Learning about AquAdvantage® Salmon from an ANT: Actor Network Theory and Education in the Postgenomic Era

Abstract

In a recent public meeting held by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), citizens and political organizations were given a chance to voice their concerns about a “new animal product” application for the first genetically engineered (GE) animal created for human consumption. Not surprisingly, a familiar controversy that first began with Dolly’s appearance in 1996 once again found its way into the headlines. What is notable about this recent GE food debate, however, is the growing sense of public helplessness in the face of creatures like the AquAdvantage® Salmon that new types of scientific activity have called into existence. While much of the controversy has centered on the question of whether or not GE salmon should require a food label to disclose its Promethean origin, there has been almost no work that looks at the educational implications of such a remarkable event. What is at stake in AquaBounty Technologies’ FDA application (which in all likelihood will be granted), in other words, is not only the question of knowing whether a food item was made by nature or in the laboratory, it also represents an important epistemological crisis of Western modern science that is replicated in the way science is taught and learned; specifically, science education’s continued reliance on the modern understanding of science that separates nature from culture which, in turn, leaves individuals and communities unequipped to deal with this question: who and what can be a part of democratic life if the question of life itself has been confused in science’s ability to reconfigure nature (wild salmon) through culture (genetic science)?

Our mission is to play a significant part in the “Blue Revolution”—bringing together biological sciences and molecular technology to enable an aquaculture industry capable of large scale, efficient, and environmentally sustainable production of high quality seafood. Increased growth rates, enhanced resistance to disease, better food conversion rates, manageable breeding cycles, and more efficient use of aquatic production systems are all important components of sustainable aquaculture industry of the future.

—AquaBounty Technologies Inc.

If you talk to the Animals, they will talk with you. And you will know each other. If you do not talk to them, you will not know them. And what you do not know you will fear, what one fears one destroys.

—Chief Dan George