Dolly: Scientific Breakthrough or Frankenstein's Monster? Journalistic and Scientific Metaphors of Cloning

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Abstract
Metaphors such as "clones are mass products" always can be used for opposing purposes if both clones and mass products have many features in common from which to select. This results in complex novel events being used in opposed fashions in metaphors. To test this claim, discussions of Dolly, the cloned sheep, consistent with the claim "CLONES ARE MASS PRODUCTS" in The Times and Nature in 1997, were examined. Mass products can be viewed as perfectly similar and, therefore, things in which one can repose confidence as a purchaser, or as inferior assembly-line products lacking the quality and variety of unique things. In The Times, Dolly was a symptom of Frankenstein's works and clones were inferior copies. In Nature, Dolly was a symptom of progressive science and clones were perfect products. Parallels can be drawn to the interminable presence of ambiguity of the use of analogy-for example, in the development of the theory of evolution (Millman & Smith, 1997).

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