Frankenstein - It’s alive!!!

Robyn Williams: Today, Frankenstein, as you've never heard him before. We start nearly 25 years ago as we saw him then. And afterwards, leap to 2018 with Suzanne Burdon whose novel about Mary Shelley is called Almost Invincible, because she was. So here's me back then:

The Science Show today delves into the philosophical subtleties behind the story of Dr Frankenstein.

Excerpt from Frankenstein: It's pronounced Franken-steen.

Robyn Williams: It may be in Hollywood but I always called him Frankenstein when he worked at the CSIRO Division of Creative Surgery back in the old days.

Reading from Frankenstein: You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!

Robyn Williams: Those were the days, men were men, monsters were monsters, and the equipment worked every time. Just grab an electrode in each hand, whack it to the side of the corpse's enormous skull and throw the switch.

Excerpt from Frankenstein: Alive! It's alive, it's alive! Hello there, I'm going to set you free.

Robyn Williams: Yes, it's alive once more, looking remarkably like Robert De Niro. And Victor Frankenstein is the spitting and grimacing image of Kenneth Branagh. I shall talk to Marilyn Butler in Oxford about Mary Shelley and the first version of the tale written in 1818.

And now, somewhere in Switzerland:

Excerpt from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: No one need ever die. I will stop this.

No, you can't cheat death.

We won't know unless we try.

I warn you, what you are suggesting is not only illegal, it is immoral.

What's happened to you?

Live!

It's alive!

Robyn Williams: No, that's not from a Liberal Party caucus meeting, the voices are in fact Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hulce and Robert De Niro in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Here's some more:

Excerpt from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: For thousands of years the Chinese have based their medical science on the belief the human body is a chemical engine run by energy streams.

That's fascinating. Then how do they expect…

Don't touch that! Their doctors treat patients by inserting needles like these into the flesh at various key points to manipulate these electric streams.

I see. So electricity is the key?

Now look at this. Go on, touch it.

It feels warm. Yes, how do you do?

Robyn Williams: The latest depiction of a novel first dreamed up by a young woman still in her teens. Mary Shelley's original version of Frankenstein, the full novel, came out in 1818. It showed a fascination with death and the manifestations of life that reflected the scientific revolution, then well under way.

Reading from Frankenstein: My attention was fixed upon every object, the most insupportable to the delicacy of the human feelings. I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me, a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius, who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone would be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.

Robyn Williams: Anne Looby reading from the original version of Frankenstein. The book has just been republished by Oxford University Press. The editor is Marilyn Butler, rector of Exeter College in Oxford. She is one of the leading scholars in the world on this sort of fiction.

Marilyn Butler: Well, I think Mary Shelley was always going to be a writer. She was really brought up by her father to be an intellectual, and he was a novelist. And the reason that she wrote such a brilliant novel first time is that I think she had absolutely absorbed how to write one because both her parents were novelists, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Robyn Williams: Is it the case that she was inspired, to some extent at least, by listening to conversations about philosophy and the nature of living?

Marilyn Butler: Yes, I think it's very clear that she was brought up in adult company. It's always said that her father introduced her to people like Coleridge, and obviously that must have been very advantageous, though mostly people only listened when Coleridge talked. But it seems as though he also introduced her to science quite a bit. He was more interested in science than you'd think. He was a philosopher, he didn't write very much about it. But he took her to lectures, and I think on the whole they must've been science lectures.

Robyn Williams: Had she met Percy at this stage?

Marilyn Butler: She didn't meet Percy until he already knew her father, he was a political fan of her father because her father was an anarchist, Percy Shelley had very left-wing views, so he introduced himself to her father, and she was away at that time, and then she came back and he met her briefly at the age of about 16 and fell for her. And they eloped in 1814 when he was still married to his first wife.

Robyn Williams: This first version of Frankenstein was quite different from what it later came to be. Was it 1831, the final version?

Marilyn Butler: Yes, the first version is in 1818, and there were several more of that first edition, hardly altered at all. And then there's the edition in 1831 which she'd really seriously revised, and she'd really changed the impact of it. In fact she also wrote an interpretive preface so that she told you what it meant. And it's that reading that she gives to it in 1813, along with the changes, that really so much influenced the way we read it now.

Robyn Williams: And the first one, is it fair, was looking squarely at the impact of science and questions that came from it, whereas the later one was more compromising when it came to matters spiritual and the church?

Marilyn Butler: Yes, I think we really can say now that the relations between Mary Shelley and science have been changed in the last two or three years because we now know much more about what exactly she was doing in 1816 when she invented the plot. And she had come out of a very scientific group. She went off on holiday with her husband and they were famously sitting in the rain by the shores of Lake Geneva and that's where she invented the plot. But for two years before that she had been very much in the company of scientists. And there was a big row going on about the nature of life, so that when she says that she looks back and she remembers those nights when they were sitting around discussing the principle of life, and then she got the idea, well, they were discussing the principle of life but like scientists. They were discussing how life starts, where it comes from, what is the difference between a dead body and a living body and would it be possible for man to make a living body or bring a dead body back to life.

Reading from Frankenstein: I went into the lecturing room which Mr. Waldman entered shortly after. His person was short, but remarkably erect; and his voice the sweetest I had ever heard. He began his lecture by a recapitulation of the history of chemistry, and the various improvements made by different men of learning, then took a cursory view of the present state of the science, and explained many of its elementary terms. He concluded with a panegyric upon modern chemistry, the terms of which I shall never forget:

'The ancient teachers of this science,' said he, 'promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little. They know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens, they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers, they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.'

Robyn Williams: So that was the first version. How did the 1831 version change?

Marilyn Butler: In 1831 she had been through a certain amount of trouble with the novel. It wasn't so much the novel itself but a couple of stage adaptations were made of it, both in 1823. And strangely enough they are very like the modern films. They actually changed the plot quite a lot and they make the monster silent, so he can't be as sympathetic. In the first version, in the novel the monster is very eloquent, and when you read it and he pleads with his maker, Frankenstein, first of all for Frankenstein to love him like a father and then for Frankenstein to make him a mate, you have sympathy with him while he's actually pleading. And Frankenstein does at first and goes along with it before he repents of that.

Well, in the stage adaptations none of all that happens, and so you only see the monster from the outside, you see the consequences of his being bad, and so you regard him as a demon that is irrationally haunting Frankenstein. So the whole emphasis in the plays is shifted much more to being an ordinary terror story. So you empathise with Frankenstein. You're not so interested in what's bad about Frankenstein because he doesn't have much opposition in the story, you're just horrified along with him.

And really the changes that were made there were because some critics and some readers obviously were rather shocked by the science, the interest in the life issue. They thought the whole thing was dynamite really, they thought the public shouldn't really be given this plot and they shouldn't really be encouraged to think about it, so that each version of it is really a censored version of it after that. The novel gets rather more like the stage plays. She realised that that was the way critics anyway and the respectable classes wanted the plot to be interpreted. And so the final version, the 1831 version which most of us have seen, puts all the emphasis on Frankenstein's guilt and remorse for having made a creature at all.

Robyn Williams: Why didn't she simply ignore the critics and say, well, that's what I have written and that's the end of that and move on to another subject, instead of rewriting a book so old?

Marilyn Butler: Well, I think anybody who writes a book as good as Frankenstein and as memorable as Frankenstein, because it instantly was memorable…I mean, it started being quoted by politicians in parliament. 'Frankenstein' instantly was a known word, so that you conjured up a man and a monster by the 1820s if you mentioned the word. So she was certainly not going to throw away literary property that was worth more than anything else she ever was able to invent. But she couldn't really, I think, have reprinted it uncensored by 1831, it was the start of a religious revival, almost any time between 1830 for another 100 years, it was really very dicey to suggest that God didn't make man and put a soul in there, which was something that man couldn't replicate. It was such an offensive idea to so many religious people, that she had to put the remorse first. It's the first thing you know about when you even read the introduction, is that this is wicked, and then you immediately have this guilt from the word go. And so she changed the inflection and she made the reader read it with more awareness of how wicked the idea was.

Excerpts from Frankenstein films: Dr Frankenstein.

Franken-steen.

You're putting me on?

No, it's pronounced Franken-steen.

Give my creation life!

From what was once an inarticulate mass of lifeless tissues, may I now present a cultured, sophisticated man about town.

Who amongst you has ever wondered if the dead could return to life?

Is that really possible, reanimation? I no longer see the world and its works as they before appeared to me, and men appear to me as monsters.

This is no ghost story. It chilled me to the bone. You must get your story published, Mary.

Curious subject matter for a young lady.

Are you suggesting the work belongs to Mr Shelley? It is my story.

Robyn Williams: From the new film Mary Shelley, released in July. And before that, Dr Marilyn Butler, the late rector of Exeter College in Oxford.

And so we leap to 2018 and beyond. Our guide is Suzanne Burdon who lives in Sydney and who has written a novel, Almost Invincible, a novel about Mary.

Reading from Frankenstein: With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Suzanne Burdon: That was how the 18-year-old Mary Shelley on a dark and stormy summer in Geneva in 1818 began her iconic tale of reanimation.

Reading from Frankenstein: How can I describe the wretch I had formed from foraged body parts, with such infinite pains and care? I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His lustrous black hair and pearly white teeth only formed a more horrid contrast with his yellow skin and watery eyes and dun white sockets, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips. I had worked hard for nearly two years for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health, but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room.

Suzanne Burdon: Frankenstein has been called the first science fiction novel. And 200 years on, after countless representations, recreations and bastardisations of the story, its ideas are still challenging the scientific imagination. But where did it come from? What pointed Mary in the direction of producing such a book, one that was not just another Gothic horror story but a complex commentary on the possibilities and limitations of scientific exploration?

For many scientists today, the novel, its tropes and themes and its insights are still relevant. Mary was not a scientist, but her understanding was deeply rooted in her own experiences and the zeitgeist of the times, and the themes that she explored in the novel still resonate today, especially in the scientific world. Fiona Sampson is a biographer of Mary Shelley.

Fiona Sampson: As a writer she is an inspiration. I think it's amazing to turn so much difficulty and anxiety really, centennial anxiety as well as personal anxiety, into a masterpiece, into art. But of course she also turned it into science in the sense that she has the foresight to channel all these questions through the big scientific enquiry of her day which is what are the origins of life, how do we make life, what's the difference between animate and inanimate if it's not any longer God dropping the spirit of life into the human or the animal. So that's very inspiring.

Also, for me as a woman writer she is really interesting because she is writing around the edge of her life. I mean, she's moving house, she is moving countries. During the time she writes Frankenstein she is suffering bereavements, her sister kills herself, her partner's first wife kills herself, she is getting married, she is pregnant, all these things are happening, and yet she still manages to write a novel, and not just spontaneously. I mean, she studies a novel form, so there are all these things going on. There is a change in science, there is a time of real political awareness and unease, it's a time after the death of God, so a real anxiety about who the human is and where they sit in the world around them, and then there's Mary's own life experiences. And at that moment when she is 18 and 19 they all coincide, as it were, in her tremendously creative intelligent mind and emerge as a novel.

Suzanne Burdon: One of Mary's personal anxieties that Fiona mentions had been the loss of her firstborn child, born prematurely and living for only a few days. She wrote in her journal:

Reading: Dreamt that my little baby came to life again, that it had only been cold and that we rubbed it before the fire and it lived.

Suzanne Burdon: And this quest for understanding about how life might be created or recreated is the driving force of the ambition of the chemistry student Victor Frankenstein, the protagonist of the novel. In the novel he says:

Reading from Frankenstein: Whence, I often ask myself, did the principle of life proceed? It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery; yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.

Suzanne Burdon: In the early 19th century there was an enormous excitement about the new scientific discoveries that seemed to be on the verge of explaining the world. Alchemy, the occult and magic was still all on the table, but electricity was one of the major candidates for explaining how life is created, even though it was still presented as a magical phenomenon.

Experiments using electrical phenomena were the subject of many shows for entertainment. Showmen who claimed scientific insights but were really just conjurers, would make phantasmagoria appear and sparks come out of a young boy's mouth as he was hoisted into the air. There were other bizarre sights too. Science communicator Kathryn Harkup has written about the science in Frankenstein.

Kathryn Harkup: There was a brilliant experiment called the Electrified Venus, and they would get a woman in glass slippers and they would charge her up with electricity and then they would invite members of the audience to come and give her a kiss. And of course the reward for kissing the beautiful lady was a stinging electric shock to the lips. So these sort of things were going on all over London and big cities in Europe as well.

Suzanne Burdon: And it was seen as entertainment rather than serious science?

Kathryn Harkup: Oh absolutely, the line between entertainment and genuine scientific research was very, very blurred at the time. So this would have been demonstrated as not just fun experiments but also cutting edge research and new discoveries.

Suzanne Burdon: Mary also benefited from living with Percy Bysshe Shelley who, even though he was a poet, was obsessed with scientific experimentation, as were many gentlemen of his class at the time. Percy's friend Hogg described his room at Oxford as having as well as books, boots, papers, shoes and pistols, also philosophical instruments, crucibles and phials innumerable, scattered on the floor and in every place. There was an air pump, a galvanic trough, a solar microscope and large glass jars and receivers. It was, as Hogg said, as if the young chemist, in order to analyse the mystery of creation, had endeavoured first to reconstruct the primeval chaos.

Kathryn Harkup: Her husband Percy Shelley was absolutely obsessed with electricity. As a kid he would electrocute his sisters and the cat and he would perform electrical experiments at his school. So he was always talking about these kind of things and doing experiments to impress and entertain.

Suzanne Burdon: And his obsession continued. As a young man their dining table in his and Mary's lodgings would become his lab, to the despair of landladies. This obsession was very much a result of the experiments in galvanism which had been first conducted by Luigi Galvani in the late 1700s. These were the ones that reanimated frogs' legs and which had been part of the conversation amongst the young people in Byron's drawing room at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, as the storms buffeted the windows, before Byron issued his challenge to write a ghost story.

During the 1780s at the University of Bologna, while cutting a frog's leg, Galvani's steel scalpel touched a brass hook that was holding the leg in place. The leg twitched. Further experiments confirmed this effect and Galvani was convinced he was seeing what he called animal electricity, the life force within the muscles of the frog. Galvani's colleague at the university, Alessandro Volta, didn't believe it. And as is often the case with academic rivalry, conducted his own experiments. He found that it was the two dissimilar metals, not the frog's leg that produced the electricity. This led him in 1800 to develop the first battery capable of a continuous electrical current, known as the voltaic pile. It was composed of a stack of alternating discs of copper and zinc, separated by cardboard soaked in brine. It was the game changer in the inventive application of electricity.

By the time Mary was young, the experiments using the voltaic or the galvanic pile had moved on from whizzbang sensationalism to human subjects. Murderers were condemned not only to hanging but also to anatomisation, so that the burgeoning numbers of medical students had corpses to practice on.

Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini, carried on the family business, becoming a professor at Bologna and conducting medical experiments in theatres all over Europe, where his stated objective was to:

Reading: Influence the different parts of the nervous and muscular systems, to continue, revive and, if I may be allowed the expression, to command the vital powers.

Suzanne Burdon: In 1803 at the Royal College of Surgeons, before a packed audience, Aldini experimented on George Forster, a criminal recently hanged at Newgate Prison, close to Mary's home in London. He connected George's body to a galvanic battery for four hours, and the public were as thrilled by the spectacle of his apparent reanimation as they had been by the spectacle of his execution. As an observer described it:

Reading: On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.

Suzanne Burdon: Aldini was also the first to treat mentally ill patients with shocks to the brain, reporting complete electrical cures, which laid the ground for the development of various forms of electrotherapy that were heavily used later in the 19th century. Even today, deep brain stimulation, a procedure to relieve patients with motor or behavioural disorders, owes much to Aldini and galvanism.

Later, in 1818 at Glasgow University, Dr Andrew Ure experimented on another man who had been hanged for murder. Ure used a galvanic battery and rods in an attempt to reanimate the corpse.

Reading: The success of it was truly wonderful. Full, nay, laborious breathing, instantly commenced. The chest heaved and fell, the belly was protruded and again collapsed, with the retiring and collapsing diaphragm.

Suzanne Burdon: Ure also told how two moistened brass knobs connected to the battery and placed on the skin over the phrenic nerve and the diaphragm could restore life. Science writer Kathryn Harkup suggests that this is perhaps the earliest description of what would come to be known as a defibrillator.

Kathryn Harkup: Actually, if they'd gone a little bit further they might have invented a defibrillator maybe 150 years early. Sadly they didn't. But there is one particular experiment that did come of this. I think it was the 1970s, there was a man who remembered watching the James Whale film as a kid and he remembered all of these electrical devices and the creature Boris Karloff starting to twitch on the slab and come to life, and he thought that's incredible. What if you could miniaturise all of those electrical devices and what if you could control them and use it to regulate the electrical impulses that go across the heart? And he went away and he invented the portable pacemaker as a direct inspiration from the film. So sometimes even if it's not the most faithful interpretation of the Frankenstein book, it can still inspire some really brilliant science.

Suzanne Burdon: Frankenstein, as I mentioned, has been called the first science fiction novel, and we have come to expect science fiction novels to predict the future based on current realities. Think of Aldous Huxley and genetic engineering. So Mary reimagined all the efforts at reanimation that were going on at the time to create the birth of her monster. And while reanimation of a corpse may not have been a prediction that has actually eventuated, apart from a proliferation of zombie movies, science hasn't given up. It has continued to investigate and harness the potential of the effects of electricity on the human body from lie detectors and biofeedback, to the modern study of electricity and its effects, known as electrophysiology.

Steven Milanese: I think in my lifetime we will see paraplegics being able to walk.

Suzanne Burdon: That's Steven Milanese, associate professor at the University of South Australia's School of Health Science.

Steven Milanese: The area that I teach into is the area of electrical stimulation. So there's heaps of advances in this area internationally with the ability, the technology now to stimulate muscles is getting smaller and smaller, so it has better clinical utility and ability to be used in a functional domain. So we are seeing it now spreading from a research perspective into a commercial perspective, so we are seeing equipment such as straps with electrical stimulators within them which go around your lower limb below your knee for those patients who lack the ability to bring their toes up, so what we call ankle dorsiflex, bring their foot up, toes to nose, if you like. And the issue with that functionally is quite dramatic because if you are unable to bring your toes up to your nose, bring your ankle up, then when you walk it's very difficult to clear your foot, so it actually has significant implications for ambulation.

Suzanne Burdon: So what about the implications for disabled people of electrophysiology?

Steven Milanese: I think it's really exciting because the issue has been to date that the computer technology, if you like, the generation of the electrical currents has been affected by the fact that the devices, the computers are big et cetera. But as we get better technology, smaller technology, smaller computer systems, I see the future where we are actually able to have muscle stimulators in muscles, in the major muscle groups, and patients can actually be able to walk using an external program. The other issue at the moment is that the computer technology doesn't learn as well as the human brain does, so the ability to maybe use it functionally is a few years away at the moment, until we have artificial intelligence sufficient to actually learn when there has been balanced disturbances, et cetera, that the computer can maintain a person's balance as a result of it. We are not up to that stage yet, but I can definitely see it within my lifetime.

Suzanne Burdon: On a completely different area of scientific prediction in Frankenstein, one of the lesser observed practical considerations in the novel is the dilemma faced by the good doctor when the monster he had created asked him to create a mate for him. He was very persuasive.

Reading from Frankenstein: If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again. I will go to the vast wilds of South America. My food is not that of man. I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite. Acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man and will ripen our food.

Suzanne Burdon: Although he initially agreed, Victor Frankenstein thought better of it and destroyed his second creation, and his reasoning was explicit.

Reading from Frankenstein: A race of devils would be propagated upon Earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Future ages might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the whole human race.

Suzanne Burdon: In making this decision, Frankenstein was actually modelling the notion of competitive exclusion, which was not yet recognised as a concept in ecology or evolutionary biology and wouldn't be from more than 100 years.

Anthropologist and evolutionary scientist Nathaniel Dominy at Dartmouth College has modelled the likely results of an eight-foot monster created by Frankenstein and its mate being dropped into South America in 1818, and it wouldn't have looked good for Homo sapiens.

Nathaniel Dominy: Well, according to our estimates, the human race would have approximately 4,188 years of survival.

Suzanne Burdon: Nathaniel, explain how you reached that conclusion.

Nathaniel Dominy: Well, when we read through the novel, there are various clues about the creature's ecological niche. For example, the creature survives on nuts and berries in the wilderness, the creature learns to read Milton's Paradise Lost, becomes fluent in multiple languages, he can survive in the Arctic. And so from these tantalising clues that are spread throughout the novel we can estimate what kind of dietary needs the creature had, what kinds of environmental conditions the creature could survive in. And from those data we can estimate a niche, and so we can then imagine if the creature had a reproductive partner, which is precisely what the creature wants, we could imagine how successful the creature and his partner would be able to reproduce under particular environmental conditions that are known. We took clues from the novel to create a population dynamics model.

Suzanne Burdon: And the principle of competitive exclusion wasn't even contemplated at that time.

Nathaniel Dominy: No, that's right, it was formulated mathematically in the 1930s, and it's the concept that's familiar to us now that two species can't live in the same place at the same time and have the same niche. The heart of the horror that Mary Shelley is trying to share with her readers is that if there was another human species on the planet and it was superior to us and it could outcompete us in the human niche, then we would be done for, we would become extinct for sure.

Suzanne Burdon: So Mary Shelley saved the human race.

Mary subtitled her book The Modern Prometheus, a reference to the Greek legend in which Prometheus stole the gods' prerogative of fire and gave it to mankind. She was of course signposting one of the major themes of the novel; whether it's okay for humankind to try and play God. It's still a very hot topic, especially in the areas of gene therapy, bioengineering and AI. Obvious examples relate to eliminating types of cancer, cardiovascular and neurological diseases by selectively editing genes of embryos. Then there is cloning and other reproductive technologies, reviving extinct species, GM foods. The list is long and the ethical dilemmas abound. Mary also put a quote from Milton's Paradise Lost on the title page.

Reading from Frankenstein: Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould me Man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?

Suzanne Burdon: She is clearly asking a question which is very dominant in science today, as so much becomes possible. What are the responsibilities of creators, to their creations and to society at large? And just because we can, should we? Here are the thoughts of Mary Shelley's biographer, Fiona Sampson:

Fiona Sampson: The reason that the Frankenstein parable is so powerful is that it speaks to our anxieties about progress outstripping social consensus. We have hope and fears mixed together. We find science occult, it's mystified to us, we can't, by definition as laypeople…and of course that's interesting that it's particularly now compared to the romantic moment where if you were an 'educated person' you could expect to know about the science of the day. Now we know that we can't know, we know that we can't follow the people who have mapped the human genome, we know that we can't follow…you know, we have the joke about 'it's not rocket science' or 'it's not brain surgery', and by that we are saying…we're throwing up our hands and saying the scientists can do stuff we can't do, it's mysterious, it's a cult. So we have to trust them but we also don't quite trust them, so we have to kind of contain as a society the consequences of what they do.

Suzanne Burdon: In her day, Mary's question was seen as a challenge to religious norms rather than to social mores or ethics. When Frankenstein was published, it was slammed by many critics as being the product of a diseased mind and as being sacrilegious, even though the public loved it. And again, we have Percy Shelley's influence. He was a proud atheist and was sent down from Oxford for writing a pamphlet on atheism. And the ideas of their hero, the Swiss philosopher Rousseau, as well as the writings of Mary's parents, all favoured the idea that only society was responsible for inculcating an ethical code, that nature is trumped by nurture. Fiona Sampson again:

Fiona Sampson: For Mary and all her generation, particularly the radical leading edge of her generation which is where Mary and her peers were, they weren't living in a country town and being fish mongers, they were at the cutting edge, and I think one has to remember that. I think that's where for them science and political revolution and philosophical enquiry and art are all knitted together because there is this tremendous vertiginous sense of it's not how we thought it was, so how then is it? Who or what can we turn to? It turns out that we've only got ourselves as a measure of everything around us, not just everything in our own lives but kind of existentially and transcendentally. There's no more God, so we've got to either be God, play God, or we've got to find something that we insert into that metaphysical spot.

Suzanne Burdon: Science writer Kathryn Harkup agrees.

Kathryn Harkup: It was no longer…things didn't occur because of the actions of a particular god or a deity, it was because of fixed laws, and you could predict them, you could mathematically calculate them. So the next step was to see human beings not just as some divine creation but as almost mechanical objects that could be pieced together and made to work correctly if they were assembled correctly. I think it still has resonance today, most particularly because of this duty of care that we have to our fellow creatures. That's what really came through to me from rereading the book.

Suzanne Burdon: There is a fascinating and ground-breaking project at Arizona State University called The Frankenstein Bicentennial Project, which is addressing some of these issues. They produced an annotated version of the 1818 edition of Frankenstein for scientists and engineers, highlighting the ethical and moral questions raised by the novel. Its objective is to both reflect on how science is framed and understood by the public, and to generate serious reflection about our individual and collective responsibility for nurturing the products of our creativity. David Guston is one of the founders of the project.

David Guston: There was really no better vehicle for having conversations that continued the conversations that she had about the role of science, about creativity and responsibility than Frankenstein and all its cultural sequelae that has come down to us over the past two centuries from not just the novel and various stage productions that started shortly after the publication but 200 or 250 film versions of Frankenstein or films that were influenced by Frankenstein, to some of the ways that we talk about contemporary science and technology, like Franken-food and Franken-fish, to a lot of things that are going on in the laboratories right now where we are trying to create artificial intelligences and are doing so and sometimes not understanding what they themselves are creating. We are putting together genes from different species and different animals in the laboratory and then putting them out into the market or sometimes even into our bodies, and so on. So it's really taking a concept and a milieu that Mary Shelley began to play with two centuries ago, and finding ways in which it still has surprisingly not just traction but real informative value in contemporary issues in science and technology.

Suzanne Burdon: The narrative of Frankenstein in some ways, as you say, with all the media incarnations that it's had, has sort of shaped the narrative, hasn't it, about the perception of the moral authority of scientists.

David Guston: Yes, it has, and what's interesting about it is that we have that archetype, the mad scientist Victor Frankenstein, even before we have the word 'scientist' in the English language. So Mary's publication of Frankenstein predates the first use of the word 'scientist' in the English language by about a decade and a half. And so she and this text are actually in conversation with people of the time trying to understand and decide what being a scientist is really all about. Victor Frankenstein is not the middle-aged Dr Frankenstein of the films but a 21- or 22-year-old college student, and the creature himself is nothing more than really someone who was quite desperate to learn. And so these three are really much closer to today's college students than other forms of how Frankenstein has come down to us.

Suzanne Burdon: In your annotated Frankenstein, the gamut of modern issues is covered, including medicine, philosophy, science and technology, it's all there.

David Guston: That's one of the things that surprised me. So the way that we approached editing this new edition of Frankenstein was to ask a diverse audience heavily into science and engineering but also into ethics, politics and religion and literature to find places in the novel that they thought were interesting or provocative to communicate to contemporary readers and particularly contemporary readers who are younger scientists and engineers or scientists and engineers in training. And so the real focal audience for this is high school to grad school scientists and engineers. So we talked about in those annotations some of the work that they might be doing in new genetic technologies or in artificial intelligence and robotics. But we also wanted to address the style of research that they were doing and to connect them with Mary Shelley and with Victor Frankenstein and with the creature who, in reality, are more like these young students than they see in other portrayals of Frankenstein.

Suzanne Burdon: And you have some novel ways of getting children and young scientists to think through the challenges.

David Guston: We've done tabletop and making activities for people in museum settings to work with and to learn with, and one of those activities we call Scribble Bot, and Scribble Bot is a six or eight inch piece of swimming pool noodle, the little foam floaty things that kids ride on. And what you do is you strap with a rubber band a couple of magic markers that make Scribble Bot's legs, and you can decorate a face and create your Scribble Bot any way that you want to, and then put an electric toothbrush down the middle hole in this pool noodle and turn on the toothbrush and take off the caps of the magic markers and Scribble Bot dances on a piece of paper and draws for you.

We have these conversations with kids as young as eight years old where you ask them: Is Scribble Bot alive? Why or why not? And is Scribble Bot creating art by drawing on this paper? Why or why not? And if somebody wanted to pay $1 million or some large sum for what Scribble Bot drew, who would get it, you or Scribble Bot? And if Scribble Bot got dropped on an important document and destroyed that document by scribbling on it, who would be responsible, you or Scribble Bot? And so you can have these fabulous conversations with kids who are as young as eight years old. And then of course the clincher to this is that companies that are currently working with very sophisticated AIs are sometimes finding that they want intellectual protection for the things that their AIs devise, which makes you wonder, well, how do we approach and think about the artificial intelligence if it's creating things that we want intellectual property for.

Suzanne Burdon: So it comes down to the broader questions that scientists ask themselves; just because we can do it, should we? Kathryn Harkup again:

Kathryn Harkup: I think it's something that is explored extremely well in the book. The idea that Victor Frankenstein stumbles across this very simple but very brilliant clue to the secret of life but then fails to tell anyone about it. This is his first crime, he doesn't share his information, he uses it to build this creature without really thinking about what might happen with that. He just assumes that his creature will love him and will adore and worship him as his creator in some kind of God-like status, but it never seems to occur to him that the creature might be indifferent to him or even hate him and that he might also hate his creature. So responsibility and a lack of care is actually what brings about Victor Frankenstein's downfall. His science is very, very successful, it's his responsibility for the creature that he lets himself and the creature down.

Suzanne Burdon: David Guston also points out that the isolation of scientists can be an issue in how ethical and moral dilemmas are resolved in a social context, just as it was for Victor Frankenstein.

Can you give me a concrete example of how a young student would take some lessons in terms of what they are actually doing from Frankenstein?

David Guston: One part of it might be that Victor Frankenstein when he goes into the sort of feverish isolated mode of creation and that's a trope that we are all very familiar with, the creative endeavour is one where the genius isolates him or herself, has this great moment, and then comes out of it and reconnects with the world. But part of what goes on in the novel is that when Victor is doing that he's not doing things that he had been doing earlier that other folks in the novel also do, which is, for example, correspond, write letters to their loved ones and engage in this kind of social interaction that supports their decision-making and particularly their moral and ethical decision-making. And so a contemporary college student might be under the impression that the right way to do their research, the right way to be creative, is to wall oneself off, and we see this time and again with students spending long nights, sometimes complete nights isolated in a laboratory, and maybe that's not what they really ought to be doing, maybe they ought to be involved in some more social enterprises that give them a purpose for why they are staying in the lab all these times, being in the lab as well as being with other people.

Suzanne Burdon: Frankenstein is often seen as failing to take responsibility for his own creation because he was repulsed by it.

Reading from Frankenstein: I began to reflect on the monster whom I had created, the miserable demon whom I had sent abroad into the world for my destruction. I was possessed by a maddening rage when I thought of him.

Suzanne Burdon: Ursula K Le Guin said that science fiction, rather than being extrapolative, is a thought experiment, and that essentially Frankenstein was Mary Shelley's thought experiment and what happens if you create a monster, but Mary also asks: what is a monster? Is monstrosity itself simply a social construct or an individual perception? David Guston's project addresses that question.

David, you're giving these small grants to different Frankenstein related activities, and I saw that one of them is called This Beautiful Monster: Cancer Across Life. Can you tell me what that's about?

David Guston: One of the things that Frankenstein as a novel gives us is the aesthetic of the monster. And in every case when the creature exposes himself to the world, the world recoils at the ugliness of the creature. So these colleagues of mine here at ASU want to turn that on its head a little bit with cactuses, things that are perfectly comfortable in our environment here in Arizona, because, like us, cactuses get cancers. Unlike us, cactuses can live with their cancers in ways that we cannot. And even more like us, we happen to find those cancers often aesthetically pleasing rather than the other way around. So they are building a garden of aesthetically pleasing cactus cancers to allow us to think about revisiting monstrosity in ways that involve positively associating with monstrosity rather than fearing and rejecting it.

Suzanne Burdon: So, we are back full circle to the enduring question that Frankenstein asks us about creation. Creation of what? A monster or another wonderful invention that will change our lives. As Mary said in her novel:

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.

Robyn Williams: Suzanne Burdon. Her book, Almost Invincible, is a novel about Mary Shelley. She presented this monstrous Science Show with the help of David Fisher, Sharon Carleton, Isabella Tropiano, Russell Stapleton, Zoe Ferguson, and with readings by Anne Looby, Jeff Del Monte, George Kemp, Ed Suttle, Mattia Tabacci, and the incomparable William Zappa. Several ABC zombies also gave support. 200 years since Mary Shelley changed the world. I'm Robyn Williams.

 

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