Hybrids: Towards a New Typology of Beings and Animal Products

A publication produced for the Hybrids: Towards a New Typology of Beings and Animal Products project funded by a Wellcome Trust public engagement grant. The project explored the emergence of biological hybrids in biotechnologies and our human, personal, moral, aesthetic and sociocultural responses to them. The two main examples of technology that the project focused on were the breeding of GM animals and xenotransplantation. The creation of any kind of hybrid begins to challenge species boundaries — in particular, an entirely new resonance on how we learn and form categories about ‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ is brought about. The project built on recent creativity and scholarship in design, bioethics, and historical and anthropological studies in the human, the animal, and the monstrous, providing tools for investigating our moral, social, cultural, and personal responses to the strange and different in human biology and ‘transhuman’ creatures. The result is to provoke discussion about genetically modified human-animal hybrids in existing and near future biotechnology. The transdisciplinary nature of the project was facilitated through the collaboration with Professor of Bioethics Richard Ashcroft (Department of Law, Queen Mary University of London) and Professor of Science Education Michael Reiss (Institute of Education, University College London). Included was also the support of active researchers in the areas of early childhood education, and developmental biology and biotechnology. In particular, what was sought, was an exploration of the relationship between future science curriculum and children’s learning in the categories of the animal/human. The project output was a narrative-based teaching methodology that uses tangible design artefacts to go beyond verbal language to introduce young children to emerging biotechnologies. Learning from existing examples of companies and organisations that produce educational toys, we designed and prototyped twelve dolls to present scientific information and to inspire awareness of associated ethical issues