Abstract
Four years after the completion of the Human Genome Project, the US National Institutes for Health launched the Human Microbiome Project on 19 December 2007. Using metaphor analysis, this article investigates reporting in English-language newspapers on advances in microbiomics from 2003 onwards, when the word “microbiome” was first used. This research was said to open up a “new frontier” and was conceived as a “second human genome project”, this time focusing on the genomes of microbes that inhabit and populate humans rather than focusing on the human genome itself. The language used by scientists and by the journalists who reported on their research employed a type of metaphorical framing that was very different from the hyperbole surrounding the decipherment of the “book of life”. Whereas during the HGP genomic successes had been mainly framed as being based on a unidirectional process of reading off information from a passive genetic or genomic entity, the language employed to discuss advances in microbiomics frames genes, genomes and life in much more active and dynamic ways.
Highlights
In the year 2000 the near decipherment of the human genome was celebrated around the world
Others took the techniques developed during the Human Genome Project (HGP) further and began to study “patterns in how genes are transcribed into messenger RNA, the chemical that carries the instructions for forming proteins, in the way genes are expressed as proteins, and in how they influence the chemicals that control our cellular biochemistry and metabolism” (NERC, 2006)
Material and method In order to provide a provisional answer to these questions and to compare and contrast results with analyses of metaphorical media framing of advances in genetics carried out before, we searched Lexis Nexis Academic for articles published over two months in English speaking newspapers, using the keyword „microbiome‟
Summary
In the year 2000 the near decipherment of the human genome was celebrated around the world. Researchers seemed to have opened the „book of life‟ and gained insights into the language of God. Soon afterwards various post-genomic enterprises began to flourish, alongside an intensive study of the language and metaphors used to publicize, debate or sell the human genome project (Nerlich & Kidd, eds., 2006 and many more). From sequencing human and animal genomes, research went on to study their functions in functional genomics, compared them in comparative genomics and examined their structure or architecture. Others took the techniques developed during the Human Genome Project (HGP) further and began to study “patterns in how genes are transcribed into messenger RNA, the chemical that carries the instructions for forming proteins (transcriptomics), in the way genes are expressed as proteins (proteomics), and in how they influence the chemicals that control our cellular biochemistry and metabolism (metabolomics)” (NERC, 2006).
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