By Jose Van Dijck
The public photograph of genetics study has gone through a notable transformation because the Nineteen Fifties, from a suspect model of analysis tainted by means of eugenics to a thriving, well-funded, and "popular" box of biomedicine. nonetheless, regardless of huge, immense clinical advances in DNA expertise and its skill to maintain huge parts of the technology undefined, social, criminal, and renowned opinion approximately genetics continues to be hugely ambivalent.
In Imagenation, historian of technological know-how Jose Van Dijck examines the position of pictures and mind's eye in renowned representations fo the hot genetics because the past due Nineteen Fifties. Taking us via an unlimited diversity of media--from basic curiosity magazines to technology fiction to public relatives materials--he demonstrates how renowned representations of genetics don't easily replicate the development of genetic know-how. as a substitute, cultural money owed of genetics are taking up a massive function within the very constitution of medical pondering, with many groups--environmentalists, feminists, entrepreneurs--influencing this process.
From information tales of DNA strings escaping from our laboratories to the continued debates over bioethics, from James Watson and The Double Helix to the Human Genome undertaking, Van Dijck Portrays the "imaginary" instruments of genetics as gamers in a theater of representation--a multilayered contest within which particular curiosity teams companies mobilize photos in a heated debate over the that means of genetics. Compelling and insightful, Imagenation unravels this phenomenon, revealing how ideology shapes the cultural varieties during which we make feel of medical progress.
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Extra resources for Imagenation: Popular Images of Genetics
Sample text
The articulation of new needs rarely happens explicitly; rather than through plain arguments, the new needs for genetics proliferate through association, with other established disciplines, away from eugenics, and through the launching of new metaphors for the gene. The idea that there is an urgent demand for the new genetics takes root via initial association of genetics with nuclear physics. After the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, American experts had been sent to Japan to examine types of cancer caused by the release of unprecedented amounts of radiation.
4 The 'new genetics' no longer starts with Mendel, but now begins with the 'discovery' of DNA by Watson and Crick, whose 'masterly piece of analysis and imagination' revolutionized genetics, and will undoubtedly help scientists to find more 'secrets of life' (63). No predecessors are mentioned, and Watson and Crick are hailed as the intellectual fathers of a revolutionary biology. Judging from this issue of Newsweek, genetics had been 'invented' ten years earlier, in 1953, so the new genetics is rhetorically cleansed from its tainted history.
This bipolar distinction between scientists and Luddites, however outdated and distorted, is still frequently used to classify people involved in, or concerned with, genetic engineering. Scripts of popular stories usually provide for unambiguous roles on the basis of professional typologies: scientists are prefigured as pursuers of disinterested knowledge, while non-scientists opposing science are invariably seen as having a 'special' interest, or holding a 'partial' or ideological position. The pre-inscription of roles is particularly evident in the gendered nature of the characters' positions.