Tail tales: how researchers handle transgenic dilemmas

This paper sets out to study dilemmas associated with transgenic mice as they appear in research practices. Transgenic mice create certain dilemmas because they are “trans” – both a product and a process – and cross over institutional as well as species boundaries. Furthermore, they transgress cultural boundaries and hybridize categories such as organism and innovation, science and technology, nature and culture. The article demonstrates how the cultural messiness inherent to the handling of transgenic mice results in “cleaning” activities, and through this unpacking suggests how these activities can be understood in terms of control. The analysis is done using a framework combining insights from animal studies, a doing ethics perspective and a rhetorical discourse tradition. The methods used are interviews and ethnographic fieldwork.