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“Go to work on an egg” urged the British Egg Board in 1990, in advertisements showing dark-suited men and women riding giant hen’s eggs down crowded city streets. I was living in London that year, reading Guardian reports on Parliamentary debates over human embryo research, and the Egg Board ads made me laugh. What an unfortunate choice of slogan! In the years since, however , that slogan has seemed prophetic, challenging the narrow focus on human eggs and embryos with a broader vision of reproductive control as central not only to human medicine but to agriculture as well. From biologists and biomedical researchers to cinematographers, industrial designers, and supermarket buyers, people in a range of professions have indeed gone to work on an egg, drawn by its remarkable features as an experimental model: the easy access it provides to the malleability and plasticity of life itself. In November of 2007 I returned to England to discuss egg engineering with people intimately involved in the practice, though in two very different contexts . I spent a day in Oxfordshire with the group of industrial designers who were inspired to create the first high-design urban hen house, the “eglu,” and the following day I met with Claudio Stern, J Z Young Professor and chair of the Centre for Stem Cells and Regenerative Biology at University College, London. Stern had intrigued me by claiming, in a 2005 article, that the chicken, “one of the most versatile experimental systems available,” had now “come of age as a major model system for biology, medicine, and agriculture” (Stern 2005, 16, 1). My conversations with the graphic designers and the biologist sparked not only metaphysical speculations but also some very material appreciation of the com34 Biology “Of all the strange things in biology surely the most striking of all is the transmutation inside the developing egg, when in three weeks the white and the yolk give place to the animal with its tissues and organs, its batteries of enzymes and its delicately regulated endocrine system. This coming-to-be can hardly have failed to lead . . . to thoughts of a metaphysical character.” —Joseph Needham A History of Embryology bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb 2 plexities of chicken culture, those processes by which the chick embryo, cinema technology, and chicken farming were harnessed to produce “the Chicken-ofTomorrow .” Move Over, iPod: Here Come the Chickens Our rental car jolted along the pitted road around the back of a suburban house to a small industrial park, where we came to a stop next to a Prius. This was the Oxfordshire headquarters of Omlet, a small British corporation that manufactures the hen house I would vote “most likely to make it into the Museum of Modern Art.” As we pulled in, a small cardboard box with large air holes from which clucks and squawks emanated was being loaded into the open hatchback . A chicken was about to be delivered to a new eglu owner, we learned from Johannes Paul, the lanky, bearded young man who met us at the door. After having earned an undergraduate engineering degree, Paul wound up at the Royal College of Art in London, studying industrial design, together with his friends James Tuthill, Simon Nichols, and William Wyndham. As Paul explained, “In our final year we were looking at working together afterwards and starting a company , and [trying to identify an area which] would distinguish us from people who were just doing furniture, tables and chairs. . . . And James kind of pops up with this idea of Why don’t we redesign a chicken house?”1 Johannes was still animated by the excitement of the moment he described: “[We] could see how we could develop not just the product but a whole kind of community around it and we could build this lifestyle and give people something they genuinely wanted and needed, and we could repackage chickens in a kind of twenty-first century way, which would mean that they were accessible again for the vast majority of people. . . . Now they would go: I really want to keep chickens, and I’ve found this great company who make this amazing chicken house and you can buy it all online and have it delivered right to your garden. With the chickens ” (Paul and Wyndham 2007). Their new product was the eglu, a glossy plastic chicken cage in the shape of an egg with an attached screened run that allowed the chicken access to the green grass of a backyard. Arguably the biggest...

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