Unexpected Creatures: Procreative Liberty and the Frankenstein Ballet.

One of the most recent and original adaptations of Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is the ballet version choreographed by Liam Scarlett and performed by the Royal Ballet in 2016 and the San Francisco Ballet in 2017 and 2018. What emerges from this translation is an economical, emotionally wrenching, and visually elegant drama of family tragedy from which we can draw a cautionary tale about contemporary bioethical dilemmas in family making that new and forthcoming biomedical technologies present. This performance of bodies interacting suggests the need for an ethics of acceptance and recognition as people navigate complex familial relationships involving procreative liberty, questions of moral personhood, and parental obligation. In the Frankenstein ballet, the narrative genre of dance-what I'll call "story in the flesh"-invites viewers to identify with the characters and enter into the complexity of interpersonal relations. The ballet becomes a compelling testimony about possible unintended outcomes set in motion by well-intended fallible humans like themselves.

Rereading Frankenstein: What If Victor Frankenstein Had Actually Been Evil?

As we reread Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at two hundred years, it is evident that Victor Frankenstein is both a mad scientist (fevered, obsessive) and a bad scientist (secretive, hubristic, irresponsible). He's also not a very nice person. He's a narcissist, a liar, and a bad "parent." But he is not genuinely evil. And yet when we reimagine him as evil-as an evil scientist and as an evil person-we can learn some important lessons about science and technology, our contemporary society, and ourselves.

Emotional reactions to human reproductive cloning.

BACKGROUND: Extant surveys of people's attitudes towards human reproductive cloning focus on moral judgements alone, not emotional reactions or sentiments. This is especially important given that some (especially Leon Kass) have argued against such cloning on the ground that it engenders widespread negative emotions, like disgust, that provide a moral guide. OBJECTIVE: To provide some data on emotional reactions to human cloning, with a focus on repugnance, given its prominence in the literature. METHODS: This brief mixed-method study measures the self-reported attitudes and emotions (positive or negative) towards cloning from a sample of participants in the USA. RESULTS: Most participants condemned cloning as immoral and said it should be illegal. The most commonly reported positive sentiment was by far interest/curiosity. Negative emotions were much more varied, but anxiety was the most common. Only about a third of participants selected disgust or repugnance as something they felt, and an even smaller portion had this emotion come to mind prior to seeing a list of options. CONCLUSIONS: Participants felt primarily interested and anxious about human reproductive cloning. They did not primarily feel disgust or repugnance. This provides initial empirical evidence that such a reaction is not appropriately widespread.

Speech acts and performances of scientific citizenship: Examining how scientists talk about therapeutic cloning.

Scientists play an important role in framing public engagement with science. Their language can facilitate or impede particular interactions taking place with particular citizens: scientists' "speech acts" can "perform" different types of "scientific citizenship". This paper examines how scientists in Australia talked about therapeutic cloning during interviews and during the 2006 parliamentary debates on stem cell research. Some avoided complex labels, thereby facilitating public examination of this field. Others drew on language that only opens a space for publics to become educated, not to participate in a more meaningful way. Importantly, public utterances made by scientists here contrast with common international utterances: they did not focus on the therapeutic but the research promises of therapeutic cloning. Social scientists need to pay attention to the performative aspects of language in order to promote genuine citizen involvement in techno-science. Speech Act Theory is a useful analytical tool for this.

Clonagem humana: um estudo sobre a gênese das representações sociais / Human cloning: a study about genesis of social representations

Compreender como o senso comum se apropria e reconstrói os saberes científicos é de interesse da Teoria das Representações Sociais. Esse estudo buscou compreender a gênese darepresentação da clonagem humana. Foram utilizadas duas fontes de dados: matérias publicadas na Folha de São Paulo e Veja nos anos de 1997 a 2007 e as cartas enviadas pelos leitores a essasfontes no mesmo período. Os descritores de busca foram: clone, clonagem, clonagem humana, clonagem terapêutica, engenharia genética e terapia celular com célula-tronco. Encontrou-se 952 matérias e 40 cartas. Os dados foram tratados pelo software Alceste. Os resultados mostram arepresentação da clonagem humana objetivada nos seguintes objetos: bebê clonado; vontade de ser Deus; fabricação de tecidos; pessoas doentes e ancorada em idéias religiosas, eugenistas e da cura pela ciência. Os achados apontam uma representação estruturada entre os leitores, com coesão e idéias partilhadas. Abre-se caminho para investigações sobre a formação de novas representações. (AU)

Knowing how social actors appropriate and (re)construction the scientific knowledge is of interest to the theory of social representations. This study aimed to understand the genesis of social representations of human cloning. It was used two sources of data for analysis: articles published in Folha de Sao Paulo and Veja during the period from 1997 to 2007 and the letterssent by readers of newspapers and magazines surveyed during the same period. The keywords used were: clone, cloning, human cloning, therapeutic cloning, genetic engineering and cell therapy with stem cell. It was found 952 articles and 40 letters. The database was analyzed by the Alceste.The results show a representation of human cloning objectified: cloned baby, man's desire to be God, the manufacture of tissues, sick people and anchored in ideas of a religious nature,eugenics experiences and healing through science. These findings point to a structured representation among readers, cohesion and sharing of ideas. This opens a path for future research emergence of new representations. (AU)

Clonagem humana: um estudo sobre a gênese das representações sociais / Human cloning: a study about genesis of social representations

Compreender como o senso comum se apropria e reconstrói os saberes científicos é de interesse da Teoria das Representações Sociais. Esse estudo buscou compreender a gênese darepresentação da clonagem humana. Foram utilizadas duas fontes de dados: matérias publicadas na Folha de São Paulo e Veja nos anos de 1997 a 2007 e as cartas enviadas pelos leitores a essasfontes no mesmo período. Os descritores de busca foram: clone, clonagem, clonagem humana, clonagem terapêutica, engenharia genética e terapia celular com célula-tronco. Encontrou-se 952 matérias e 40 cartas. Os dados foram tratados pelo software Alceste. Os resultados mostram arepresentação da clonagem humana objetivada nos seguintes objetos: bebê clonado; vontade de ser Deus; fabricação de tecidos; pessoas doentes e ancorada em idéias religiosas, eugenistas e da cura pela ciência. Os achados apontam uma representação estruturada entre os leitores, com coesão e idéias partilhadas. Abre-se caminho para investigações sobre a formação de novas representações.

Knowing how social actors appropriate and (re)construction the scientific knowledge is of interest to the theory of social representations. This study aimed to understand the genesis of social representations of human cloning. It was used two sources of data for analysis: articles published in Folha de Sao Paulo and Veja during the period from 1997 to 2007 and the letterssent by readers of newspapers and magazines surveyed during the same period. The keywords used were: clone, cloning, human cloning, therapeutic cloning, genetic engineering and cell therapy with stem cell. It was found 952 articles and 40 letters. The database was analyzed by the Alceste.The results show a representation of human cloning objectified: cloned baby, man's desire to be God, the manufacture of tissues, sick people and anchored in ideas of a religious nature,eugenics experiences and healing through science. These findings point to a structured representation among readers, cohesion and sharing of ideas. This opens a path for future research emergence of new representations.

Consumers' attitudes toward consumption of cloned beef. The impact of exposure to technological information about animal cloning.

Novel food technologies, such as cloning, have been introduced into the meat production sector; however, their use is not widely supported by many consumers. This study was designed to assess whether Japanese consumers' attitudes toward consumption of cloned beef (specifically, beef derived from bovine embryo and somatic cell-cloned cattle) would change after they were provided with technological information on animal cloning through a web-based survey. The results revealed that most respondents did not discriminate between their attitudes toward the consumption of the two types of cloned beef, and that most respondents did not change their attitudes toward cloned beef after receiving the technological information. The respondents' individual characteristics, including their knowledge about the food safety of cloned beef and their basic knowledge about animal cloning, influenced the likelihood of a change in their attitudes after they received the information. In conclusion, some consumers might become less uncomfortable about the consumption of cloned beef by the straightforward provision of technological information about animal cloning; however, most consumers are likely to maintain their attitudes.

U.S. consumers attitudes toward farm animal cloning.

In January 2008, the United States Food and Drug Administration concluded "meat and milk from cattle, swine, and goat clones or their offspring are as safe to eat as food we eat from those species now" (U.S. FDA, 2010). However, cloning remains a very controversial topic. A web-based survey administered by Knowledge Networks was used to determine U.S. consumers' awareness of and attitudes toward meat and milk from cloned cattle. Findings reveal consumers do not differentiate much between products from cloned animals and products from non-cloned animals. Overall consumers are concerned that animal cloning is an unnatural process and that it will lead to human cloning.

Attitudes of social science students in Israel and Austria towards the belated twins scenario--an exploratory study.

This article discusses results of a questionnaire survey of 156 university students in Israel and Austria examining reactions towards the Belated Twins scenario, which entails the artificial twinning of embryos of which one is immediately carried to term while the other one is born later. The scenario resembles a case of human reproductive cloning in terms of result (the creation of genetically identical individuals in a time-delayed manner) but it involves gamete fusion like "natural" reproduction. By means of qualitative text analysis we discuss the core themes mobilized both in support and opposition to the scenario. While Israeli and Austrian respondents held similar general attitudes (about half were in favour of legalizing Belated Twins, while about a third opposed it), they drew partly on different arguments to arrive at their conclusions. In both groups, uncertainty stemming from "novel" elements in the scenario was regularly interpreted as negatively exacerbating existing issues.

[The two (and more) cultures of the "clone". Utopia and fiction in post-war discourses of life sciences]. / Die zwei (und mehr) Kulturen des "Klons". Utopie und Fiktion im biowissenschaftlichen Diskurs der Nachkriegszeit.

Since the late 1950s, "two cultures" has become a catch phrase for describing a deep divide between science and literature. When Charles P. Snow, who initiated this discussion, introduced the notion of "two cultures" in a lecture at the University in Cambridge in 1959, he referred to an incompatibility of scientific and literary worldviews in Western Societies. His thesis of two contradicting cultures immediately received a huge variety of different responses from philosophers, scientists, novelists and literary scholars. However, this article argues that this widespread debate was part of a broader post-war discourse on the impact of modern science on society, in which especially the idea of "scientific progress" was at stake. Central to this debate was the question of how scientific and technological progress could affect the notion of the "human" itself. The paper analyses the emerging discourse on cloning against this background. The constitutive role of fiction and imagination in both fields, science and literature, is explored by tracing the scientific, utopian and literary cultures in which figures of human clones have taken different shapes since the 1960s. At that time, scientists developed utopian views in which the "clone" became a metaphor for future possibilities of transcending and reshaping the human nature. Science fiction writers reacted to this by portraying the human clone as an individual and by depicting human clone figures in a psychological way

Egg donation, surrogate mothering, and cloning: attitudes of men and women in Germany based on a representative survey.

OBJECTIVE: To determine opinions and attitudes of the German general population toward the treatment methods of reproductive medicine: egg donation, surrogate mothering, and reproductive cloning. DESIGN: Representative survey. SETTING: German general population: face-to-face interviews at home with 2,110 persons, aged 18-50 years. PATIENT(S): Patients were not included. INTERVENTION(S): No interventions took place. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S): Approval and disapproval of treatment methods of reproductive medicine and preimplantation genetic diagnosis were assessed by questionnaires regarding medical, age, reasons, or general. RESULT(S): Overall, the diverse treatment methods of reproductive medicine found comparable rates of approval and disapproval. Legalization of egg donation was approved by a slight majority (50.8%), particularly for medical reasons (35.9%). Surrogate mothering found lower overall rates of approval (43.7%), 28.5% supported an admission for medical reasons. Reproductive cloning was rejected by the vast majority (82.9%). Attitudes to reproductive medicine were affected by age and the individual reproductive experiences. CONCLUSION(S): New techniques in reproductive medicine and their development provide hope and health promises for affected couples but also entail long-term risks and ethical issues. Balancing the individual's right to a reproductive autonomy and choice and ethical standards will constitute a future challenge for society. Results demonstrate considerable uncertainty and information deficits in the community.

Human reproductive cloning and reasons for deprivation.

Human reproductive cloning provides the possibility of genetically related children for persons for whom present technologies are ineffective. I argue that the desire for genetically related children is not, by itself, a sufficient reason to engage in human reproductive cloning. I show this by arguing that the value underlying the desire for genetically related children implies a tension between the parent and the future child. This tension stems from an instance of a deprivation and violates a general principle of reasons for deprivation. Alternative considerations, such as a right to procreative autonomy, do not appear helpful in making the case for human reproductive cloning merely on the basis of the desire for genetically related children.

Moral qualms, future persons, and embryo research.

Many people have moral qualms about embryo research, feeling that embryos must deserve some kind of protection, if not so much as is afforded to persons. This paper will show that these qualms serve to camouflage motives that are really prudential, at the cost of also obscuring the real ethical issues at play in the debate concerning embryo research and therapeutic cloning. This in turn leads to fallacious use of the Actions/Omissions Distinction and ultimately neglects the duties that we have towards future persons.

Attitudes towards human reproductive cloning, assisted reproduction and gene selection: a survey of 4600 British twins.

BACKGROUND: Surveys have shown opposition to human reproductive cloning (HRC) in many countries. Views of identical (monozygotic, MZ) twins are of particular interest, as they naturally share 100% of their genes. We investigated attitudes of British twins towards HRC in the context of assisted reproduction technologies (ART) and gene selection. METHODS: About 4651 identical and non-identical (dizygotic, DZ) twins expressed their degree of agreement or disagreement to nine statements relating to ART, gene selection and HRC in a self-completion questionnaire. RESULTS: Most subjects (70% and 78% respectively) did not regard the use of medical technologies to treat infertility as interfering with either nature or God's will, despite believing that infertility is not a disease (54%). Attitudes to gene selection and HRC were context dependent, with more favourable views towards preventing serious diseases than towards enhancing traits. About 44% supported a permanent ban of HRC. MZ twins were significantly more likely to agree that HRC should be allowed for medical purposes, such as saving a sibling's life, than were DZ twins. Increasing religiosity generally correlated with more negative attitudes. CONCLUSIONS: Many attitudes are context dependent. More positive views of MZ twins towards HRC could be linked to their experience with being genetically identical.

Twins: A cloning experience.

Drawing upon qualitative interviews with monozygotic (identical) twins sharing 100% of their genes, and with dizygotic (fraternal) twins and singletons as control groups, this paper explores what it means to be genetically identical. (The twins interviewed were from the TwinsUK register in London.) In the context of the ongoing debate on human reproductive cloning, it examines questions such as: To what extent do identical twins perceive their emotional and physical bond to be a result of their genetic makeup? What would they think if they had been deliberately created genetically identical? How would they feel about being genetically identical to a person who was born a few years earlier or later? First, our respondents ascribed no great significance to the role of genes in their understanding of what it means to be identical twins. Second, the opinion that human reproductive cloning would "interfere with nature", or "contradict God's will", was expressed by our respondents exclusively on the abstract level. The more our respondents were able to relate a particular invented cloning scenario to their own life-worlds, the lower the prevalence of the argument. Third, for all three groups of respondents, the scenario of having been born in one of the other groups was perceived as strange. Fourth, the aspect that our respondents disliked about cloning scenarios was the potential motives of the cloners. Without equating monozygotic twins directly with "clones", these results from "naturally" genetically identical individuals add a new dimension to what a future cloning situation could entail: The cloned person might possibly (a) perceive a close physical and emotional connection to the progenitor as a blessing; (b) suffer from preconceptions of people who regard physical likeness as a sign of incomplete individuality; and (c) perceive the idea of not having been born a clone of a particular person as unpleasant.