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The essays in this special issue emerged from a workshop held at Cardiff University in September 2010. As sociologists based at the dual-site (Lancaster and Cardiff) Centre for Economic and Social As- pects of Genomics (Cesagen) funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, we have both been engaged in researching ethi- cal and social issues around animal biotechnologies for a number of years. The aim of the workshop was to address various examples of animal biotechnology and consider their potential effect on the future of human/animal relations. We employ here a broad defini- tion of biotechnology to include various types of bioscience innova- tion instead of restricting ourselves to genetic modification (GM). In particular, we discern that several different types of biotechnology are bound up in a latent promissory discourse deployed by both sci- entists and animal advocates that perhaps surprisingly forecasts a benefit to the lives of other animals themselves through the uptake of particular technologies.
Situated, then, at the intersection of critical animal studies (CAS) and science and technology studies (STS), we are interested in the trajectories of animal biotechnology and how they may intensify or disrupt traditionally hierarchical relations between humans and other animals. Given that scientific knowledge production has been bound up in both vivisection and the commodification of farmed animals, we are interested in how new forms of knowledge could potentially reconfigure what has been an antagonistic relationship between science and social movements for animal advocacy, even though the epistemological diversity of the former has also provided much in the way of knowledge-claims for animal minds, subjectiv- ity, and sociality via ethology and animal-welfare science.1
During the first years of the twenty-first century, in the wake of the sequencing of the human genome, the choice of which nonhu- man animal genomes were sequenced was shaped, to a large extent, by economic utility and preexisting biomedical uses of animal mod- els. Thus those animals popular in animal research and agricultural commodification were among the first to be sequenced; for example, sequences of both the mouse and bovine genome were completed in 2009. This could be read as a rather straightforward intensification of the instrumentalization of animals, and while this is certainly part of what is happening, it is also,...