human cloning. He again waded into the rhetorical arena, with the unusual move of taking on Seed directly in the press.
The statement of White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry circulated widely:
In his weekly radio address in early January, Clinton did not name Seed, but talked extensively about the risks of human cloning in a thinly veiled response to the uproar.
Nineteen European countries were quick to sign up. The signatories were Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Moldavia, Norway, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Macedonia, and Turkey.
The proposal was not signed by Germany, which claimed its own laws were stronger, and England, which did not want to restrict its research possibilities, but also claimed stronger domestic regulation.
This followed previous international initiatives, but was much more direct, inviting a legislative commitment to controlling the risks of human cloning. 5
While the executive levels of Western governments fought the rhetorical battle in the press, the U.S. Congress labored over a more legislative biogovernmental response. Seven different anticloning proposals emerged in the Senate alone.
The initial bill, sponsored by the Republicans and supported by the National Right to Life Committee and the Christian Coalition, went to the floor on February 3, 1998, as an emergency measure without a committee hearing.
By this time, the scientific community had mobilized. Worried about hasty and unduly limiting legislative responses, 71 patients' groups and scientific organizations, as well as 27 Nobel laureates lobbied hard opposing the bill.
Despite overwhelming opposition to human cloning on Capitol Hill, and despite the early predictions that the bill would pass quickly, 12 Republicans joined all the Democrats and the bill failed, 18 votes short of the 60 required to bring it to a vote.
What ensued is an ongoing process of the Senate approving a bill that did not pass in the House of Representatives and vice versa. Ultimately the United States remains without comprehensive federal legislation on the issue of human cloning.
This lack of success in legislating the issue is in part due to the lack of clear lines of governmental authority over human cloning.
Although the federal Food and Drug Administration intervened in mid-January 1998 to claim authority over clinical research using cloning technology, the consensus seems to be that the FDA, given its discretionary powers and noncriminalized sanctions, is not a strong enough governmental agency to effectively govern the issue.
The debate appears to have moved to state legislatures where regulations are uneven, unclear, and generally perceived as weak.
As Republican Senator Bill Frist said,
They attempted to do so, and failed. However, this time, because Seed was a rhetorical threat only, this rhetorical response sufficed.
Yet this near failure of biogovernance is revealing.
Implications of Richard Seed as Biogovernmental Event
Dionne (1998) noted:
All branches of the U.S. government attempted to regulate cloning in some way, primarily through marking it as a forbidden zone.
Yet its forbidden nature resulted more from the temporal lag in governmental regulation than from any ontological or moral claim. In its haste, the government did not consult with scientific expertise and consequently failed to be effective.
The scientific community mobilized, benefitting from considerable credibility in the media and in governmental circles, and as a result was successful in producing a discursive distinction between reproductive and therapeutic cloning. 6
Therapeutic cloning was rendered scientifically legitimate and nonthreatening, whereas reproductive cloning was relocated back into the future as a problem to be addressed later.
The most effective governmental actor in this scenario is not the state, but rather, the scientific community, illustrating that biogovernmental authority is always a contested site.
- First, biogovernance cannot be contained by national governments; it is an activity whose edges are always fraying. Biotechnologies simultaneously benefit from, and disrupt, the nation-state and its power to regulate economic and scientific activities within its borders.
Richard Seed repeatedly claimed that if human cloning was made illegal in the United States, he would merely relocate "offshore," possibly to Mexico, Japan, Korea, and some undisclosed location (e.g., Carney, 1998; Hourigan, 1998; Krieger, 1998).
In the threats to move offshore, the secret basement laboratory of Weingart's mad scientist goes global (2003). However, aided by the privatization of science and global flows of capital and research, a number of American scientists had already moved to Britain, where regulations with respect to genetic research are less strict.
These relocations are outside the governmental reach of the American state. Biogovernance increasingly will require international cooperation in order to be effective.
As one journalist correctly noted,
Current neoliberal governance is focused increasingly on the mobilization of a technical and economic rationality.
One of the most common implications of this is the withdrawal of the state from the marketplace. We see a decline in the willingness of states to regulate the private sector. This has, in recent years, been the case in the biotechnological realm as well. 7
However, because the biotechnological realm is simultaneously industrial and moral, it poses a governmental dilemma.
There remains a residual public expectation that the state will defend the moral boundaries of the national body and the bodies of its citizens, and yet when those boundaries are being breached by the private sector, and in particular, the scientific private sector, governments are frozen into immobility at worst, and ineffectiveness at best.
Journalists Spears and Laucius (1999) framed this issue well when they wrote:
There is a general sense of resignation within the media coverage, among legislators, and on the part of scientists that human cloning is inevitable and ultimately unstoppable.
This technoscientific determinism renders any
governmental response always already obsolete and therefore
inevitably ineffective.
However, the power of science that Seed momentarily made visible, was quickly moved back into the shadows through his reformulation as bad scientist.
Ultimately, the Richard Seed event located the risk in the individual and not in the practice of science. Human cloning is not the problem, but rather the unskilled and unethical application of human cloning techniques by unscrupulous scientists.
Science convinced government in this instance that science itself is best placed to govern these issues, complicating traditional structures of governance.
Through the calls for and temporary bans being put into place, the risks of reproductive human cloning are relocated from the present, where Seed temporarily actualized them, into the future.
Time is purchased for a more effective biogovernmental response, both on the part of the scientific community and national governments. Seed drew out into the open the public fear on this issue; our initial repugnance is now spent.
Perhaps this is why subsequent forays into human cloning on the part of Drs. Severino Antinori and Panos Zavos, have not drawn the same kind of media or governmental responses.
As Seed himself observed,
The tensions that are always present within biogovernance as a governmental rationality, became rupture points in the case of Richard Seed read as biogovernmental event.
The contradictions inherent in the regulation of activities that are simultaneously national and global, in the state regulation of the private sector and its marketplace, and in the interference in scientific practice (read progress), render biotechnological science almost ungovernable in the traditional sense.
Rather, governance becomes a process that is diffused among a range of social actors and involves an expanded variety of governmental techniques.
The end goal of biogovernance as a specific mode
of governmentality is not regulation or control, but rather the
communication, management, even husbandry of biotechnological
developments.
It seems inevitable not only that human cloning will happen, but also that there is nothing to stop maverick scientists from practicing it.
Traditionally, the public has looked to the state to harness science in its service, enforce social norms in research and development, and ensure that technoscientific developments are for the social good.
However, the emerging biogovernmental order seems
unwilling and unable to meet those expectations. Neil Gerlach is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University.
He thanks the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its generous financial support of his biotechnological research.
Sheryl N. Hamilton is the Canada Research Chair in Communication, Law, and Governance at Carleton University with dual appointments to the School of Journalism and Communication and the Department of Law.
She would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its generous financial support of her research and her two invaluable research assistants, Christiana Abraham and Paula Romanow.
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