Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Corresponding IntroductionPublic knowledge about genetics and genomics is often framed as shallow, reactionary or just uninformed by stakeholder advocates for particular innovations in application or policy. Media representations are regularly characterized by scientists as exaggeration or fear-mongering and the general public's scientific knowledge is often characterized as slightly ridiculous. Against this general context, work on public engagement is often pursued to contest the assertion that there has been an historical distrust of science, and that there is currently an 'anti-science brigade', despite decades of work by social scientists demonstrating the contextual character of the 'public understanding of science ' (Wynne 1992, Irwin andMichael 2003). The figure of the 'antiscience brigade' was frequently mobilised by the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair during his time in office (1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007) through repeated references to 'irrational' public debate against which science needed to be defended (Haran et al 2008).The research findings presented here, however, are in tune with what Irwin and Michael call the 'ethnographic turn' in public understanding of science (2003: 28) which observes that: 'people do not simply possess knowledge about scientific "facts" and scientific procedures and processes, they can also reflect upon the epistemological status of that knowledge' (Michael 1996: 107). What is distinctive about the research is that it invited respondents to characterise and reflect upon the sources of their knowledge about genetics and genomics -areas of science which have been the subject of an exceptional degree of public discourse in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -in a relatively open-ended way, without directing them to particular examples of genetic knowledge dissemination.Corresponding Author Dr K O'Riordan k.oriordan@sussex.ac.uk, MFM University of Sussex, UK Recent research into public engagement with genetics can be characterized in terms of three approaches: attitudes studies (Sturgis et al 2005, Condit, 2010; media content analysis (Kitzinger 2008, Nerlich et al 2002; and patient or focus group work (Kerr and CunninghamBurley 2...

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This article works with the figure of the "modest witness" and the concept of "virtual witnessing" to explore the case of the South Korean scientist, Hwang, whose stem cell breakthroughs are now regarded as hoaxes. We analyze the rhetorical techniques used by the scientific establishment and news media to first endorse, and then disavow, Hwang's work. In particular, we focus on how the rhetoric of disavowal operates to maintain a dominant understanding of the normal relationship between science and the media. We highlight how journalists and scientists framed the original breakthroughs in ways which obscured the mediation of these events, but, once the scandals emerged, began to foreground the media as a problem. This retrospective acknowledgement of mediation also subtly (re)assigned the problem to the world of celebrity scientists and fictional genres and narratives. This lets news reporting, and routine science-journalist relations off the hook.

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