Abstract
Cloned animals are often understood as ‘models’ whose embodiments demonstrate the viability of somatic cell nuclear transfer and its applicability to a species body. In conceptualizing models through the trope of technoscience, Evelyn Fox Keller has argued that scientific models are not simply cognitive representations of something else, but are also embodiments of action and practice that constitute the kinds of scientific questions that can be asked and how those questions can be answered. Drawing on Keller's language, I would say that, while we understand cloned animals as ‘models of’ somatic cell nuclear transfer, little empirical scholarship has explored what these animals are ‘models for’. This article asks what practices cloned animals embody, focusing on endeavours to clone endangered wildlife in the United States. Based on a multi-sited, ethnographic study, I show that these animals are models for conducting science in zoological parks, which entails questions regarding the kinds of knowledge practices that should be used to reproduce zoos and, in turn, meaningfully reconstitute wildlife. Based on this analysis, I contend that cloned animals not only model technique and scientific practices, but also new assemblages in the reproduction of zoos and, in turn, nature.
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Notes
1 On science and technology as practice, see Clarke and Fujimura (1992), Clarke and Star (2003), Haraway (1989, 1991, 1997), Latour (1987), Mol (2002), Pickering (1992), Timmermans (2000) and Timmermans and Berg (2003).
2 On models as practice, see also de Chadarevian and Hopwood (2004), Hopwood (1999), Hacking (1983) and Myers (2008).
3 Franklin's (2007) genealogical analysis of Dolly the Sheep is, to my knowledge, the only study to date that has addressed cloning as practice.
4 See also Veltre (1996) for a similar definition of zoos.
5 I conducted all interviews between July 2005 and July 2006, in person when possible and over the telephone when in person meetings could not be arranged.
6 See also Franklin (2003) on the ways biotechnology companies work around ethically challenging human body parts required for biomedical experimentation through technological means.
7 Interspecies nuclear transfer was an important source of debate, however. This technical process creates organisms that are, by definition, chimeras. Like hybrids, interspecies chimeras trouble the notion of species as discrete biological groups. This is particularly problematic for species conservationists in the United States, where law requires that preservation practices ‘come after’ (Strathern, 1992) the decline of naturally occurring and discrete animal groups. See Friese (forthcoming) for a discussion of the debates over interspecies nuclear transfer itself, in relation to questions about whether or not cloned animals produced through interspecies nuclear transfer can count as part of endangered species. For a discussion of just how troubling hybrids are in zoo worlds, see Thompson (1999). For a problematization of the word ‘species’ as a visual register that links debates about difference across human and non-human animals, see Haraway (2008: 17–18).
8 With articulation I refer to the symbolic interactionist notion of articulation work, or the process of getting ‘things back “on track” in the face of the unexpected’ (Star, 1991: 275). On medical technologies as articulation work, see also Timmermans (2000).
9 Emel and Wolch (1998: 6) have cited an estimate that 50–80 percent of animals die in transit. On death in animal industries, see also Franklin (2007).
10 Clarke (1987) has shown that the availability of research materials has been a primary factor shaping the direction and pace of the reproductive sciences. This is certainly also true in zoos.
11 Franklin (2007: 88) has pointed out that captive breeding is a key feature of domestication itself and many species resist the kind of control that this process entails.
12 The modern zoo has had a tripartite identity: education, entertainment and science. However, the scientific utility of wild animals in zoological parks has always been problematic at best. Early natural historians catalogued the outwardly visible organs of plants and animals. Foucault (1970: 137) has argued that this made plants the preferred object to represent and catalogue by natural historians, such as Linnaeus and Buffon. Later, comparative anatomists classified animals according to their internal organs, a kind of knowledge production that requires dissection (Zuckerman, 1959, 1978). Animals in zoological parks were and remain today too valuable to dissect at will. Knowledge had to be gained rather unsystematically after the death of an individual (Ritvo, 1996). Thus, there has long been a tension in zoological parks between their mandate as sites of scientific inquiry and as locations for public education and entertainment.
13 On the role of bodily transformation in reproductive sciences see Clarke (1995, 1998) and in biomedicine more generally see Clarke et al. (2003).
14 One scientist clearly demonstrated this point, stating that she strongly believes any reproductive technology can be adapted to any species provided there are sufficient material and financial resources available.
15 On the uneven politics of ‘mutual’ benefits projects see Hayden (2003).
16 It is worth pointing out that the zoo, rather than the biotechnology company, receives the publicity of creating a cloned animal. It is likely that zoo researchers, like their biotechnology colleagues, financially benefit from the awe that surrounds cloning and ‘world's first’ cloned animals. One scientist at ACRES told me that private donors are among their primary research funders. As such, cloning and other high-profile reproductive technologies are likely to bring in new sources of revenue for the zoo.
17 Developing biomedical technologies for human consumption has been marked by the proliferation of ‘hype’ that creates capital needed for these endeavours (Sunder Rajan, 2006). However, there can be a backlash if scientists are not able to achieve their stated end goals within expected timelines. The same is true of assisted reproductive technologies in zoos, which were significantly hyped and now are being criticized for failing to produce technological solutions.
18 See Mitman (1999) and Takacs (1996) on the alignment between a focus on endangered animals, an aesthetic and moral rationale for preservation, and the entertainment function of zoos.
19 See Haraway (2003) on the linkages and fissures in biodiversity discourses and practices in Species Survival Plans when compared to dog breeding protocols.
20 Ryder was in a unique position to make this argument as he oversees the San Diego Zoological Society's Frozen Zoo™. Kurt Benirshcke began collecting and preserving somatic cells from wild animals using cryopreservation during the 1960s, which was eventually institutionalized as part of the San Diego Zoological Society's research centre Conservation and Research for Endangered Species (CRES). The Frozen Zoo™ preserves somatic cells, sperm cells and embryos of endangered species. Somatic cells have been collected largely for informational purposes, while sperm and embryos have been collected for their reproductive potential. Cloning could potentially transform the somatic cells from the status of relics to reproductive individuals within the population. On frozen zoos and assisted reproductive technologies, see also Thompson (1999).
21 The zoo did not learn how to physically engage in the cloning process itself in the banteng project. Indeed, Ryder commented during an interview that part of what made the project feasible was the fact that ACT paid for the project. In that sense, the banteng continues to be the model for conducting science with industrial partners. But Ryder showed how zoos could ensure that these collaborations are indeed mutually beneficial.
22 This is already under way with gametes. The new Zoo Information Management System (ZIMS), an international inventory of captive endangered animals, includes embodied animals as well as sperm and embryos (Barbara Durrant, interview with author).
23 While I was at the Taxonomic Advisory Group meetings for endangered felids, some people spoke of zoos collaborating with field researchers to collect sperm from wild cats. Field researchers regularly capture wild animals, take biological samples, and then release the animal. The idea was that a sperm sample could be included at this time, thereby providing new founders to the zoo population without permanently capturing wild animals.
24 On the links between cloning and domestication, see also Franklin (2007).
25 Hanson has positioned American zoological parks within the distinctly American public parks movement that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. The parks movement was a social reform movement, based in the elite ideal of recreation that was intent upon educating working-class and immigrant groups in middle-class sensibilities (Hanson, 2002: 28). Hanson (2002: 20) states that park planners ‘associated appreciation of nature with self-improvement and unstructured outdoor recreation with both good health and good morals’. Zoos can thereby be understood a site of social control.
26 Agriculturalists of Bakewell's time generally located the agricultural value of animals in the health and size of their herd or flock. Bakewell instead looked to the reproductive potential of individual organisms that displayed exceptional and highly desired traits as the source of value. Fernand Braudel has argued that this kind of selective breeding was a precondition for industrialization in England (in Franklin, 1997: 431).
27 See also Haraway (2008: 148) on this point, in that SSPs depart from natural and artificial selection by selecting for diversity criteria rather than adaptational criteria.
28 Technoscience critiques the bifurcation of nature/culture, science/technology, thought/action and basic/applied with the idea that technical practices and sociality are always already intertwined in the creation of facts. Significantly, this concept has shown that scientific knowledge and technologies can neither be divided up in a straightforward way, nor organized in a linear fashion. Cloning has made this point abundantly clear, where the development of a new technology disrupted and changed the facts of cellular development (Franklin, 1999).
29 I would like to thank Sarah Franklin for this point. See also Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood (2004) on what models do in linking science and society.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the people who shared their stories, provided tours of their workplaces and even opened their homes while this research was conducted. Adele Clarke, Laura Foster, Janet Shim, Tiago Saraiva, Charis Thompson, Stefan Timmermans and Rachel Washburn graciously read and commented on different drafts of this article. A later version was presented at the BIOS Centre roundtables, where valuable feedback was provided; particular thanks goes to Valentina Amorese, Des Fitzgerald, Sarah Franklin and Uffe Jensen. Comments from three anonymous reviewers at BioSocieties were extremely helpful in finalizing the manuscript. Generous support for research and writing was provided by: the BIOS Centre and Sociology Department, London School of Economics; the Center for Society and Genetics, University of California, Los Angeles; a Graduate Student Research Award from the University of California, San Francisco; an Andrew Vincent White Scholarship from the University of California Humanities Research Institute; a Chancellor's Dissertation Research Fellowship from the University of California, San Francisco; and an Anselm L. Strauss Dissertation Research Fellowship from the University of California, San Francisco.
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Friese, C. Models of Cloning, Models for the Zoo: Rethinking the Sociological Significance of Cloned Animals. BioSocieties 4, 367–390 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1745855209990275
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1745855209990275