Managing the boundaries between maverick cloners and mainstream scientists: the life cycle of a news event in a contested field

Experimental Subjectification:The Pursuit of Human Embryonic Stem Cells in India

“…Bharadwaj & Glasner 2009). However, this is not entirely unusual given mass media is playing an ever-increasing role in determining the outcome of scientific controversies (Turney 1998;Petersen 2002;Eriksson 2004;Haran et al 2007). These criticisms and claims that NuTech Mediworld is purportedly violating all norms of normal science notwithstanding, the global traffic of patients has gone from a handful to over 900 individuals.…”

Human Cloning in Film: Horror, Ambivalence, Hope

“…This rhetorical move was used in criticism of the 2004 horror film Godsend O'Riordan, 2008). This cloning film stuck to the vision of both cloning and genetic modification as horrific, and evoked 'maverick' cloning claims (Haran, 2007). It was criticized at the time of release for potentially giving cloning a bad name and it was suggested that this might impact on future biomedical cures by setting back research.…”

“…During the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, the distinction between therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning, and anxiety around this, became crucial in the political debates about regulation and governance in the UK. This distinction was key in a particular moment of science policy formation-the licensing of therapeutic cloning-and its emergence as a UK scientific practice in 2004 (Haran, 2007;Mulkay, 1997;Parry, 2003;Williams et al, 2003). A factor in these distinctions in the visual imagery of cloning is whether the foregrounding is of the body of the clone, or cloning as a biomedical process.…”

“…Fictional human cloning scientists, and figures in factual genres who have proposed or laid claim to reproductive cloning (Dr Panos Zavos, Brigitte Brosselier, Severino Antinori, Richard Seed) have also been represented as 'maverick', weak or evil. Fictional characters and such factual 'maverick' characterizations are often based on archetypal figures of the scientist such as Dr Faustus and Dr Frankenstein (Frayling, 2005;Haran, 2007;Haynes, 1994;Nerlich et al, 2001;Turney, 1998;Van Dijck, 1998;Weingart, 2003).…”

“…That is to say that human cloning has meaning within what might be thought of as the bounds of 'respectable science' in the UK and elsewhere (Gieryn, 1999;Haran, 2007;Haran et al, 2007). By respectable science I mean that human cloning has become an aspect of the scientific practices of stem cell production under the aegis of regulators.…”