Sarah Franklin Inaugural Lecture

of this process: it is at once a replication of a biological process, and a technology that changes the meaning of the adjective ‘biological’.

But before I say more about IVF, I first want to say a few words about a reproductive technology of another kind, namely the university. And since I’m an ethnographer I’ll begin with an anecdote or actually a series of interconnected anecdotes -- from the everyday working life of an academic.

I take the first of these from our departmental away day. This year’s away day was organised by Brendan Burchell, who is turning out to be a very excellent Head of Department, and he invited Nicola Buckley, who is the head of public engagement here at Cambridge, to come speak to us about a new impact fund the school is piloting. If you know anything about academia in the UK right now you will know that both impact and REF are actually four letter words. And you do not need to do the math to work this out: all you need to do is watch the collective wave of eye rolling that accompanies the phrase ‘ESRC Impact Enhancement Fund’. But as my very responsible colleague John Thompson reminds us, there is no escape from the impact agenda.

So I wrote to Nicola after our meeting because impact is a funny beast. It is odd, after all, that a word from physics used to describe a collision between two unrelated bodies has become the sign under which we are supposed to collect more information about the relationships we create through our scholarly labours. We consequently must become more interliterate about impact.

In my email to Nicola, I mentioned that the external research funding I have received is partly intended to facilitate the investigation of IVF itself as an ‘impact study’, and thus to facilitate a sociological analysis of biomedical translation. I also mentioned we were hoping to use our project website as a means of research, as well as public engagement. I gave some examples of research I had done previously on this topic, and included a link to the Final Report on a workshop I organised at the LSE on ‘The Impact of Impact’. I suggested we might meet up next month.

Nicola wrote me a long email in reply, in which she both thanked me for the material I had sent and revealed herself to be a very skilled analyst of the impact agenda, which she was trying to change. What was interesting about Nicola’s email was not only that she herself turned out to be an ‘end user’ of some of my ‘outputs’, but that she was implementing a sociological model of