“Hecho en México”: a media analysis of the first MRT baby

ABSTRACT

2016 witnessed the birth of the first baby conceived using mitochondrial replacement technology (MRT), a procedure conducted by an international team in a Mexican clinic. The story soon made it to the international press, where authorship was assigned to the USA team and Mexico was described as lacking regulation, thus a suitable location. The Mexican media offered a different version. The baby was stamped as “made in Mexico” and the Mexican physician involved was described as a remarkable citizen and bold scientist. The story served as a counter-narrative to the one circulating in the press and academic circles. It dismantled the notion of Mexico as a country with “no rules” and instead offered a story of a country producing cutting-edge technology and of a government ready to back up scientific progress. In this paper, we analyze the performative acts that transformed this breakthrough into a national success and we ask about the role the Mexican team had in this accomplishment. This analysis contributes to the conversation held within the field of postcolonial science and technology studies, regarding knowledge production, authorship, and the role of science stories in the process of nation building.

RESUMO

O ano de 2016 testemunhou o nascimento do primeiro bebê concebido com a tecnologia de substituição mitocondrial (MRT), um procedimento realizado por uma equipe internacional em uma clínica mexicana. A história logo chegou à imprensa internacional, onde a autoria foi atribuída à seleção dos EUA e o México foi descrito como carente de regulamentação, portanto, um local adequado. A mídia mexicana ofereceu uma versão diferente. O bebê foi carimbado como “feito no México” e o médico mexicano envolvido foi descrito como um cidadão notável e um cientista ousado. A história serviu de contra-narrativa à que circulava na imprensa e no meio acadêmico. Desmontou a noção do México como um país “sem regras” e, em vez disso, ofereceu a história de um país que produz tecnologia de ponta e de um governo pronto para apoiar o progresso científico. Neste artigo, analisamos os atos performativos que transformaram esse avanço em um sucesso nacional e perguntamos sobre o papel que a equipe mexicana teve nessa conquista. Esta análise contribui para o debate feito no campo dos campo dos estudos pós-coloniais de ciência e tecnologia, sobre produção de conhecimento, autoria e o papel das histórias científicas no processo de construção da nação.

RESUMEN

En el 2016 se anunció el nacimiento del primer bebé concebido usando la técnica de reemplazo mitocondrial, un procedimiento realizado por un equipo internacional en una clínica mexicana. La noticia pronto llegó a la prensa internacional, donde se le asignó autoría al equipo estadounidense y México fue descrito como carente de regulación, por lo tanto el lugar idóneo para realizar el procedimiento. En los medios nacionales circuló una versión distinta de la noticia. El bebé fue descrito como ‘hecho en México’ y el médico mexicano como ‘rifadísimo’. Esta versión sirvió como una contra-narrativa. Esta versión desmanteló la idea de que México es un país sin reglas; en su lugar, colocó a México como un país en el que se produce ciencia de frontera con un gobierno que la apoya. En este artículo analizamos los actos performativos que permitieron la transformación de este logro en un éxito nacional y nos preguntamos por el papel que jugó el equipo mexicano en este caso de éxito. Con este análisis buscamos contribuir a la conversación sobre la producción de saberes, las prácticas de asignación de autoría y el papel de la ciencia en la construcción de nación, llevada a cabo en los campos de los estudios postcoloniales y los estudios de ciencia y tecnología.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial STS
• knowledge production
• mitochondrial replacement technology (MRT)
• media analysis
• performative acts
• Mexico

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• STS postcolonial
• produção de conhecimento
• tecnologia de substituição mitocondrial (MRT)
• análise de mídia
• atos performativos
• México

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Estudios poscoloniales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología
• producción de conocimiento
• técnicas de reemplazo mitrocondrial
• análisis de medios
• actos performativos
• México

1. Introduction

In 2016, the birth of the first baby conceived using mitochondrial replacement technology (MRT) was announced in an abstract published in the annual conference program of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (Zhang et al. 2016). A few days later, the story appeared in the British science communication magazine New Scientist (Hamzelou 2016). During the following days, the press across the globe picked up the story repeating what New Scientist had said. This birth caught the attention of scholars across the natural and social sciences because of the life-changing nature of the technique and the controversial way it had been carried out. The procedure was described as a way of helping a Jordanian couple give birth to a child free of the mitochondrial disease carried by the mother. The technique involved genetic information from three people: the mother’s nuclear DNA, the father’s sperm DNA, and a donor’s mitochondrial DNA. Because this baby held DNA from three people, he was dubbed in the media as the “Three Parent Baby,” a label that was highly contested by many academics (see Dimond and Stephens 2018). Likewise, the place where the procedure took place attracted critical attention. The initial press reported that the procedure had been performed by an international team, headed by a US-based scientist, in a Mexican clinic because Mexico “has no rules” that would prohibit it (see Palacios-González and Medina-Arellano 2017). Overall, the press presented this story as proof that MRT is a successful method to avoid inheriting mitochondrial disease, and placed Mexico as a country without regulation (González-Santos, Stephens, and Dimond 2018). However, the story told by the Mexican media was different.

In this article, we analyze the way four high-rating television and radio shows presented this story. We argue that these programs offered a narrative that had a strong nation-building tone and framed the procedure as highly techno-scientific. They did so by highlighting the role Mexican people and institutions had in creating the conditions that made this success possible. The anchors of these programs, for example, described Chávez-Badiola, the Mexican physician involved, as “rifadísimo”¹ and as central for this achievement, they stamped the baby as “made in Mexico,” and they considered the procedure as an “extraordinary” procedure, as the “most important biotechnological development” of our time, and as undoubtedly a national success. They presented Mexico as a technologically-able country, a pioneer in the field of assisted reproduction, contributing to it through this cutting-edge biotechnological innovation, which is a source of pride for Mexicans, and it presented this case as an opportunity for the development of the legal, scientific, and medical fields. We show how this was achieved through specific performative acts that allowed and provoked certain things: they made MRTs worthy (legal, ethical, moral, valuable, and important), they helped Chávez-Badiola to claim authorship, and they transformed the regulatory situation into an opportunity. Through these acts, strategic alliances were established (Latour 1987; Law 1992), particular framings were drawn, and MRTs were presented as virtuous procedures designed to help families.

Using the idea of performative acts as an analytical tool and drawing on postcolonial science and technology studies (STS), in this paper, we analyze four high-rating programs, describing how this narrative turned this birth into a national accomplishment. In the following section, we highlight the ideas we draw from the postcolonial STS perspective. Then, we offer a brief description of the media we analyzed as well as the methods we used for their analysis. The fourth section presents the analysis of how this MRT case was made national. The paper closes with a conclusion that recapitulates the findings and opens a discussion by viewing this story through a wider lens connecting it with other stories of reproductive technology.

2. Postcolonial STS: who gets the right to claim knowledge?

STS scholars have studied the way knowledge claims are constructed, debated, circulated, accepted, turned into facts, then maybe questioned, rejected, and forgotten (see for example Callon, Law, and Rip 1986; Latour 1987; Law 1992). They have shown how the process of knowledge production and continuance involves a great amount of work that is carried out by a heterogeneous array of actors in various places, both inside and outside the scientific realm. This work involves producing and gathering economic, legal, human, epistemological, and technological resources as well as the production of the conditions where science and technology can be developed, experimented, practiced and demonstrated. For claims to transform into facts, they need to gather supporters and they need to sustain these gatherings to keep the claim alive. Hence, the production of knowledge and its transformation into scientific facts are contingent to and part of the context in which they take place. Parts of this process can take place in the media, as we will see further ahead.

We strengthen the STS perspective with the work of postcolonial scholars like Reyes Cruz (2008), Moreno Figueroa (2010), and Medina et al. (2014) who have argued against the idea that colonialism ended when the administration and control of colonies were handed to the now nation-states. Their work shows how the division of labor and the ethno-racial hierarchies that were produced through colonialism were not transformed when colonists left. Instead, the modern global and local colonial process creates, strengthens, and re-signifies these exclusions. The contemporary epistemic, spiritual, racial, ethnic, and gendered hierarchies and tensions are a product of what Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel (2007) call the “modern/colonial, capitalist/patriarchal, Euro/Northamerican world system.” These tensions are not simply economic nor simply cultural, they shape a wider, more intricate network of power that integrates and produces economic, political, and cultural processes – including the process of knowledge production.

Postcolonial STS is also concerned with the implications of labeling certain types of knowledge as proper science and others as “ethno-science” or traditional knowledge; with trying to understand how colonial inequalities and forms of racialization re-materialize through novel technologies; and with looking at the way “new” knowledge travels with and through “old” colonial encounters and relations (Harding 2011; Vertommen, 2015; Perler and Schurr 2021). However, acknowledging the power dynamics of the geopolitics of knowledge should not necessarily be followed by a nationalist perspective that celebrates scientific accomplishments as local and disconnected from the rest of the world. As Cházaro (2009) argues, the history of science and medicine requires abandoning the quest for linearity and origin. Knowledge is neither something that travels from north to south nor the product of an isolated nation. Science is always multi-sited, hence its travels become a fundamental epistemological question (Steven J. Harris, 1998). In a similar line of thought, Harding (2011) warns against assuming local hierarchies to be irrelevant to the struggle to escape Western anthropocentrism. Modernity does not spread from the West to the rest of the world. It is produced in each society, with elements arriving from the outside (which is not necessarily the West) that need to interact and negotiate with local elements affecting and transforming all of them. Modernity is the result of these negotiations, and it is always local.

Inspired by these ideas and concerns, in this paper, we ask: Who can claim authorship over this knowledge and how can they do this? Who stipulates what counts as the knowledge needed for the first successful MRT case and how is this argued? This case is an example of how it is those who hold cultural and social capital who can determine what counts as knowledge, and how they are able to impose and reproduce their authority and knowledge system. As we describe in detail, it is the media, the scientists, and government officials who have the space and means to shape the story of the MRT case as a national accomplishment.

This MRT case shows that knowledge production entails a complex and multilateral flow of actors, people, techniques, tools, aspirations, and claims that are inserted in a particular global context. For its analysis, we must always keep in sight the hierarchies, inequalities, and epistemic violence that the global frame generates (Gorbach 2019). This paper offers a description of how these hierarchies, inequalities, and epistemic injustices are played out and negotiated in the national media. We look at how the Mexican media worked as a site to resist a notion of science that traveled from a modern and civilized north to an unruly and chaotic south. Our critical approach also visibilizes the way the same process affirmed old conceptions of national progress, strengthening power relations along the way. Making it national required invoking a notion of “mexicanness” that for centuries has worked to mask and facilitate class, racial, and gender privilege under the idea that “we are all mixed” (Moreno Figueroa 2010). As Harding notes, “modernity always tends to appropriate and reshape to its own ends the social hierarchies that it finds” (2011, 9). In this case, the process of making a scientific national achievement entailed old imaginaries of the nation and its ideal citizens as modern, and above all, empowered mestizos (e.g. rifadísimos).

3. The media in the process of knowledge production

Historically, the media has played an important role in the construction, adoption, and rejection of science and technology (Marks et al. 2007). It has been capable of making breakthroughs look like virtuous national achievements that emerge from remarkable scientists and brilliant minds, while also having the power to make these same breakthroughs look as disgraceful events and to shame those involved (see Haran and Kitzinger 2009; Henderson and Kitzinger 2007; Key Chekar and Kitzinger 2007; Nerlich and Clarke 2003; Oudshoorn 1999). This is achieved by framing and narrating these novel ideas in particular ways; for example, by invoking or ignoring risks, benefits, and safety issues; by laying out degrees of (un)certainty; by using discursive tools that highlight and obscure different parts of the story; by omitting to mention the opposing actors and actions while emphasizing others; and by using the “breakthrough” framing when reporting the success of new technology.

Previous scholars have studied press and media coverage of human embryo research (Mulkay 1996), the birth of the first babies conceived using in vitro fertilization (IVF) in India (Bharadwaj 2016); the first cloned sheep (Bauer and Gaskell 2002); the first laboratory grown beef burger (O’Riordan, Fotopoulou, and Stephens 2017); the first cloning of human cells (Haran and Kitzinger 2009); and now the “world’s first” birth of a child conceived using MRTs (González-Santos, Stephens, and Dimond 2018). Like us, these authors have been interested in looking at who tells the story, who is presented as important and who is left out, how the procedure was described, which aspects were highlighted, which concerns were brought up, who brought them up, how were they said to be solved or addressed, the images used and how these relate to the story being told. For example, González-Santos, Stephens, and Dimond (2018) analyzed the initial press reactions to the announcement of the same case we now analyze. According to them, these articles performed the task of rendering MRT as culturally and technologically feasible. We argue that television and radio coverage of this same story did the task of framing this achievement as a national accomplishment. In both cases, this was done discursively by doing things with words (Austin 1962) and by establishing strategic alliances (Latour 1987); nonetheless, the results were different. This paper shows how.

3.1. The news programs

On 4 October 2016, Denisse Merker, anchor of the evening news program En Punto, announced the birth of the child conceived using MRT. The program stated that the procedure had been conducted at New Hope Clinic in Guadalajara (Mexico) by Dr. Alejandro Chávez-Badiola, director of the clinic. The next day, Carlos Loret de Mola and Ana Francisca Vega invited Chávez-Badiola, together with the Sanitary Risk Commissioner (COFEPRIS) and the head of the National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), to their morning news program Despierta to discuss the implications of this achievement. Some months later, Chávez-Badiola was invited to the weekend radio program, Fórmula Noticias hosted by Jaime Núñez, also to talk about this first-time success. The story was covered again three years later, in 2019, by Fernanda Tapia. She invited Chávez-Badiola to her segment dedicated to outstanding Mexicans in her midday magazine radio program ¡Qué tal Fernanda! (see Table 1).

Table 1. Details of television and radio programs.

Program	Type of program	Anchor	Date
En Punto (Late night show 10:30 pm to 11:00 pm) 8 million viewers	Television, Televisa	Denise Maerker	Aired: 4 October 2016. Duration: 2:06. https://www.facebook.com/newhopemexico/videos/uno-de-los-m%C3%A1s-importantes-logros-de-la-ciencia-en-lo-que-va-del-2016-es-de-new-/1297618250279780/
Despierta (morning show 6:30 am to 7:30 am) estimated 35 million viewers across Latin America, Mexico & US	Television, Televisa	Carlos Loret de Mola and Ana Francisca Vega	Aired: 6 October 2016. Duration: 9:09. https://www.facebook.com/newhopemexico/videos/somos-noticia-mundial/1511762582198678/
Formula Noticias (weekend show, 7:00 am to 10:00 am)	Radio, Grupo Fórmula (related to Televisa)	Jaime Núñez	Aired: 21 March 2017. Duration: 9:51 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = HAa7GZ89sow
¡Qué tal Fernanda! (midday show 11:00 am to 1:00 pm)	Radio, Imagen Radio (90.5FM), Grupo Imagen	Fernanda Tapia	Aired: 1 July 2019. Duration: 9:08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = RwQyePSiEzc

All programs are available online, they were last accessed on the 18 April 2022 using the links provided. We found these segments of Diez en punto and Despierta posted on the Facebook profile of the New Hope Fertility Clinic. Fórmula and ¡Qué tal Fernanda! were found by searching the web.

These were high-ranking news programs (not science communication programs) that touch upon a variety of topics, from politics to culture and gossip, with a broad scope covering both national and international news, and the four-time slots: weekday mornings (Despierta), midday (¡Qué tal Fernanda!), the evening (En Punto), and weekends (Fórmula) (see Appendix for a more detailed description of these programs). They were anchored by well-known individuals, with a trajectory of over two decades on air attracting large audiences, and they were produced by two of the most important telecommunication conglomerates – Televisa and Imagen Radio.

All four programs were transcribed and analyzed, in Spanish, by both authors using performative acts as analytical tools (see the following section). Full transcriptions of the programs are available upon request. A self-critical note on this point is important. For this paper, we translated the direct quotes assuming that we could reach a wider audience, but this decision never sat fully comfortable with our postcolonial perspective. What language should the direct quotes be in? How would this paper be received if it had the quotes in Spanish?

3.2. Performative acts

For our analytical tool, we turn to the idea of performative utterances or speech acts developed by scholars including J.L Austin. Austin (1962) suggested that speech acts can have a performative power, they can act upon the world and transform it, even while lacking a truth value. Speech acts vary according to the nature of their intentions, some are declarations, others are statements or claims (representatives), questions, requests, or orders (directives); they can be threats, promises, or offers (commissives); or expressions of thanking, apologizing, congratulating (expressives) (Levinson 2016). Their transformative power is dependent on how they are performed; speech acts need to be uttered in the right way, in the right circumstances, and with the right intention. A typical example is “I declare you husband and wife.” However, to unlock the power of this declaration (or of any speech act) it needs to be uttered by a person with the required credentials, in the right setting, to people who have previously presented the legally established documents, and for all to sign the legally produced paperwork. In other words, some speech acts rely on institutions as well as on a pre-established interactive sequence. Hence, paying attention to these institutions and sequences helps identify speech acts and what they are doing, which in many cases may be more than one thing at a time.

This tool proved useful to identify how this case was made national, even when this project fell within an STS theoretical framework and not within the areas of philosophy of language and conversation analysis. We identified speech acts by the words being used, to whom they were being said, the context, and the reaction to the utterances (Levinson 2016). We found that frequently the content, context, and reactions included visual aids. We also detected that, by repeating these performative acts within and across these news programs, the act of making this MRT story a national success was sustained though time (cf. Latour 1987). In what follows, we see how performative utterances were strategically used in the media coverage of this story to frame this event as a desirable national success, Mexico as a technologically-able nation, and to see how a particular claim of authorship is built, presented, strengthened, and sustained for a large audience. All this was done by making MRTs worthy, by claiming authorship over this case, and by framing it as an opportunity.

3.3. Making it national by making it worthy

Throughout the four programs, we identified three performative acts that made this procedure worthy of claiming its authorship: establishing alliances, purifying the procedure, and making it valuable. As we will see, making it worthy required the support of strategic actors that would help purify the procedure, making it safe and accessible, and thus presenting it as valuable and desirable. Establishing alliances means establishing relationships with actors that can help negotiate and attain legitimacy, validity, prestige, and security. These alliances were established between Chávez-Badiola and members of the government, the community of scientists, and the media.

In Despierta, these alliances were performed through the physical presence of people invited to the shows, by mentioning their name and institutional affiliation, and through their statements. Inviting the Commissioner of COFEPRIS, who represents a governmental regulatory institution, and the director of INMEGEN, who represents a national medical institution, to talk alongside Chávez-Badiola suggested support, approval, and alliance from the government and science. This was emphasized by displaying an orchestrated set of answers to the anchor’s questions; all three seemed to follow the same line, never debating or standing at odds. Governmental support was emphasized twice: first, by announcing that the Minister of Health was interested in developing an expert group to propose a regulatory framework; then again, when the anchor underscored that it was there, in the program, that the government pronounced itself officially, for the first time, on these biotechnologies.

In Despierta, ¡Qué tal Fernanda!, and in Fórmula, Chávez-Badiola aligned himself with Zhang, his US counterpart, by foregrounding the many years of collaborative work they have had. This positioned him and the technique as the latest link in a line of research on MRT that ties Cambridge-Zhang-Mexico and himself. While in two programs, Chávez-Badiola described Zhang as his collaborator, in En Punto, this alliance was established through the use of Zhang’s image shown while Chávez-Badiola spoke about the procedure. However, Zhang was never mentioned by name, therefore he was not included in the verbal narrative. It was only Chávez-Badiola’s voice and story that was heard. Nonetheless, the images helped to tie alliances between Zhang and Chávez-Badiola while simultaneously positioning the latter at the center. We consider that this performative act also helped establish authorship because it was Chávez-Badiola's voice, face, and name that were mentioned and shown on screen.

A second set of performative acts helped purify Chávez-Badiola and the procedure in order to make them ethical. The act of purifying implied placing the controversial or problematic issues on the table and then assuring that these have been appropriately dealt with. These concerns were the production and handling of embryos, the safety of MRT's, the possibility of altering family structures (i.e. kinship and respecting heteronormativity), the possibility of creating designer babies, and the accessibility of procedures for Mexicans. To purify the procedure in terms of embryo management and safety, Chávez-Badiola talked about the details of the procedure: “the protocol we followed” (as stated in all four programs). This protocol did not require embryos other than the ones to be transferred, thus avoiding the need to dispose of un-transferred embryos. The disposal of embryos was, as signaled by the anchor of Despierta, a controversial issue because “some see this equal to an abortion, and this goes against their beliefs.” This helped Chávez-Badiola present himself and his procedure as interested in respecting life. The ethical nature of the procedure was strengthened when Chávez-Badiola pointed out that they transferred only male embryos. This made this procedure safe for future generations since the genetic intervention could not be passed down through the maternal/mitochondrial line.

Another purifying act consisted of highlighting that the protocol of embryo production and management had been approved by the Director of INMEGEN, who agreed that this procedure was safe for future generations. It was ethical also because it had been previously presented and approved by the clinic’s ethics committee. Furthermore, the statement given by the Commissioner confirmed it was safe because the clinic “has, since 2009, a government-issued license to work” (Despierta), which means they have complied with all the sanitary and safety requirements ensuring that this procedure was hygienically safe (more on this in the following section).

Regarding the concern about altering family structures, the purifying strategy involved several performative acts. In Despierta, this was done by rejecting the “three parent baby” framing, downplaying the importance of mitochondrial DNA, and limiting the idea of genetic modification to what is done with the nuclear DNA: “what is altered in the MRT procedures is a very tiny fraction of the entire genetic patrimony […] we need to distinguish – scientifically and medically – between this and the type of genetic modification needed to produce babies à la carte” (INMEGEN Director). To strengthen this point, the anchors gestured to the three guests to see if they agreed with this framing. Each, from their particular expert perspective, rejected the idea that the baby had three parents. In Fórmula and in En Punto, this meant using images of happy, healthy looking, young, heterosexual couples, which accompanied with the comments made by the anchors and by Chávez-Badiola, made it clear that this procedure was being presented as an aid for heterosexual couples to conceive “many families […] many healthy babies” (Chávez-Badiola, ¡Qué tal Fernanda!).

Another concern was the possibility of creating designer babies. The anchors of Despierta asked about the possibility of selecting the sex and physical characteristics of future babies, an idea quickly dismissed by the director of INMEGEN by saying that “not only is this still impossible but it is something prohibited under international best practices.” A fifth concern was accessibility. Although both the public and the private health systems offer infertility treatments, most users have to seek these services in the private system, limiting their accessibility to those with the means to cover the cost. Chávez-Badiola acknowledged the high cost and commented that these services needed to be more widely available so their cost would go down and become more economically accessible. He also mentioned the lack of access to information as a problem:

people think that ARTs are elitist. I think the problem is lack of access to information that limits access to the treatments. It is important that […] young professional women–academics–who want to postpone motherhood because they are prioritizing their career, understand that there are options, like egg-freezing.

These points are part of a wider concern related to the stratified access to healthcare in general and reproductive care in particular, as well as part of a problematic socio-political structure that places all the pressure of childbearing on women (see Gonzalez-Santos 2020).

The third performative act was making MRTs valuable. This was done by the way MRTs were described by the anchors as “fascinating,” a “revolutionary procedure,” a “scientific advance” that will “change the face of humanity,” that will “truly transform humanity” (Despierta). Then by Chávez-Badiola saying this is “the most revolutionary procedure of the century, and it was done in New Hope” (¡Qué Tal Fernanda!), as “the most important advancement in assisted reproduction and the one with the highest impact” (Fórmula). With these descriptions, as well as through the images of test-tubes, white-coat scientists, formulas scribbled in glass-boards, MRTs were depicted as a valuable cutting-edge technology.

Value was also assigned by highlighting MRTs capacity to avoid a deadly “health issue” that “the mother was passing down” and that had resulted in a “family tragedy” – the death of two previous children. The procedure was also described as valuable due to its role in gene editing and stem cell therapies. Describing this technology in such positive terms and having purified it from all possible health, moral, ethical, or legal problems made it desirable for the nation, hence, worthy of claiming its authorship.

3.4. Making it national by claiming authorship

We identified different ways in which Chávez-Badiola, in conjunction with the anchors, claimed authorship: by presenting Chávez-Badiola as a capable and worthy man and scientist, highlighting the important role he played in the technical, financial, and ethical aspects, and having him rename the procedure. All this was done through the gestures, adjectives, and phrases used by the anchors to describe Chávez-Badiola and by him when answering questions. Acting together, these performative utterances managed to claim technological, geographical, financial, and ethical authorship, framing Chávez-Badiola as an important actor in the making of this baby and Mexico as an important place to carry it out.

It was important to present this young clinician as capable of being part of this extraordinary successful case. Having Chávez-Badiola as a guest in ¡Qué tal Fernanda! in the segment “Un Mexicano Rifadísimo,” suggests that he is rifadísimo: that he is willing to sacrifice and to go the extra mile for something he wants. He frames himself as rifadísimo because he returned to Mexico after studying in the United Kingdom given that he saw a professional opportunity: “Mexico is at the cutting edge in the field of assisted reproduction worldwide […] this is one of the reasons why I came back to Mexico” (Chávez-Badiola). The anchor saw him as rifadísimo because he is “echado para adelante,” a forward-looking pioneer in reproductive medicine who successfully gathered and articulated all the elements needed for this “revolutionary procedure” to take place, gaining Mexico’s pride, and placing Mexico on the map of the international field of reproductive medicine.

Authorship was undoubtedly established when anchors asked Chávez-Badiola “how did you do it? and how long did it take you?” In his answers, Chávez-Badiola narrated how “he had done it” although frequently using the first person plural: “we do not generate embryos that are doomed to be destroyed. We work with the egg […] then we fertilize.[…] We want to avoid the legal issues […] that is why we decided to use this particular technique” (Despierta, emphasis added). But it was not just Chávez-Badiola who placed himself as part of the team who achieved this. For example, in En Punto, the anchor and the narrating voice highlighted that this “great scientific achievement took 14 years of research and it finally was achieved in Guadalajara,” that it had involved the work of “various groups of researchers, from many countries, but coalesced in Mexico.” Chávez-Badiola explained that this success was the result of work carried out for “twenty years which started in Cambridge, with the doctoral work of Dr. John Zhang, and that culminated with this birth. An accomplishment like this one does not happen in one day” and it requires teamwork. He explained that it had been achieved in Guadalajara because “we had the technology and we had the resources to do it.” He emphasized that his contribution was being the person able to gather and secure the human, legal, financial, and material resources needed to produce this successful case. One anchor highlighted this role as uniter: “how gratifying it is to be able to unite all these elements for this success after 20 years of work” (¡Qué tal Fernanda!). This role required Chávez-Badiola to convince and gather a group of people, their resources, and their enthusiasm, to take action into the production of this baby (cf. Magazine 2015). On top of this, Chávez-Badiola underlined that 100% of the cost had been covered with Mexican funds: “In this case we paid for everything. Yes, New Hope Fertility Clinic Mexico paid” (emphasis added).

Chávez-Badiola constantly renamed the procedure: “this is not the name but I like to call it transplant of cell organelles” (En Punto), “cellular reconstruction” (¡Qué Tal Fernanda!) or a “mitochondrial replacement” (Fórmula). Naming is powerful, it is political, it is a way of establishing identity, of claiming relatedness, even authorship. Names, like most words, are seldom neutral (Dimond and Stephens 2018). Blasimme et al. (2015), for example, argue that, when naming technologies, it is important for non-English-speaking communities to use terms, metaphors, and names in their own languages as a way of demonstrating that these technologies are routinely used in local labs and, as a way of inviting lay people to discuss these technologies. The way Chávez-Badiola renamed the procedure involved an exchange between an amenable name using words that the public understands and relates to from experience but that brings forth moral or religious sensibilities (i.e. “three parent baby”), to a name that uses a technical nomenclature difficult to understand, such as “mitochondria” or “organelles.” It seems like he is not engaging in an act of making it “easier” for the lay public. Instead, these new names could help differentiate scientific knowledge from lay knowledge, and thus help purify the procedure from ethical or moral problems. Ravitsky, Birko, and Dupras-Leduc (2015) point out that the way biotechnologies are named affects their ethical and legal discussions, they reflect people’s standpoint on the issues, and they participate in framing the issues being discussed. In any case, the act of renaming the procedure is deeply linked to claiming authority over it.

But the most dramatic of all the moments in which authorship was claimed was during Despierta, when the anchor gestured a stamping motion while stating “it has the eagle stamp with the legend ‘Made in Mexico’” claiming that the baby and the procedure had been made in Mexico. The anchor stamped this procedure as “made in Mexico” and Chávez-Badiola accepted this narrative – thus claiming authorship. This national success placed Mexico on the map. The narrative presented in these programs suggests that Chávez-Badiola was responsible for creating the conditions for this breakthrough to happen: he mustered the economic, human, technological, and legal elements. How often is the role of team builder and resource gatherer considered in the narratives of techno-scientific production?

3.5. Making it national by making it an opportunity

Through a series of questions about the place occupied by Mexico in the geopolitics of knowledge, Mexico was being presented as a medical and technological hub. Fórmula's anchor, for example, was interested in knowing how much “science had progressed” and whether “these developments had arrived late to Mexico or they had arrived at the right moment, simultaneously arriving in all parts of the world?” Chávez-Badiola answered:

proof of where we are located is the result we had with the baby born after a reconstruction and replacement of mitochondria. We are at the top, with a very good level, good labs and good technology. Our results compare with those of other centers,

“We are at the cutting edge, this first baby was the conjoined work of New York and Mexico. We have a very high level here in Mexico.”

Within the context of little regulation, this success was seen as an opportunity for Mexico to continue to build itself as a technological and scientific nation by developing more technology, training more scientists, and helping more people. In Despierta, for example, the Commissioner stated that

it is a good thing that the technology is available in Mexico, and it is very important that Mexican scientists develop it … the lack of regulation can work in favour, so physicians in Mexico could perform many of these procedures and help many families to have healthy babies.

This success was also seen as an opportunity to build a specific regulatory framework and, by doing so, any accusation of having legislative voids was effectively avoided. Despierta’s anchor, asked the Commissioner about the procedure having been done in Mexico because of its lack of regulation. The Commissioner clarified that Mexico does have regulation, one that oversees the clinic’s infrastructure and some of its processes in order to ensure the safety of the procedures (i.e. hygienically and technologically safe). Nonetheless, he agrees that there are no specific rules or regulations overseeing this particular type of procedure. This means, according to him, that it is legal to perform it. This unclear situation was read differently between the two anchors. One considered that “the lack of specific regulation can create the conditions so that these procedures can be offered to all those who need it, helping many families.” While the other was ambivalent about this: “should we celebrate because it is possible and the technology is here, or should we be worried because genetic experiments can be carried out here.” The Commissioner saw it as an opportunity:

Without doubt it is an opportunity. Some countries have absolute prohibitions and that becomes an obstacle for research. […] The Health Secretary instructed creating a group, which is already working on developing […] a specific regulatory mechanism that encompasses all aspects–the technical, the bioethical and the human rights–that are present in the global discussion on this topic.[…] This initiative follows the best practices and contemplates including all types of treatments, the scientific, technical, and the ethical aspects.

This shows how the procedure was presented as legal: by stating that MRTs are not specifically outlawed and by publicly stating that the government knew it had been done and agreed with it.

Nevertheless, regulating these procedures also generated concern. Although the Commissioner assured that there were no intentions to prohibit these procedures and that the agenda was to promote scientific research, Despierta’s anchor worried about the parliament’s participation: “I have the impression this will be a slow process, and that the outcome will be like a bad genetically modified product.” The Clinician responded to these concerns saying that he trusted that regardless of which

law ends up passing, it will be a law that will allow them to carry on with research and practice. I trust that in Mexico there are things that are being done properly, this is an example of this. I trust this law will allow for certainty and at the same time allow us to carry on.

The case and its presentation on national television were therefore seen as an opportunity to define “proper” laws as those that back up the autonomy of science and the practice of for-profit medical services.

4. Conclusion

In this paper, we described how the birth of the first MRT conceived child was made national through performative acts that relied on the government, on a scientific institution, and on the media as validating institutions. The anchors performed the role of witness and provocateur by guiding the conversation through their questions, by picking and choosing where to focus the attention, and by highlighting the bits and pieces of the story. These performative acts served as a counter-narrative to the one offered in the international and national press. They dismantled the notion of Mexico as a country with “no rules” and instead offered a story of a country producing cutting-edge technology and of a government ready to back up scientific progress. We identified three sets of performative acts that were important to make this happen. One set had the power of making it worthy, which required a process of purification in order to make this procedure ethical, safe, valuable, and desirable; this also meant establishing strategic alliances with national and international scientific and governmental institutions and individuals. Another set had the power to frame this success as an opportunity to create more and better rules and legislation over assisted reproduction, as an opportunity for research to go forward, as an opportunity to help heterosexual couples build healthy families, and as a health-related business opportunity that can be offered to national and international patients (within a cross-border health market). The third set had the power of assigning authorship. Chávez-Badiola repeatedly included himself within the genealogy of creators of this success, he renamed the procedure, he emphasized the Mexican clinic had paid for all the expenses, and both him and the anchors insistently highlighted the importance of his role in gathering the necessary elements to make this a success.

An STS postcolonial approach to the MRT case in Mexico means unveiling the heterogeneity and messiness of technosciences. It requires heightened sensitivity to the ways that not only geography, race, and class but also gender hierarchies are (re)constituted through the relations that make science. In this case, the process of making the MRT case a national achievement involved centering the gaze on the effort, intellectual achievements, and success of a male-privileged biomedical physician in charge of the Mexican team. In some media appearances, other male authorities also performed alliances to claim this national authorship: a director of a national institute and a government official. Anchors also played their role in backing up the legitimacy of the case, the position of the male physicians, scientists, and government officials as the rightful moral subjects of the nation, and the importance of being linked with the science practiced in Anglo-European contexts.

This contrasted with the little attention given to the way MRTs, as most ARTs, materialize the social injustice of contemporary biomedicine. Justifying the absence of law in the name of scientific autonomy expands to other practices beyond the MRT case. In a country where surrogacy, egg donation, and unethical clinical trials happen without effective mechanisms to protect women and children, a public defense of science as above the law has real, material impact on the reproductive bodies, and experiences of women (Murtinger et al. 2020; Perler and Schurr 2021).²

A postcolonial STS approach to technology makes evident how authorship is negotiated; the practices, knowledges, actions, or inputs that count as valuable and those that do not. In this case, the media narrative was mobilized to put forward Chávez-Badiola’s role in assembling the human, legal, financial, material, technological resources needed to actually carry out the procedure. These resources matter, particularly if they are not available in the US. Can science be done without them? While the press focused on the lack of rules in Mexico, these programs articulated the lack of legislation with the existence of knowledge, technology, interest, and space where to carry out this procedure. For the media, these were enough reasons to make this into a national success.

The way in which this case was presented in the international and national press fits nicely into known ways of thinking about the history of knowledge production in Latin America; ways that tend to move from a diffusionist perspective – that views science as something that travels from north to south – to a nationalist perspective, one that celebrates scientific accomplishments as a local and isolated production (Cházaro 2009). What this paper offered was a critique of both stands, providing instead a study of science that abandons linearity and origin and embraces the complexities of the geopolitics of knowledge. Knowledge, tools, patients, doctors, embryos, and techniques move across the nation-state to make things happen, things like the first baby born thanks to MRTs. This paper illustrated how these movements, and the claims that go along with them, were negotiated, acknowledging that these movements happened within a global context that still shapes and is shaped by the hierarchies of colonization and the epistemic injustices that follow from them (Gorbach 2019).

Furthermore, the international nature of contemporary biotechnology pushes for a discussion on governance that goes beyond focusing on national regulations. Policy landscapes devoted to finding regulatory voids tend to portray the Global South as the region where governance capabilities must be strengthened in order to avoid ethically questionable procedures. Nevertheless, as the MRT case in Mexico shows, the conditions that allow clinical trials or novel healthcare practices involving unregulated technologies are often not circumscribed to the national state. They involve a heterogeneous array of actors that are located in different countries and are facilitated by an international permissive scientific culture (Saldaña-Tejeda et al. 2022). This case opens the door to a new perspective on the regulation of biotechnologies. The narrative around MRTs constructed in and through the media, resists the notion that an absence of appropriate regulations for new technologies of life is a void to be filled or an open door for maverick scientists. Instead, this narrative gives central place to scientific events as opportunities to regulate according to the country’s human and technological resources. This view of science has been widely criticized for promoting a notion of science as self-regulating and above the law. However, these narratives also work to move the international gaze (i.e. the increasing production of policy landscape) from voids, lacks, and needs to what the country has and offers. The MRT case in Mexico helped to mobilize the idea that government officials and scientists have the authority to decide what counts as genetic modifications and the extent to which sex selection makes nuclear transfers ethical to avoid inheritable alterations. This narrative provides an intended order, a temporality where science breakthroughs and their clinical application come first and regulation follows and accommodates these imperatives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Small Grant in Humanities and Social Science, Wellcome Trust, Ref. 218699/Z/19/Z.

Notes on contributors

Sandra P. González-Santos

Sandra P. González-Santos is a feminist science and technology studies scholar interested in genetic and reproductive biotechnologies and, more recently, in food systems in Mexico. Both her research methods and teaching pedagogy involve arts based critical methods. As an independent scholar she teaches in private and public universities, high-schools, and art centers in Mexico City.

Abril Saldaña-Tejeda

Abril Saldaña-Tejeda is a feminist scholar that focuses on the social determinants of health, genomics, and postgenomics. She is currently exploring the social, legal, and ethical implications of human genome editing and stem cell research in Latin America. She is an associate professor of Sociology at the Department of Philosophy, Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico.

Notes

1 Rifadísimo is a Mexican expression used to describe a cool person who engages in risky behaviour, gambling everything for something considered important. The segment holds this name because it focuses on presenting outstanding Mexican figures.

2 It is important to clarify that this case is not part of a clinical-trial protocol as is the uterine lavage protocol carried out in Nayarit, Mexico (Najmabadi et al. 2023).

Appendix

En Punto

En Punto is a half-hour news program, aired at 10:30 pm on national television (Televisa). It is anchored by Denise Maerker, a political scientist who left academia to pursue a career in the news industry. The story of the first MRT baby was presented in a pre-recorded segment that opened with the anchor highlighting the unusual genetic composition of the baby: “they used the genetic material of three people, not two […] so the baby would be born without an illness.” Then, she presented Chávez-Badiola as participating in this procedure and stated that it had been conducted “in Mexico, in Guadalajara.” She closed the segment highlighting the extraordinary nature of this scientific advancement since it “allows for healthy babies even when the mother is ill.” The core of the segment is narrated by a voice-over while you see a short video made from compiled stills and videos taken from the BBC, the New Scientist, and courtesy of NHFC, as indicated by the stamps on the corner of the screen, mostly showing Zhang. Like the anchor, the narrating voice highlighted that this “great scientific achievement” had involved the work of “various groups of researchers, from many countries, but coalesced in Mexico.” The procedure was described as capable of making possible “the impossible,” “the unimaginable,” of creating “a human being from the reproductive cells of three people” and as suitable for “people who suffer from mitochondrial illnesses and are infertile or people who are fertile but can pass down heritable illnesses.” The narrating voice informed that the baby was five months old and doing well, and that, within the following year, the procedure would be available for all those who needed it through the private healthcare system. In-between takes of the video we see Chávez-Badiola explaining the procedure to an off-camera interviewer.

Despierta

Despierta is a morning news show aired on national television (Televisa). In 2016 it was anchored by Carlos Loret de Mola, an economist with over twenty years of experience working as a news anchor, and Ana Francisca Vergara, who studied a Master's in International Relations and has been in the media for over 25 years (she began writing her first column at 19 years of age). For this segment, three men were invited: Julio Sánchez y Tépoz, the commissioner of the National Commission for Sanitary Risk (COFEPRIS), Xavier Soberón, the director of the National Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), and Alejandro Chávez-Badiola, the director of the New Hope Fertility Clinic (NHFC, in Guadalajara), “where the experiment was carried out” (Anchor). The main topics discussed were: the idea that this baby has three parents; the reproductive story of the couple; that this was made in Mexico; the moral and ethical aspects; the issue concerning regulation and legislation; and the possibility of designing babies. With a few exceptions each guest was asked about specific themes: Chávez-Badiola was asked about the clinical aspects, the Director of INMEGEN was asked about the scientific and ethical issues, and the Commissioner was asked about the legal and regulatory status.

Fórmula

Fórmula is a weekend radio news show aired on FM radio by Grupo Fórmula (related to Televisa). It is hosted by Jaime Núñez who has been in the radio business for over 25 years. Nuñez invited Chávez-Badiola to talk about “how science has progressed" in what he described as "a very interesting and sensitive subject”: the area of human assisted reproduction. Núñez was interested in knowing about assisted reproduction, how successful and accessible these procedures were, the place Mexico occupied in the international ranking in the area of assisted reproduction, and if “these developments had arrived late to Mexico or had they arrived at the right moment? Are they simultaneously arriving in all parts of the world? Where is Mexico in relation to these techniques?"

Although this is a radio program it is also streamed online, which is the version we analyzed. This version incorporated a sequence of images showing white-coat scientists using laboratory equipment, healthy-happy-looking, white, heterosexual, young couples holding hands, walking and enjoying life, and pregnant bodies. These images were projected while Chávez-Badiola explained assisted reproduction.

¡Qué tal Fernanda!

¡Qué tal Fernanda! is a midday radio show that has been aired for over 20 years on FM radio by Grupo Imagen. It was created by Fernanda Familiar, a well-known female anchor with over thirty years of experience working in radio. She has also published books and edited a woman’s magazine (Fernanda). The program has a section called Mexicanos Rifadísimos. The term Rifadisimo is used to describe someone who has fought and risked everything for something considered important. It is also used to describe something or someone very cool. In this segment she presents Mexicans she considers have risked something for their country, they have gone that extra mile, done something outstanding, fought for something, or accomplished something few have before, thus placing Mexico on the map. Like Fórmula and Despierta, this program is also based on interviews.