Abstract
Sometimes one is still asked – often by natural science colleagues – what the difference is between sociology and anthropology. Sarah Franklin's book would provide (half of) a convincing answer. It is a carefully crafted, technically well informed, consistently clever work of social research which is, never the less, somehow alien to the sociologist.
It starts with clones, which is what the reader expects from Dolly. Franklin explains carefully the basis of Dolly's reproduction and the whole range of related work on animal cloning. As is now well known, Dolly was produced by a process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer: the nucleus of a cell from an adult sheep was introduced into an emptied-out egg cell from a different sheep and this egg cell was then stimulated to reproduce itself. The egg was placed into a surrogate ewe and grew into an embryo and thence into Dolly. The Dolly process involves no father but up to three mothers.
Roughly speaking, Dolly showed that an adult mammal could be reproduced so as to generate almost-clones of that adult. I say almost-clones since the host cell was not entirely emptied out. Mitochondrial DNA remained, so that Dolly developed in a cellular environment with some DNA from an unrelated sheep (in fact, from a different breed in her case). Also, at the time of her birth, Dolly's own DNA was already old – having undergone repeated episodes of replication and cell division during Dolly's genetic mother's life – and thus Dolly at one month was not exactly like her (un-named) predecessor had been at the same age even at the genetic level, even though her coding DNA sequence was fundamentally the same. Still, the astonishing thing was that an adult mammal had virtually been cloned using one body cell (in this case a mammary cell) to generate all the other kinds of cells in the body. Dolly was even fertile, so that she could have passed on some of her genetic endowment (and thus her ‘mother's’) to her offspring. Franklin spent a good deal of time talking with the scientists who developed Dolly (Ian Wilmut and others) and visiting their workplace, and she covers this material well.
But Franklin is not writing the usual kind of book on cloning and its regulation; indeed early on she firmly sets herself apart from that literature. After discussing Dolly, she follows an unexpected route, locating our dealings with Dolly in the context of our broader connections to sheep. Though sheep might be thought to have lost their key place in the economy before industrial times, she finds that sheep are still all around us. Australia has over 110 million sheep and New Zealand approximately half that many, and Australia's sheep economy is dependent on live sales to the Middle East and North Africa. Humans are still modifying sheep biology, even away from the laboratory – choosing which breeds are favoured in Middle Eastern markets and responding to changing preferences for leaner or younger (or older) meat. Indeed, sheep breeds only really came to be understood in the modern sense in the eighteenth century. ‘Pure’ breeds were established by in-breeding, to an extent that wasn't far off cloning in any event; well before Dolly, sheep were human creations.
As Franklin happily acknowledges, we have grown used to the idea that humans think about themselves and their ‘natural’ properties in terms of other animals. Ape narratives are deployed to show us what we are not as well as what we are. Experimental mice in some ways do the same thing, both standing in for us and standing out from us. Franklin proposes that we think of sheep in a similar way; we have built landscapes for sheep and now sheep regulate the landscapes. We shape sheep but sheep shape our view of nature.
From breeds and commerce Franklin moves on to sheep troubles, specifically the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in Britain, which resulted in the mass culling of farm animals, and the probably less well known story of the live sheep cargo from Australia aboard the Cormo Express two years later. In the latter case, some 60,000 sheep were sent to Saudi Arabia from Western Australia but, on arrival in the Middle East, were rejected on the grounds that they were affected by a viral disease. Australian spokespersons rejected this claim but the sheep were turned away. The unlucky animals were stuck at sea with no nearby country willing to accept them. Even if they weren't unwell on arrival in port, being cooped up for much longer was likely to make them genuinely sick. Representatives of the industry in Australia rejected the idea that the animals could be repatriated – since this might lead to the idea in the Middle East that other Australian animals could be infected by them; in any event the animals might have now become vectors of some other disease. The authorities could find no one to take the sheep, even for free and in the end had to pay for them to be unloaded (and presumably eaten) in Eritrea.
Franklin unfolds her stories about Dolly in an attractive manner but many of her claims are allusive rather than specific. Let me take two points of detail to illustrate what I mean. First, there is the contested issue of how old/aged Dolly is. At birth her DNA had already been around for six years. It had gone through numerous cycles of replication and cell division as Dolly's genetic mother grew from fertilised egg to maturity. Reproduction generally results in the DNA becoming slightly shorter; the very end of the string is dropped. DNA molecules are protected from this process by having lengthy elements at the ends (telomeres) which do not code but which seem to function precisely to prevent the shortening process from affecting vital bits of the DNA sequence. The question is, was Dolly pre-aged at the genetic level? Franklin reports on suggestions that this may have been so and that this may have impacted her health in mid-life, but then concludes by noting that ‘Wilmut and his colleagues caution that these measurements were made in several different experiments and may be misleading’ (159). Given the centrality of this issue, one might have expected more detail on this debate but the discussion is left with Wilmut's vague reassurance.
Something similar happens in the Cormo Express case. Australian exporters seem to have believed that the disease claims were sparked not by any actual disease but by the fact that the Australian dollar had suddenly appreciated, making the sheep much dearer on arrival than had been anticipated. Steps were taken to try to construct some ‘objective’ body that could pronounce on whether the sheep were sick or not, though it is not clear in detail how the Saudi Arabian authorities responded to these moves. Again Franklin is more interested in what the generalities of the case tell us than the specifics.
Overall Franklin has tried to lift our gaze from Dolly as clone to sheep-in-society. This is an interesting move but I worry that it may have been achieved at the cost of detailed analyses of the construction of Dolly's age, of the infectedness of Australian sheep, and of numerous other specifics–the very kinds of details that have been the bread and butter of recent sociology of science.