Introduction to Special Issue on Animal Biotechnology: Do Animal Biotechnologies Have a Latent Liberatory Imaginary?

The essays in this special issue emerged from a workshop held at Cardiff University in September 2010. As sociologists based at the dual-site (Lancaster and Cardiff) Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen) funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, we have both been engaged in researching ethical and social issues around animal biotechnologies for a number of years. The aim of the workshop was to address various examples of animal biotechnology and consider their potential effect on the future of human/animal relations. We employ here a broad definition of biotechnology to include various types of bioscience innovation instead of restricting ourselves to genetic modification (GM). In particular, we discern that several different types of biotechnology are bound up in a latent promissory discourse deployed by both scientists and animal advocates that perhaps surprisingly forecasts a benefit to the lives of other animals themselves through the uptake of particular technologies.

Situated, then, at the intersection of critical animal studies (CAS) and science and technology studies (STS), we are interested in the trajectories of animal biotechnology and how they may intensify or disrupt traditionally hierarchical relations between humans and other animals. Given that scientific knowledge production has been bound up in both vivisection and the commodification of farmed animals, we are interested in how new forms of knowledge could potentially reconfigure what has been an antagonistic relationship between science and social movements for animal advocacy, even though the epistemological diversity of the former has also provided much in the way of knowledge-claims for animal minds, subjectivity, and sociality via ethology and animal-welfare science.¹

During the first years of the twenty-first century, in the wake of the sequencing of the human genome, the choice of which nonhuman animal genomes were sequenced was shaped, to a large extent, by economic utility and preexisting biomedical uses of animal models. Thus those animals popular in animal research and agricultural commodification were among the first to be sequenced; for example, sequences of both the mouse and bovine genome were completed in 2009. This could be read as a rather straightforward intensification of the instrumentalization of animals, and while this is certainly part of what is happening, it is also, we argue, an oversimplification. In the context of the biopolitical sequencing of agricultural animals, genomic knowledge can potentially be used in various ways, perhaps most obviously to enhance traditional productivist agriculture in the form of, for example, faster breeding or breeding larger animals. As we write (May 2013), it seems likely that the United States will soon grant regulatory approval to the first GM animal for human consumption—a salmon that is precisely designed to grow faster. Yet, at the same time, animal-welfare scientists are also involved in trying to use genomic knowledge to inform selection decisions that are less economically reductionist. While this may be a long way from any understanding of animal “liberation”—a concept that we are also keen to think critically about in this issue—it does begin to reveal the potential for ethically divergent animal biotechnologies.

The production of animals for food, already often a culturally ambivalent practice, intersects with several contemporary public health and environmental crises, and so meat in particular has emerged as an area of social concern and potential technological intervention. Sarah Franklin’s concept of “ethical biocapital” attempts to capture how a form of ethics is increasingly “built into new life forms.”² Accordingly, some animal scientists attempt to anticipate and avoid controversy within the very materiality of their innovation—in the bodies of animals—as “greener” or “healthier” products. Similarly, attempts may be made to build in particular values and implied practices or relations into the production of animals, or indeed parts of animals. Although it is not new for the human domestication of animals to incorporate various economic and aesthetic values, here, more specifically, we may note a response to the various crises of the legitimation of animal agriculture: an attempt to sidestep them, or to turn...