“Designer babies” and “playing God”: Metaphor, genome editing, and bioethics in popular science texts

This study is a corpus-based analysis of metaphor in popular science texts about genetic engineering. It explores two sub-corpora of web articles drawn from Nature.com and TheGuardian.com in order to identify the metaphorical associations that authors of popularisation discourse trigger in the audience’s mind and the ethical issues that these associations may raise. The focus is especially on the genetic modification of embryos, which is often described as ‘text editing’, as well as on modified offspring, often defined by authors as ‘designer babies’. The former metaphor is connected to the traditional metaphor of the genome as a ‘text’ (Calsamiglia and van Dijk 2004), whereas the latter is rather connected to the commercialisation of modified babies, regarded as ‘designer’ or ‘tailored’ goods. The study shows how metaphor can be used both for popularising effects, mapping concepts from abstract to concrete domains, and for ethical reasons, persuading audiences of the dangerous consequences and high risks of genome editing. Only a small portion of metaphors in the corpus authorises and encourages genome editing as a ‘step’ towards progress and ‘fight’ against disease.