ORIGINAL ARTICLE Susan McHugh The call of the other 0.1%: genetic aesthetics and the new Moreaus Received: 6 March 2005 / Accepted: 1 June 2005 / Published online: 26 November 2005 Ó Springer-Verlag London Limited 2005 Abstract Remakes of popular novels and films indicate how animals have become a primary means of representing not only the rapid development and proliferation of genetically modified organisms in plant form but also the interplay of aesthetics and scientific technologies in the post-Darwinian emphasis on species as a social form. Where vivisection worked in the 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau as a scientific mechanism for social domi- nance, ensuing versions of the story over the past 100 years have come to position eugenic breeding and, most recently, transgenic splicing as the trope for playing out the central cultural work of ordering species in the distinction of human species being. But the contradictions of representing animals also open up other possibilities for genetic aesthetics. Especially in the 1996 film remake, the isolation of the successful transgenic animal (akin to what artist Eduardo Kac calls ‘‘the beautiful chimera’’) and her alignment with the human become the conditions of possibility for a theriocentric (nonhuman animal centered) community of animal transgenics that emerges in opposition to the human genetic aesthetic. Animals remain the medium in which these struggles are (re)enacted, but their transgenic forms enable an investigation of how and why the human is increasingly defined as genetically 0.1% removed from the animal. Keywords Genetic aesthetics Æ Cognition Æ Film Æ The Island of Dr. Moreau Æ Transgenic animals Æ Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) Animals may not be big in the biotech industry at large, but they sure are big in its public perception. Fast becoming figures of evil in popular science fictions, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are anything but the poster children of their industries. Frequently imagined as super-powered animals run amok, fic- tional genetic chimera instead seem to take the rap for another kind of emergent creature, the multinational agribusiness now producing and distributing S. McHugh Department of English, University of New England, 11 Hills Beach Road, Biddeford, ME 04005-9599, USA E-mail: smchugh@une.edu Æ Tel.: +1-207-2830170 AI & Soc (2006) 20: 63–81 DOI 10.1007/s00146-005-0007-4