Donna Haraway is perhaps our most advanced scientific storyteller. She locates the myths, metaphors, and tropes that underlie a technologically companionable physical world. Without abandoning scientific method—in fact, by embracing it in its fullest applicability—she exposes and also celebrates our scientific narratives as our clan story. In the process she 'outs' our most fundamental distinctions and unexamined paradoxes: nature/culture, wild/domesticated, molecular/organic, animal/human, body/gender, et al. Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields is the first chapter of Haraway's epic tale of Western science. When she names it 'metaphors that shape embryos,' it should be clear that embryos also shape her metaphors, for she brilliantly illuminates the origin and dependence of each in each other. Donna Haraway is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department, University of California, Santa Cruz.
