ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This article aims to demonstrate how new science and technology would have been understood and accepted in the 1970~1980 Korea, by examining media reports on ‘test-tube baby’ and IVF. At first, newspapers focused monstrous ‘test-tube baby’ more than ‘In vitro fertilization’ itself, and described it as an unnatural, blue creature and a symbol of depressed future. These images of ‘Test-tube baby’ in the 1970s had been combined multifarious preconceptions on artificial insemination of animals and dystopian imaginations in literary works. But as Louis Browne in the U.K(1978) and the first ‘test-tube baby’ in the South Korea(1985) were borne, media gradually focused new science and technology itself, IVF and explained its economic values and future possibilities. In the media, IVF became research topics for medical experts and potential new products for maternity hospitals, and ‘test-tube baby’ developed to a hope for infertile couples. These changes in the media report reveal the unique Korean conditions for encounter with new reproductive technology and its soft landing, in respect that media deliver the news and establish the framework for science and technology.

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