Dolly Mixtures

While the creation of Dolly the sheep, the world's most famous clone, triggered an enormous amount of discussion about human cloning, inDolly Mixturesthe anthropologist Sarah Franklin looks beyond that much-rehearsed question to some of the other reasons the iconic animal's birth and death were significant. Building on the work of historians and anthropologists, Franklin reveals Dolly as the embodiment of agricultural, scientific, social, and commercial histories which are, in turn, bound up with national and imperial aspirations. Dolly was the offspring of a long tradition of animal domestication as well as the more recent histories of capital accumulation through selective breeding and enhanced national competitiveness through the control of biocapital. Franklin traces Dolly's connections to Britain's centuries-old sheep and wool markets (which were vital to the nation's industrial revolution) and to Britain's export of animals to its colonies-and particularly to Australia-to expand markets and produce wealth. Moving forward in time, she explains the celebrity sheep's links to the embryonic cell lines and global bio-scientific innovation of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. Franklin combines wide-ranging sources-from historical accounts of sheep-breeding, to scientific representations of cloning by nuclear transfer, to popular media reports of Dolly's creation and birth-as she draws on gender and kinship theory as well as postcolonial and science studies. She argues that there is an urgent need for more nuanced responses to the complex intersections between the social and the biological, intersections which are literally reshaping reproduction and genealogy. InDolly Mixtures, Franklin takes the renowned sheep as an opportunity to begin to develop a critical language to identify and evaluate the reproductive possibilities post-Dolly biology now faces, and to look back at some of the important historical formations that enabled and prefigured Dolly's creation.

Sarah Franklin is Professor of Social Studies of Biomedicine and Associate Director of the Bios (Centre for the study of bioscience, biomedicine, biotechnology, and society at the London School of Economics and Political Science