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Public fiction as knowledge production: the case of the Raëlians' cloning claimsCenter for Nanotechnology in Society, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California 93106-9430, USA, mci0{at}umail.ucsb.edu In this article, I follow the construction of the public fiction of the 2002 Raëlians' cloning claims as a site of liminal, or transitional, space for scientific knowledge production. In 2002, the Raëlians, a new religious movement, announced the successful birth of Baby Eve, allegedly, the first clone. Baby Eve was quickly denounced as a hoax. Within the media frenzy that led up to and followed Baby Eve's birth, the voices of a core set of pro-cloning scientists emerged as experts in constructing human cloning. These experts used the Raëlians' claims to settle several controversies about human cloning: reproductive cloning was unethical while therapeutic cloning was desirable; scientists who advocated reproductive cloning were immoral; and human cloning was too complex to be achieved by anyone working outside mainstream scientific institutions. Though Baby Eve is undoubtedly a fictional construct, she offered the world an important opportunity to engage the science fiction-like implications of human cloning as if they were real.
This version was published on May
1, 2009 Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 18, No. 3,
292-308 (2009) |
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