Biotechnology, Media and Law-Making: Lessons from the Cloning and Stem Cell Controversy in Australia 1997–2002

Abstract

This paper reports on a large media study of the Australian newspapers’ reporting on the cloning and stem cells controversy for the period 1997 to 2002. It is found that the media framed the technologies that were subject to the controversy (reproductive cloning, therapeutic cloning, embryonic stem cell research and adult stem cell research) according to certain scripts that either presented the technologies as causing anxiety or promising progress. These cultural scripts were ultimately worked together in the media to present a compromise that minimised the anxiety and maximised the progress. It is further argued that this framing was repeated in Commonwealth Parliament during debate on the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002 (Cth) and the Research Involving Human Embryos Act 2002 (Cth). It is suggested that this has implications for legal scholarship on law and technology; namely it opens understanding of legal responses to technology to the cultural context through which technologies are popularly communicated and how this context informs and structures the law-making process.