Investigating the development in the Italian press of the public debate on cloning after the announcement of the Dolly's birth allows one to trace and analyze the growing acceptance of mammal cloning as a scientific fact, at least at the media level. This analysis is focused mainly on the increasingly expanding network of issues interlinked with cloning within the “public space” created by the media and on the interaction among the various social actors who, motivated by the most divergent yet incredibly convergent interests, support these issues. Our analysis allows us to show not only the actors' different positions about cloning, but even how they contribute to establishing mammal cloning as a scientific fact. For this analysis, the perspective adopted refers mainly to the actor-network theory (ANT). The nearly 100 articles published in the two most widely read Italian newspapers over the period in which cloning remained front-page news in 1997 have been analyzed to assess the extent of their coverage and then subjected to a content analysis to determine their coverage of the network of issues and social actors involved in the debate.
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References
1.
As is well known, the “intrinsically public nature of the scientific enterprise” was depicted at the beginning by Merton, underlying a basic assumption for the sociology of science as a whole.
2.
the public announcement of Dolly's birth found space in the newspapers earlier than in the journal Nature, even if the difference was only few days. See also J. Turney, Frankenstein's Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 213.
3.
See the discussion and references in note 46, below.
4.
See, for instance, E. S. Clemens, “Of asteroids and dinosaurs: the role of the press in the shaping of scientific debate,”Social Studies of Science16, no. 3 (1986): 421-456.
5.
B. Lewenstein , “Science and the media,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. S. Jasanoff, G. E. Markle, J. C. Petersen, and T. Pinch (London: Sage, 1995), 343-360.
6.
J. Meyrowitz , No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
7.
Thus the public as well as closed character of science emerges; it has been taken, for instance, by Merton as the ideal pattern of functioning of scientific community, see R. K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
8.
This term should include not only general “public opinion” but also any social actors who cannot be professionally defined as scientists, so this category covers politicians, religious institutions, intellectuals, doctors, and so on.
9.
For the specific relationship between media and biology, see also J. Turney, Frankenstein's Footsteps, in particular, pp. 66-77 and p.148.
10.
M. Bucchi , Science and the Media. Alternative Routes in Scientific Communication (London: Routledge, 1998).
11.
J. Durant , M. W. Bauer, G. Gaskell, ed., Biotechnology in the Public Sphere (London: Science Museum, 1998), 3.
12.
As discussed after paragraph 5, the U.S. president, the European Community, and several states including Italy passed legislation to stop the funds for research in the field of human cloning a few days after Dolly's birth.
13.
Durantet al. , Biotechnology, p. 4.
14.
P. R. Wheale and R. McNally, “The social management of genetic engineering: an introduction,” in The Social Management of Genetic Engineering, ed. P. R. Wheale, R. von Schomberg, and P. Glasner (Aldershot, UK & Brookfield, VT, USA: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 1998), 1-27, especially p. 2.
15.
For a recent review, see also J. Law and J. Hassard, ed., Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
16.
B. Latour , Science in Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 117.
17.
So, for instance, when the debate about recombinant DNA began “alongside the `official' debate, conducted in committee rooms and in the pages of scientific journals, there were popular accounts of the issues, in which the vocabulary the scientists used had different connotations” (Turney, Frankenstein's Footsteps, p. 194).
18.
and the definition and the discussion of “translation” in Callonet al., Mapping the Dynamics of Science & Technology, pp.xvii and 24-28.
19.
B. Latour, Nous N'avons Jamais été Modernes (Paris: La Découverte, 1991), chap. I.
20.
B. Wynne , “Public understanding of science,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. S. Jasanoff, G. E. Markle, J. C. Petersen, and T. Pinch (London: Sage, 1995), 361-388.
21.
From this point of view, our use of the actor/network theory is quite different from that of T. Wilkie and E. Graham, “Power without responsibility: media portrayals of Dolly and science,”Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics7 (1998): 150-159.
22.
Latour , Science in Action, p. 41.
23.
The same happened, for instance, at the beginning of the twentieth century during the debate about the creation of life in the laboratory when “most editorial comments... pondered the consequences rather than the plausibility of life creation” (Turney, Frankenstein's Footsteps, p. 84).
24.
The articles cover 25 to 27 October.
25.
When we talk of Italian newspapers, it is important to remember that the Italian publishing market does not make the distinction between popular and “quality” newspapers characteristic of other national markets. As a consequence, the wider distribution of the two mentioned papers must be conceived in absolute and not relative terms.
26.
The coverage trend is shown in Figure 4a.
27.
See Figure 4b.
28.
N. Luhmann, Soziale Systeme. Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984), chap. IV.
29.
This interrelationship between the Luhmann approach and the ANT doesn't mean that the whole theory on which the first is based could be compatible with the second; that remains the most important theoretical reference of this article.
30.
See Figure 7 and the discussion of the different actors' standpoints.
31.
The notion of semantic macrostructure used here yields results quite different from that proposed by van Dijk as mean for the news analysis. He defines it as the hierarchical organization of topics or themes—where topics correspond to macropropositions that are formed by a group of propositions interlinked on the basis of general knowledge and personal beliefs and interests; see T. A. van Dijk, News as Discourse (Hillsdale, NJ: LEA, 1988), 34. In our case, it is hard to reduce each topic—here called “issue”—to a group of propositions, and for each issue there are moreover one or more actors who express opinions about it.
32.
Kolata , Clone, p. 82.
33.
The link between cloning and IVF has been a sort of leitmotif from the beginning of the public debate about biological development and its possible applications; see Turney, Frankenstein's Footsteps, pp. 140, 170, 178.
34.
Il Corriere della Sera, 25 October 1993 (front page) and La Repubblica, 26 October 1993 (front page).
35.
In 1987, its position on the matter was made official in the document entitled Respect for the Unborn and the Dignity of Procreation by the Holy Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
36.
The Vatican's position was reaffirmed in 1995 by the encyclical Evangelium Vitae.
37.
National Bioethics Committee , Parere sulle tecniche di procreazione assistita. Sintesi e conclusioni (Roma: Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1994), 5.
38.
Note that this void still continues at the time of this writing.
39.
“Totipotence” is the embryonic cells' condition during the first days after conception. This condition permits the embyonic cells subsequently to differentiate.
40.
In spite of the increasing relevance ascribed to genetic factors, the role of the environment is still accepted as determinant among the scientists.
41.
In any case, this would certainly not happen until the debate on cloning was limited to a question among only scientists and the communication channels within the scientific community. This is what happened in March 1996, when the Italian press reported a dispute between Nature and the Sunday Times. The English newspaper accused the prestigious journal of not having been totally honest in their report on the experiment at the Roslin Institute of Edinburgh that led to the birth by “cloning” of two lambs. An inevitable controversy ensued, even Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell appeared publicly to provide the necessary details. But the accusations, even with the announcement of Dolly's cloning, did not take the minimum interest of the general public into account. Thus the controversy ended up, more or less, as a discussion on the correctness of the scientific communication of a “discovery” that still had a somewhat doubtful credibility. It was, after all, a minor squabble that did not remotely anticipate what was to occur a year later.
42.
For a reconstruction of the Italian debate about Dolly and cloning, see also R. Satolli and F. Terragni, ed., La clonazione e il suo doppio (Milano: Garzanti, 1998).
43.
On that day, La Repubblica workers were on strike.
44.
See again Figures 4a and 4b.
45.
This is very curious, since the Pope had not expressly mentioned cloning but had launched a more general appeal to respect life and thus the need to put an end to “dangerous experiments” promoted merely in the quest for profit. Nevertheless, a few days earlier a note in L'Osservatore Romano—the official newspaper of the Vatican—asked politicians to ban human cloning.
46.
has reinforced the Scottish results, even if the new method is quite different and the rate of success remains very low (just 1%; see V. Sgaramella, “La scienza prima e dopo Dolly,” in ed. R. Satolli and F. Terragni, La clonazione e il suo doppio, 43-68, especially p. 65). It is also important to note that, whereas the scientific debate developed in Science and Nature finds space in the scientific pages of the English and American newspapers, this did not happen in the Italian papers.
47.
See, for example, the articles published by Il Corriere della Sera on 1st March and by La Repubblica on 3rd March.
48.
La Repubblica, 1 March 1997, p. 9.
49.
S. Lundin and M. Ideland, ed., Gene Technology and the Public. An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 1997).
50.
La Repubblica, 3 March 1997, p. 15.
51.
and in the Declaration about the cloning problem, signed by Renato Dulbecco and Paolo Vezzoni (Milan: Le Scienze, 1997).
52.
George Porter, 1967 Nobel Prize winner for chemistry at the conference Knowledge in science and in technology: new ideas in Europe, Rome, 20th and 21st November 1997 (excerpts from his speech, translated by Sylvie Coyaud, appeared in the Sunday supplement of Il Sole 24 ore on 23rd November 1997).
53.
As highlighted by Nelkin and Lindee, “the DNA has assumed a cultural meaning similar to that of the Biblical soul” (The DNA Mystique, p. 40), and therefore it is strategic for the Catholic Church to oppose this intrusiveness of science in a field traditionally reserved to her competence.
54.
At the beginning of the nineties, the party that had traditionally represented the Catholic electorate, the Democrazia Cristiana (DC), collapsed into several smaller parties because of a crisis generated by judicial vicissitudes regarding corruption. During that period, the political arena had reorganized in two main groups, one near the center-left positions, the other near the center-right. The smaller parties split their allegiances between these two groups. In 1997, the Italian government was expressive of the center-left, which also included some small parties of Catholic inspiration, as well as the opposition. Moreover, as has been observed by Allansdottir, Pammolli, and Bagnara in their analysis of the Italian debate on biotechnology from 1973 until 1996, “while benefits were mostly in terms of health, the costs and the risks associated with modern biotechnology were primarily perceived as moral hazards” (A. Allansdottir, F. Pammolli, and S. Bagnara, “Italy,” in Durant et al., Biotechnology, pp. 89-102, especially p. 94).
55.
About the Italian situation, see F. Neresini and F. Bimbi, “The lack and the `need' of IVF regulation for assisted fertilization: the Italian case,” in Bodies of Technology. Women's Involvement with Reproductive Medicine, ed. A. R. Saetnan, N. Oudshoorn, and M. Kirejczyk (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000).
56.
About the management of public opinion on the problems related to biotechnology, see A. Hill and M. Michael, “Engineering acceptance: representations of `the public' in debates on biotechnology,” in Whealeet al., eds., The Social Management of Genetic Engineering, pp. 201-217.
57.
See section 2, where the notion of translation is discussed.
58.
That is, monozygotic twins.
59.
Kolata , Cloning, p. 246.
60.
Satolli and Terragni, La clonazione e il suo doppio; Kolata, Cloning.
61.
It is known that hosts of people worry about protecting the polar bear but practically nobody acts to safeguard battery hens.
62.
Even if some explanations have already given about the means of constructing Figure 7 in the methodological paragraph, it could be useful to give some more details. In Figure 7, the categories of actors involved in the public debate are assigned to two possible positions: “against” or “for” each of the three main issues (IVF, human cloning, and Dolly (i.e., the cloning of a mammal using DNA from a somatic cell). The arrows indicate the interest of each category of actors to support an issue from an “against” or “for” point of view. Some categories include actors both for and against. As a representation, even Figure 7 is obviously a simplification.
63.
As pointed out by ANT, the translation process works if each actor is able to render “himself indispensable to others actors by creating a geography of obligatory passage points” (Callonet al., Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology, p. xvii). From the scientists' point of view, translation happens mainly when they can force their allies to pass “through” their laboratories.
64.
Among the most frequent, we find Frankenstein, Jurassic Park, and The Boys from Brazil.
