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Frankenstein: how Mary Shelley’s sci-fi classic offers lessons for us today about the dangers of playing God

<p><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/frankenstein-9780241425121" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus</a>, is an 1818 novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Set in the late 18th century, it follows scientist Victor Frankenstein’s creation of life and the terrible events that are precipitated by his abandonment of his creation. It is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Gothic novel</a> in that it combines supernatural elements with horror, death and an exploration of the darker aspects of the psyche.</p> <p>It also provides a complex critique of Christianity. But most significantly, as one of the first works of science-fiction, it explores the dangers of humans pursuing new technologies and becoming God-like.</p> <h2>The celebrity story</h2> <p>Shelley’s Frankenstein is at the heart of what might be the greatest celebrity story of all time. Shelley was born in 1797. Her mother, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Mary Wollstonecraft</a>, author of the landmark A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), was, according to that book’s introduction, “the first major feminist”.</p> <p>Shelley’s father was <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/godwin/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">William Godwin</a>, political philosopher and founder of “philosophical anarchism” – he was anti-government in the moment that the great democracies of France and the United States were being born. When she was 16, Shelley eloped with radical poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Percy Shelley</a>, whose <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ozymandias</a> (1818) is still regularly quoted (“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”).</p> <p>Their relationship seems to epitomise the Romantic era itself. It was crossed with outside love interests, illegitimate children, suicides, debt, wondering and wandering. And it ultimately came to an early end in 1822 when Percy Shelley drowned, his small boat lost in a storm off the Italian coast. The Shelleys also had a close association with the poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lord Byron</a>, and it is this association that brings us to Frankenstein.</p> <p>In 1816 the Shelleys visited Switzerland, staying on the shores of Lake Geneva, where they were Byron’s neighbours. As Mary Shelley tells it, they had all been reading ghost stories, including Coleridge’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43971/christabel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Christabel</a> (Coleridge had visited her father at the family house when Shelley was young), when Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. Thus 18-year-old Shelley began to write Frankenstein.</p> <h2>The myth of the monster</h2> <p>The popular imagination has taken Frankenstein and run with it. The monster “Frankenstein”, originally “Frankenstein’s monster”, is as integral to Western culture as the characters and tropes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.</p> <p>But while reasonable continuity remains between Carroll’s Alice and its subsequent reimaginings, much has been changed and lost in the translation from Shelley’s novel into the many versions that are rooted in the popular imagination.</p> <p>There have been many varied adaptations, from <a href="https://youtu.be/TBHIO60whNw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Edward Scissorhands</a> to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGzc0pIjHqw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Rocky Horror Picture Show</a> (see <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/feb/11/the-20-best-frankenstein-films-ranked" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a> for a top 20 list of Frankenstein films). But despite the variety, it’s hard not to think of the “monster” as a zombie-like implacable menace, as we see in the <a href="https://youtu.be/BN8K-4osNb0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">trailer to the 1931 movie</a>, or a lumbering fool, as seen in <a href="https://youtu.be/nBV8Cw73zhk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the Herman Munster incarnation</a>. Further, when we add the prefix “franken” it’s usually with disdain; consider “frankenfoods”, which refers to genetically modified foods, or “frankenhouses”, which describes contemporary architectural monstrosities or bad renovations.</p> <p>However, in Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein’s creation is far from being two-dimensional or contemptible. To use the motto of the Tyrell corporation, which, in the 1982 movie Bladerunner, creates synthetic life, the creature strikes us as being “more human than human”. Indeed, despite their dissimilarities, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAzpa1x7jU" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the replicant Roy Batty in Bladerunner reproduces Frankenstein’s creature’s intense humanity</a>.</p> <h2>Some key elements in the plot</h2> <p>The story of Victor Frankenstein is nested within the story of scientist-explorer Robert Walton. For both men, the quest for knowledge is mingled with fanatical ambition. The novel begins towards the end of the story, with Walton, who is trying to sail to the North Pole, rescuing Frankenstein from <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0c/Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Das_Eismeer_-_Hamburger_Kunsthalle_-_02.jpg/1280px-Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Das_Eismeer_-_Hamburger_Kunsthalle_-_02.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sea ice</a>. Frankenstein is being led northwards by his creation towards a final confrontation.</p> <p>The central moment in the novel is when Frankenstein brings his creation to life, only to be immediately repulsed by it:</p> <blockquote> <p>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. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.</p> </blockquote> <p>Victor Frankenstein, like others in the novel, is appalled by the appearance of his creation. He flees the creature and it vanishes. After a hiatus of two years, the creature begins to murder people close to Frankenstein. And when Frankenstein reneges on his promise to create a female partner for his creature, it murders his closest friend and then, on Frankenstein’s wedding night, his wife.</p> <h2>More human than human</h2> <p>The real interest of the novel lies not in the murders or the pursuit, but in the creature’s accounts of what drove him to murder. After the creature murders Frankenstein’s little brother, William, Frankenstein seeks solace in the Alps – in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog#/media/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noopener">sublime nature</a>. There, the creature comes upon Frankenstein and eloquently and poignantly relates his story.</p> <p>We learn that the creature spent a year secretly living in an outhouse attached to a hut occupied by the recently impoverished De Lacey family. As he became self-aware, the creature reflected that, “To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being.” But when he eventually attempted to reveal himself to the family to gain their companionship, he was brutally driven from them. The creature was filled with rage. He says, “I could … have glutted myself with their shrieks and misery.” More human than human.</p> <p>After Victor Frankenstein dies aboard Walton’s ship, Walton has a final encounter with the creature, as it looms over Frankenstein’s body. To the corpse, the creature says:</p> <blockquote> <p>“Oh Frankenstein! Generous and self-devoted being! What does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me? I, who irretrievably destroyed thee by destroying all thou lovedst.”</p> </blockquote> <p>The creature goes on to make several grand and tragic pronouncements to Walton. “My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change, without torture such as you cannot even imagine.” And shortly after, about the murder of Frankenstein’s wife, the creature says: “I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey.”</p> <p>These remarks encourage us to ponder some of the weightiest questions we can ask about the human condition:</p> <blockquote> <p>What is it that drives humans to commit horrible acts? Are human hearts, like the creature’s, fashioned for ‘love and sympathy’, and when such things are withheld or taken from us, do we attempt to salve the wound by hurting others? And if so, what is the psychological mechanism that makes this occur?</p> </blockquote> <p>And what is the relationship between free will and horrible acts? We cannot help but think that the creature remains innocent – that he is the slave, not the master. But then what about the rest of us?</p> <p>The rule of law generally blames individuals for their crimes – and perhaps this is necessary for a society to function. Yet I suspect the rule of law misses something vital. Epictetus, the stoic philosopher, considered such questions millennia ago. He asked:</p> <blockquote> <p>What grounds do we have for being angry with anyone? We use labels like ‘thief’ and ‘robber’… but what do these words mean? They merely signify that people are confused about what is good and what is bad.</p> </blockquote> <h2>Unintended consequences</h2> <p>Victor Frankenstein creates life only to abandon it. An unsympathetic interpretation of Christianity might see something similar in God’s relationship with humanity. Yet the novel itself does not easily support this reading; like much great art, its strength lies in its ambivalence and complexity. At one point, the creature says to Frankenstein: “Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.” These and other remarks complicate any simplistic interpretation.</p> <p>In fact, the ambivalence of the novel’s religious critique supports its primary concern: the problem of technology allowing humans to become God-like. The subtitle of Frankenstein is “The Modern Prometheus”. In the Greek myth, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Prometheus</a> steals fire – a technology – from the gods and gives it to humanity, for which he is punished. In this myth and many other stories, technology and knowledge are double-edged. Adam and Eve eat the apple of knowledge in the Garden of Eden and are ejected from paradise. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, <a href="https://youtu.be/RWCvMwivrDk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">humanity is born when the first tool is used</a> – a tool that augments humanity’s ability to be violent.</p> <p>The novel’s subtitle is referring to Kant’s 1755 essay, “The Modern Prometheus”. In this, Kant observes that:</p> <blockquote> <p>There is such a thing as right taste in natural science, which knows how to distinguish the wild extravagances of unbridled curiosity from cautious judgements of reasonable credibility. From the Prometheus of recent times Mr. Franklin, who wanted to disarm the thunder, down to the man who wants to extinguish the fire in the workshop of Vulcanus, all these endeavors result in the humiliating reminder that Man never can be anything more than a man.</p> </blockquote> <p>Victor Frankenstein, who suffered from an unbridled curiosity, says something similar:</p> <blockquote> <p>A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind … If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind.</p> </blockquote> <p>And also: “Learn from me … how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”</p> <p>In sum: be careful what knowledge you pursue, and how you pursue it. Beware playing God.</p> <p>Alas, history reveals the quixotic nature of Shelley and Kant’s warnings. There always seems to be a scientist somewhere whose dubious ambitions are given free rein. And beyond this, there is always the problem of the unintended consequences of our discoveries. Since Shelley’s time, we have created numerous things that we fear or loathe such as the atomic bomb, cigarettes and other drugs, chemicals such as DDT, and so on. And as our powers in the realms of genetics and artificial intelligence grow, we may yet create something that loathes us.</p> <p>It all reminds me of sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson’s relatively recent (2009) remark <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00016553" target="_blank" rel="noopener">that</a>, “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”</p> <p><em><strong>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/frankenstein-how-mary-shelleys-sci-fi-classic-offers-lessons-for-us-today-about-the-dangers-of-playing-god-175520" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>.</strong></em></p> <p><em>Image: Shutterstock</em></p>

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"I created a Frankenstein's monster": Inventor of most popular dog breed haunted by regret

<p>The labradoodle is one of the most popular dogs around the world - it is no wonder how with their cutesy curls and plaintive eyes. </p> <p>However, the man who first invented the breed in the 1980’s admitted he has some feelings of regret for creating the infamous labradoodle. </p> <p>"I realised what I had done within a matter of days,” Wally Conron told<span> </span><a rel="noopener" href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-09-23/labradoodle-guide-dogs-designer-regret/10717186" target="_blank">abc.net.au.</a></p> <p>As a professional dog breeder, Wally said he mainly worried about breeding healthy, happy pups. </p> <p>However, he believes labradoodle breeders do not share the same concerns. </p> <p>"I realised the reason for these unethical, ruthless people [was] to breed these dogs and sell them for big bucks," Wally says.</p> <p>"I opened a Pandora's box and released a Frankenstein's monster.</p> <p>"When I'm out and I see these labradoodles I can't help myself, I go over them in my mind.</p> <p>"I look at it thinking, does it have hip dysplasia, has it got elbow problems, any other problems I can see?</p> <p>"I find that the biggest majority are either crazy or have a hereditary problem. I do see some damn nice labradoodles but they're few and far between."</p> <p>Mr Conron first crossed a labrador and a poodle in the late eighties after he was asked to breed a non-shedding guide dog. </p> <p>"I bred the labradoodle for a blind lady whose husband was allergic to dog hair," he says.</p> <p>"She wanted to know if we could come up with a dog that she could use as a guide dog and her husband wouldn't be allergic to," he says, speaking to the ABC podcast<span> </span><a rel="noopener" href="https://abclisten.page.link/gro5" target="_blank">Sum Of All Parts.</a></p> <p>He trialled 33 different standard poodles after deciding a “standard” one would “do the job”, he decided they didn’t have the right temperament to be a successful guide dog. </p> <p>After three years of attempts, Wally came up with the idea make a brand new crossbreed or "a dog with the working ability of the Labrador and the coat of the poodle".</p> <p>After breeding three dogs, he shipped one off to the blind woman and her husband who lived with the dog well into his retirement.</p> <p>The other two, he found, were extremely hard to get rid of as “no one wanted a cross breed,”</p> <p>Out of sheer frustration, Mr Conran approached Guide Dogs Victoria’s PR department and asked them to say they’d bred a “special breed.”</p> <p>"I said 'can you get onto the media and tell them that we've bred a special breed? A breed called the labradoodle — it's non-allergenic',”  he said.</p> <p>Quickly Wally found it became a sensation. </p> <p>"I could not visualise the publicity that a crossbred dog would get," Wally says.</p> <p>"Cars would stop and people would get out of the car and say to me, 'excuse me what sort of dog is that?' I'd say 'it's a labradoodle!'"</p> <p>While the gorgeous dogs have captured the attention of many over the last 30 years, the cost of them far outweigh their multi-thousand dollar price tag.</p>

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The surprising story behind Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”

<p><em><strong>Angela Wright is a Professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Sheffield.</strong></em></p> <p>Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em><strong><a href="https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/frankenstein/" target="_blank">Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus</a></strong></em></span> was published anonymously 200 years ago in January, 1818. It has since become the most analysed and contested novel of all time.</p> <p>It is cited today in debates on the ethics of scientific progress. The “Frankenstein effect” has become synonymous with questionable advances in genetics, in vitro fertilisation and artificial intelligence, evoking the spectre of dangerous science. It has become an example of what goes wrong when science goes too far.</p> <p>When we return to Frankenstein’s origins, however, we uncover a different story. <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://www.uwp.co.uk/book/mary-shelley-hardback/" target="_blank">As Shelley was later to document</a></strong></span>, the story was forged during the Summer of 1816 in debates that took place between herself, her partner (later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, her stepsister Claire Clairmont and John Polidori at the <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/diodati-the-residence-of-lord-byron" target="_blank">Villa Diodati</a></strong></span> on the shores of Lake Geneva.</p> <p>There, she records, the group was debating the arguments of poet and chemist <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/davy_humphrey.shtml" target="_blank">Sir Humphry Davy</a></strong></span> and discussed “the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated”.</p> <p>Shelley had accompanied her father William Godwin to hear Davy give his lectures on chemistry at the Royal Institution in 1812, and later, in 1816, she read his <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em><strong><a href="https://archive.org/details/elementschemica00davygoog" target="_blank">Elements of Chemical Philosophy</a></strong></em></span> as she was composing Frankenstein.</p> <p>Davy’s account of science was mesmerising for the sheer excitement that it conveyed: “Science has … bestowed upon [man] powers which may be called almost creative,” he declared. Frankenstein, drawing upon the scientific advancements of its age, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Erasmus-Darwin" target="_blank">Erasmus Darwin’s</a></strong></span> early theory of evolutionary development in the 1790s, vitality, galvanism and Davy’s quest to determine the “hidden origins” of nature, partakes of the fascination and anxiety about scientific progress. But it is wrong to read the novel as being straightforwardly sceptical of scientific advancement.</p> <p><strong>‘A torrent of light’</strong></p> <p>Victor Frankenstein’s aims in creating new life are, after all, commendable. Reflecting the mixed aspirations of his mythological counterpart Prometheus, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm#chap04" target="_blank">Frankenstein wishes to</a></strong></span> “pour a torrent of light into our dark world” and in so doing “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption”. He seeks to eradicate diseases which corrupt the human frame before its time.</p> <p>These are not bad ambitions. But it is the way in which he pursues nature to “her hiding places” that makes his quest so fatal. Ventriloquising Shelley’s views, Frankenstein later observes that:</p> <p><em>A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule.</em></p> <p>Knowledge, Shelley argued, should always be pursued in tranquillity; creation should always be the intellectual fruit of a “peaceful mind”.</p> <p>The words that Frankenstein utters can be read, too, as an expression of Shelley’s approach to authorship. Much has been made of her comparative youth when she wrote Frankenstein. The novel was begun when she was 18.</p> <p>Despite the fact that Matthew Gregory Lewis, known to both Shelleys, published his own Gothic tale – <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93157.The_Monk" target="_blank">The Monk</a></strong></span> (1796) – at the age of 21, some ask how such a young woman could have composed Frankenstein, and falsely ascribe authorship to Percy Bysshe Shelley.</p> <p>Sir Walter Scott, reviewing Frankenstein for Blackwood’s Magazine, was the first to commit this error, commenting that it “is said to be written by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who, if we are rightly informed, is son-in-law to Mr Godwin”.</p> <p>Shelley’s response to Scott’s review of her novel was swift. Writing to Scott on June 14, 1818, she pointed out his error, noting, “I am anxious to prevent your continuing in the mistake of supposing Mr Shelley guilty of a juvenile attempt of mine.”</p> <p>Shelley’s response to Scott’s mistake was decisive in her assertion of authorship. Her journal further illustrates the intensive work that she invested in her manuscript.</p> <p>Percy Bysshe Shelley may have edited her work, but this was the gesture of one who wished to support and encourage another’s authorial career. Frankenstein was the first in a line of seven novels by Shelley that she published across three decades.</p> <p>It may be the one for which we now celebrate Shelley, but all of her works reveal an assertion of women’s rights to create as authors and artists, associating these rights with a calm pursuit of knowledge. Shelley, author of Frankenstein, cautious supporter of scientific advancement, was much, much more than the sum of the parts of her first monster.</p> <p><em>Written by Angela Wright. Republished with permission of <a href="https://theconversation.com/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">The Conversation</span>.</strong></a> </em><img width="1" height="1" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90206/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" alt="The Conversation"/></p>

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