The Influence of Popular Cultural Imagery on Public Attitudes Towards Cloning

This article shows how public attitudes towards cloning and geneticallymodified food and crops are influenced by dystopian science fictionliterature, films, images and metaphors. We analyse a body of textsproduced in the wake of the announcement of the successful cloning of Dollythe sheep by the Roslin Institute in February 1997, using methods fromdiscourse analysis and cognitive semantics. It is hoped that a betterunderstanding of the emergence and structure of lay imagery of issues suchas cloning will facilitate more effective communication between experts,policy makers and citizens.