Crazy Quilt: Cloning Collaborations

摘要

Human Cloning in the Media: From Science Fiction to Science Practice, by Joan Haran, Jenny Kitzinger, Maureen McNeil and Kate O'Riordan, London and New York: Routledge, Genetics and Society series edited by Paul Atkinson. At some point a few years back, while trying to reconstruct the history of genetic disease in the United States, I began to think of the science of human genetics as pieced together from the experiences of people in many different social locations. At the time I was working on a chapter exploring genetics research during the 1960s among the Pennsylvania Amish. Perhaps I was driving around too much in Lancaster County, where magnificent Amish quilts fill shop windows and clothes lines, because somehow quilts became 'good to think with' around questions of genetic science. Female productions, often collaborative, often involving a life narrative, they are forms of low art that can also move up, into galleries and museums. Quilts bring together fabrics from many sources (sheep's wool included) which are subsumed under a broader pattern, and in that pattern given a single meaning. Their seams are obvious, right there on the surface, if you bother to look, but the broader pattern is what matters to most observers.