'The influence of popular cultural imagery on public attitudes towards cloning'

This article shows how public attitudes towards cloning and genetically modified food and crops are influenced by dystopian science fiction literature, films, images and metaphors. We analyse a body of texts produced in the wake of the announcement of the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep by the Roslin Institute in February 1997, using methods from discourse analysis and cognitive semantics. It is hoped that a better understanding of the emergence and structure of lay imagery of issues such as cloning will facilitate more effective communication between experts, policy makers and citizens.