Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (A John Hope Franklin Center Book) [Paperback]

Sarah Franklin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 082233920X | ISBN-13: 978-0822339205 | Publication Date: April 11, 2007

While the creation of Dolly the sheep, the world’s most famous clone, triggered an enormous amount of discussion about human cloning, in Dolly Mixtures the anthropologist Sarah Franklin looks beyond that much-rehearsed controversy to some of the other reasons why 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—particularly 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 bioscientific 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. In Dolly Mixtures, Franklin uses the renowned sheep as an opportunity to begin developing a critical language to identify and evaluate the reproductive possibilities that post-Dolly biology now faces, and to look back at some of the important historical formations that enabled and prefigured Dolly’s creation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Deftly blending insights drawn from anthropology, history, science, animal husbandry, and current politics, Sarah Franklin has written an imaginative and illuminating account of the iconic Dolly and her many meanings.”—Harriet Ritvo, author of The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination

“Sarah Franklin’s timely, highly original book tracks sheep and sheep-human associations through their many pathways in deep and recent pasts and near futures; in economies and markets, in research institutes and pharmaceutical houses, in British national and colonial ventures; in the transcontinental traffic between agricultural sciences and human medicine, especially reproductive medicine; in kin-making within and between species; in the transit of famous animals from laboratory subjects to popular cultural icons; and in the trajectories from sheep breeding to human embryonic stem cell research.”—Donna Haraway, author of Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience

From the Publisher

"Sarah Franklin's timely, highly original book tracks sheep and sheep-human associations through their many pathways in deep and recent pasts and near futures; in economies and markets, in research institutes and pharmaceutical houses, in British national and colonial ventures; in the transcontinental traffic between agricultural sciences and human medicine, especially reproductive medicine; in kin-making within and between species; in the transit of famous animals from laboratory subjects to popular cultural icons; and in the trajectories from sheep breeding to human embryonic stem cell research."--Donna Haraway, author of Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse(tm): Feminism and Technoscience

"Deftly blending insights drawn from anthropology, history, science, animal husbandry, and current politics, Sarah Franklin has written an imaginative and illuminating account of the iconic Dolly and her many meanings."--Harriet Ritvo, author of The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (April 11, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082233920X
• ISBN-13: 978-0822339205
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #696,527 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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