Breakthrough Motif: Dolly the Cloned Ewe Meets Astrid the Hybrid Pig

The 'breakthrough' motif today serves as one of the most pervasive temporal abstractions for describing key events in science and medicine. Of late, it has come to refer to commemorative moments including the introduction of signify unequivocal disjunctures in the overall temporal shape of innovation and science, designating all the major 'steps forward' of grand progress narratives (Lyotard, 1984). It is therefore, probably one of the most routine cultural methods available for making tacit sense of the dynamics of change and the relevance of 'the new' to the future. This is not to imply that breakthrough is unambiguously favourable to those who use it most. Both scientific institutions and popular science writers express competing points of view. The metaphor is sometimes derided by both constituencies as an overused cliché that inflates hopes and creates promises which too often go unfulfilled (Palevitz and Lewis, 1998; MacNair, 1995). A good example of this is a recent meeting between senior scientists and correspondents at Cold Spring Harbor entitled 'Breakthrough! How News Influences Health Perception and Behaviour'. Illustrating the ambivalences embedded in breakthrough, during the course of the meeting, the metaphor was quickly abbreviated to the pejorative 'B-word'. In a review