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This is a cool article about genetically modified foods. It relates to Frankenstein because it discusses how to genetically get fish species to grow at a faster rate, thus modifying natural life.

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Critics and supporters of genetically modified (GM) foods are duking it out again, as the FDA considers approving the first-ever genetically engineered animal food - in this case a breed of salmon modified to grow twice as fast as ordinary salmon.

Whatever the FDA's decision, food experts say many Americans are woefully misinformed about genetically engineered foods.

CBS News spoke with two prominent experts on GM foods to get their take on the potential risks and benefits of what some are calling "Frankenfoods."

Food Labels

If you've been scanning food labels to check whether you're about to buy products containing GM foods, you're wasting your time.

The FDA decided more than a decade ago that GM foods do not have to be labeled. So there's no easy way to tell whether a particular packaged food is made with GM crops.

Help Against Hunger?

"The industry often says that genetically modified foods are the most promising way to meet the food needs of the 21st Century," says Dr. Nestle. "This is an exaggeration."

Nestle says food shortages around the world are the result of poverty and other social problems that cannot be solved with a technological fix - a sentiment echoed by other food experts.

"In the U.S., we have had food surpluses for a decade, and yet we still have hunger," says Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports. "It's not because we don't have enough genetically modified foods. Some people can't afford food at any price."

Altered Genes

Critics of genetically modified foods were ridiculed when they suggested several years ago that genes from genetically modified crops would start showing up in conventional crops. Well, no one is laughing any more.

Dr. Nestle points out that airborne pollen from a field of genetically modified corn or soybeans, for instance, can drift over to a field where conventional crops are planted - and spread altered genes.

Says Nestle, "They can't keep their genes under control. There is a 100 percent probability that modified genes will show up in other crops to some low percentage."

Pesticides

One of the early selling points of genetically modified food was that crops engineered to be resistant to pests would require less pesticide.

That's true for certain varieties. But most GM crops are designed to be resistant to the chemicals that kill weeds and bugs. That means farmers can use the herbicides more liberally without killing their plants.

That's good news for Monsanto, the company that makes most of the world's GM seeds as well as the herbicide used to spray the crops.

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Think You Know What's In Your Food? Think Again

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This powerpoint gives an introduction to Mary Shelby's Frankenstein.

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this article explains the the history of Frankenstein, the origin all in detail .

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"It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils." Soon after, those efforts culminated in a portentous and frightening outcome, when Victor Frankenstein observed "the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."

Two centuries have passed since that fictional November night in which Mary Shelley- then still Mary Godwin, it being prior to her marriage to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley-placed her famous doctor, breathing life into a creature fashioned from pieces of corpses. Frankenstein; or, the modern Prometheus has endured as one of the best known works of universal literature, the source of over 90 theatrical adaptations and more than 70 films.

But Shelley's work was not a mere fantasy in the style of the phantasmagorical stories that she and her friends exchanged during that odd summer of 1816 in a villa by Lake Geneva. Although that was when the author conceived the plot of her novel, to give it shape she drank from the scientific sources of her time. "Mary was importantly influenced by people that we would call scientists," says David Guston, director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University and co-editor of the book Frankenstein Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds (MIT Press, 2017), in a conversation with OpenMind.

That is why many authors see Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel, a genre that questions the consequences of scientific advances and their speculative applications.

The first science fiction novel

The first and most obvious of the scientific imprints in the work is the method for bringing the creature to life: curiously, the harnessing of a thunderbolt during a storm never appears in the book -it was a contribution of cinema. The first edition of the novel made only a brief mention of electricity, and resolved the resuscitation of the creature with a vague allusion to "infuse a spark of being." "The specifics of how he did it weren't as important," says Iwan Morus, a historian of Victorian science at the University of Aberystwyth in the United Kingdom. "She didn't need to spell it out, since her readers would know already how it would be done."

In fact, electricity was the fashionable scientific mystery of Shelley's epoch. The Italian Luigi Galvani had shown how a spark infused movement in the legs of dissected frogs. "There is evidence that Mary did see galvanic demonstrations, which were popular at the time," says Guston. Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini, went much further when in 1803 he used electricity to reanimate the limbs of George Forster, a criminal executed in London, before the shock of a horrified audience.

"Mary and Percy both moved in social circles where discussions about electricity and its relationship to the processes of life would have been commonplace," says Morus. Mary also knew about the work of William Nicholson and Humphry Davy, pioneers of electricity in Britain and friends of her father. During the composition of the novel, she read Davy's work Elements of Chemical Philosophy, from which she integrated some phrases into the speech of Dr Waldman, the professor of Victor Frankenstein.

As pointed out by Stuart Prior, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol (United Kingdom), in 1814 Mary and Percy attended a conference of Andrew Crosse, an outlandish experimenter who had transformed his country property of Fyne Court into a large electrical laboratory. "Davy visited Crosse several times at Fyne Court, and encouraged him to give the talk in London," Prior told OpenMind.

A blurred border between life and death

But beyond the disturbing spectacles of Aldini, the possibility of reviving a corpse with electricity was part of the scientific discussion of the time about whether the human body was only the sum of its parts or whether it was animated by a vital force, something equivalent to the soul. In the British scientific community these two positions had their main defenders in the surgeons William Lawrence and John Abernethy, respectively; the former had been the doctor for Percy Shelley's family.

The dichotomy between Lawrence's mechanicism and Abernethy's vitalism had profound consequences on the scientific thinking of the time, because of its implications for the definition of life and death. The boundary between the two had faded thanks to the rise in the resuscitation of drowned people, according to Sharon Ruston, historian of the science of Romanticism at the University of Lancaster (United Kingdom). Mary did not find these cases strange; before she was born, her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had been revived after attempting suicide by throwing herself into the Thames. "Death, it seems, could be reversed," Ruston writes.

One of those rescuers was the Scottish doctor James Lind (cousin of James Lind known for studying the cure of scurvy) who worked on a rudimentary cardiopulmonary resuscitation system with which he managed to revive a patient. "Lind has been regarded as a 'real life Victor Frankenstein'," says Guston. The reason is that there was a strong link between the Scot and the author of Frankenstein: Lind was more than a mentor, being almost a father to Percy during his school years at Eton. Thanks to the influence of the doctor, "Percy was a science enthusiast and is said to even have attempted to recreate Benjamin Franklin's kite-and-key experiment as a student," continues Guston.

In fact, Franklin also appears on the list of candidate models for Mary Shelley's character: according to Guston, it has been proposed that the author came up with the name for her doctor in homage to the American scientist and inventor, "especially considering that Immanuel Kant called Franklin the modern Prometheus."

The alchemist who stole corpses

But of course, among the possible inspirations for Shelley's iconic character, we cannot forget the German alchemist who is said to have stolen corpses in order to revive them with a potion of his invention, and who was actually born in the castle of Frankenstein? But despite the amazing similarities even in the name, the influence of Johann Conrad Dippel in the gestation of the novel is a matter of debate.

It is documented that in 1814 Mary and Percy visited the German town where the castle is located. However, this is not mentioned in her travel diary, although according to what Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, authors of The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein (Little, Brown, 2006), told OpenMind, "the similarities between Dippel's life and Mary Shelley's novel are too great to be written off as coincidence." Mary Shelley took the real answer to the grave-a place from which, in real life, no one has yet returned.

Javier Yanes

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Ventana al Conocimiento (Knowledge Window)

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The Scientific Origins of Frankenstein | OpenMind

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"It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils." Soon after, those efforts culminated in a portentous and frightening outcome, when Victor Frankenstein observed "the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."

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https://www.dictionary.com/browse/frankenstein-food

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This Video shows how someone turned a fruit into meat.

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Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds.

A Grape Made of... Meat?? - Tissue Recellularization - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaVHTd9Ne_s

Oct 29, 2019 · 1.5m members in the mealtimevideos community. You know when you sit down for a meal in front of the computer and you just need something ...

r/interestingasfuck - A Grape Made of... Meat?? 182 ... They did surgery on a grape. 5. Reply ... Japan saves millions of liters of water every year doing this. /r/​ALL.

Jun 11, 2019 · Decellularization is a pretty strange process. Using a special type of soap, it's possible to remove all the cellular material from a piece of tissue, ...

Virginia - From your Internet address - Learn more

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Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds. A Grape Made of... Meat?? - Tissue Recellularization - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaVHTd9Ne_s Oct 29, 2019 · 1.5m members in the mealtimevideos community. You know when you sit down for a meal in front of the computer and you just need something ...

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After two hundred years, are we ready for the truth about Mary Shelley's novel?

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley began writing "Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus" when she was eighteen years old, two years after she'd become pregnant with her first child, a baby she did not name. "Nurse the baby, read," she had written in her diary, day after day, until the eleventh day: "I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it," and then, in the morning, "Find my baby dead." With grief at that loss came a fear of "a fever from the milk." Her breasts were swollen, inflamed, unsucked; her sleep, too, grew fevered. "Dream 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," she wrote in her diary. "Awake and find no baby."

Pregnant again only weeks later, she was likely still nursing her second baby when she started writing "Frankenstein," and pregnant with her third by the time she finished. She didn't put her name on her book-she published "Frankenstein" anonymously, in 1818, not least out of a concern that she might lose custody of her children-and she didn't give her monster a name, either. "This anonymous androdaemon," one reviewer called it. For the first theatrical production of "Frankenstein," staged in London in 1823 (by which time the author had given birth to four children, buried three, and lost another unnamed baby to a miscarriage so severe that she nearly died of bleeding that stopped only when her husband had her sit on ice), the monster was listed on the playbill as "------."

"This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good," Shelley remarked about the creature's theatrical billing. She herself had no name of her own. Like the creature pieced together from cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein, her name was an assemblage of parts: the name of her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, stitched to that of her father, the philosopher William Godwin, grafted onto that of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as if Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley were the sum of her relations, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, if not the milk of her mother's milk, since her mother had died eleven days after giving birth to her, mainly too sick to give suck- Awoke and found no mother.

"It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils," Victor Frankenstein, a university student, says, pouring out his tale. The rain patters on the windowpane; a bleak light flickers from a dying candle. He looks at the "lifeless thing" at his feet, come to life: "I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs." Having labored so long to bring the creature to life, he finds himself disgusted and horrified-"unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created"-and flees, abandoning his creation, unnamed. "I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion," the creature says, before, in the book's final scene, he disappears on a raft of ice.

"Frankenstein" is four stories in one: an allegory, a fable, an epistolary novel, and an autobiography, a chaos of literary fertility that left its very young author at pains to explain her "hideous progeny." In the introduction she wrote for a revised edition in 1831, she took up the humiliating question "How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea" and made up a story in which she virtually erased herself as an author, insisting that the story had come to her in a dream ("I saw-with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,-I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together") and that writing it consisted of "making only a transcript" of that dream. A century later, when a lurching, grunting Boris Karloff played the creature in Universal Pictures's brilliant 1931 production of "Frankenstein," directed by James Whale, the monster-prodigiously eloquent, learned, and persuasive in the novel-was no longer merely nameless but all but speechless, too, as if what Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley had to say was too radical to be heard, an agony unutterable.

Every book is a baby, born, but "Frankenstein" is often supposed to have been more assembled than written, an unnatural birth, as though all that the author had done were to piece together the writings of others, especially those of her father and her husband. "If Godwin's daughter could not help philosophising," one mid-twentieth-century critic wrote, "Shelley's wife knew also the eerie charms of the morbid, the occult, the scientifically bizarre." This enduring condescension, the idea of the author as a vessel for the ideas of other people-a fiction in which the author participated, so as to avoid the scandal of her own brain-goes some way to explaining why "Frankenstein" has accreted so many wildly different and irreconcilable readings and restagings in the two centuries since its publication. For its bicentennial, the original, 1818 edition has been reissued, as a trim little paperback (Penguin Classics), with an introduction by the distinguished biographer Charlotte Gordon, and as a beautifully illustrated hardcover keepsake, "The New Annotated Frankenstein" (Liveright), edited and annotated by Leslie S. Klinger. Universal is developing a new "Bride of Frankenstein" as part of a series of remakes from its backlist of horror movies. Filmography recapitulating politico-chicanery, the age of the superhero is about to yield to the age of the monster. But what about the baby?

"Frankenstein," the story of a creature who has no name, has for two hundred years been made to mean just about anything. Most lately, it has been taken as a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley technologists, an interpretation that derives less from the 1818 novel than from later stage and film versions, especially the 1931 film, and that took its modern form in the aftermath of Hiroshima. In that spirit, M.I.T. Press has just published an edition of the original text "annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds," and prepared by the leaders of the Frankenstein Bicentennial Project, at Arizona State University, with funding from the National Science Foundation; they offer the book as a catechism for designers of robots and inventors of artificial intelligences. "Remorse extinguished every hope," Victor says, in Volume II, Chapter 1, by which time the creature has begun murdering everyone Victor loves. "I had been the author of unalterable evils; and I lived in daily fear, lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness." The M.I.T. edition appends, here, a footnote: "The remorse Victor expresses is reminiscent of J. Robert Oppenheimer's sentiments when he witnessed the unspeakable power of the atomic bomb. . . . Scientists' responsibility must be engaged before their creations are unleashed."

This is a way to make use of the novel, but it involves stripping out nearly all the sex and birth, everything female-material first mined by Muriel Spark, in a biography of Shelley published in 1951, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of her death. Spark, working closely with Shelley's diaries and paying careful attention to the author's eight years of near-constant pregnancy and loss, argued that "Frankenstein" was no minor piece of genre fiction but a literary work of striking originality. In the nineteen-seventies, that interpretation was taken up by feminist literary critics who wrote about "Frankenstein" as establishing the origins of science fiction by way of the "female gothic." What made Mary Shelley's work so original, Ellen Moers argued at the time, was that she was a writer who was a mother. Tolstoy had thirteen children, born at home, Moers pointed out, but the major female eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, the Austens and Dickinsons, tended to be "spinsters and virgins." Shelley was an exception.

So was Mary Wollstonecraft, a woman Shelley knew not as a mother but as a writer who wrote about, among other things, how to raise a baby. "I conceive it to be the duty of every rational creature to attend to its offspring," Wollstonecraft wrote in "Thoughts on the Education of Daughters," in 1787, ten years before giving birth to the author of "Frankenstein." As Charlotte Gordon notes in her dual biography "Romantic Outlaws," Wollstonecraft first met her fellow political radical William Godwin in 1791, at a London dinner party hosted by the publisher of Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man." Wollstonecraft and Godwin were "mutually displeased with each other," Godwin later wrote; they were the smartest people in the room, and they couldn't help arguing all evening. Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" appeared in 1792, and, the next year, Godwin published "Political Justice." In 1793, during an affair with the American speculator and diplomat Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft became pregnant. ("I am nourishing a creature," she wrote Imlay.) Not long after Wollstonecraft gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Fanny, Imlay abandoned her. She and Godwin became lovers in 1796, and when she became pregnant they married, for the sake of the baby, even though neither of them believed in marriage. In 1797, Wollstonecraft died of an infection contracted from the fingers of a physician who reached into her uterus to remove the afterbirth. Godwin's daughter bore the name of his dead wife, as if she could be brought back to life, another afterbirth.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was fifteen years old when she met Percy Bysshe Shelley, in 1812. He was twenty, and married, with a pregnant wife. Having been thrown out of Oxford for his atheism and disowned by his father, Shelley had sought out William Godwin, his intellectual hero, as a surrogate father. Shelley and Godwin fille spent their illicit courtship, as much Romanticism as romance, passionately reading the works of her parents while reclining on Wollstonecraft's grave, in the St. Pancras churchyard. "Go to the tomb and read," she wrote in her diary. "Go with Shelley to the churchyard." Plainly, they were doing more than reading, because she was pregnant when she ran away with him, fleeing her father's house in the half-light of night, along with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who wanted to be ruined, too.

If any man served as an inspiration for Victor Frankenstein, it was Lord Byron, who followed his imagination, indulged his passions, and abandoned his children. He was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know," as one of his lovers pronounced, mainly because of his many affairs, which likely included sleeping with his half sister, Augusta Leigh. Byron married in January, 1815, and a daughter, Ada, was born in December. But, when his wife left him, a year into their marriage, Byron was forced never to see his wife or daughter again, lest his wife reveal the scandal of his affair with Leigh. (Ada was about the age Mary Godwin's first baby would have been, had she lived. Ada's mother, fearing that the girl might grow up to become a poet, as mad and bad as her father, raised her, instead, to be a mathematician. Ada Lovelace, a scientist as imaginative as Victor Frankenstein, would in 1843 provide an influential theoretical description of a general-purpose computer, a century before one was built.)

In the spring of 1816, Byron, fleeing scandal, left England for Geneva, and it was there that he met up with Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, and Claire Clairmont. Moralizers called them the League of Incest. By summer, Clairmont was pregnant by Byron. Byron was bored. One evening, he announced, "We will each write a ghost story." Godwin began the story that would become "Frankenstein." Byron later wrote, "Methinks it is a wonderful book for a girl of nineteen- not nineteen, indeed, at that time."

During the months when Godwin was turning her ghost story into a novel, and nourishing yet another creature in her belly, Shelley's wife, pregnant now with what would have been their third child, killed herself; Clairmont gave birth to a girl-Byron's, though most people assumed it was Shelley's-and Shelley and Godwin got married. For a time, they attempted to adopt the girl, though Byron later took her, having noticed that nearly all of Godwin and Shelley's children had died. "I so totally disapprove of the mode of Children's treatment in their family-that I should look upon the Child as going into a hospital," he wrote, cruelly, about the Shelleys. "Have they reared one?" (Byron, by no means interested in rearing a child himself, placed the girl in a convent, where she died at the age of five.)

When "Frankenstein," begun in the summer of 1816, was published eighteen months later, it bore an unsigned preface by Percy Shelley and a dedication to William Godwin. The book became an immediate sensation. "It seems to be universally known and read," a friend wrote to Percy Shelley. Sir Walter Scott wrote, in an early review, "The author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination." Scott, like many readers, assumed that the author was Percy Shelley. Reviewers less enamored of the Romantic poet damned the book's Godwinian radicalism and its Byronic impieties. John Croker, a conservative member of Parliament, called "Frankenstein" a "tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity"-radical, unhinged, and immoral.

But the politics of "Frankenstein" are as intricate as its structure of stories nested like Russian dolls. The outermost doll is a set of letters from an English adventurer to his sister, recounting his Arctic expedition and his meeting with the strange, emaciated, haunted Victor Frankenstein. Within the adventurer's account, Frankenstein tells the story of his fateful experiment, which has led him to pursue his creature to the ends of the earth. And within Frankenstein's story lies the tale told by the creature himself, the littlest, innermost Russian doll: the baby.

The novel's structure meant that those opposed to political radicalism often found themselves baffled and bewildered by "Frankenstein," as literary critics such as Chris Baldick and Adriana Craciun have pointed out. The novel appears to be heretical and revolutionary; it also appears to be counter-revolutionary. It depends on which doll is doing the talking.

If "Frankenstein" is a referendum on the French Revolution, as some critics have read it, Victor Frankenstein's politics align nicely with those of Edmund Burke, who described violent revolution as "a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it." The creature's own politics, though, align not with Burke's but with those of two of Burke's keenest adversaries, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Victor Frankenstein has made use of other men's bodies, like a lord over the peasantry or a king over his subjects, in just the way that Godwin denounced when he described feudalism as a "ferocious monster." ("How dare you sport thus with life?" the creature asks his maker.) The creature, born innocent, has been treated so terribly that he has become a villain, in just the way that Wollstonecraft predicted. "People are rendered ferocious by misery," she wrote, "and misanthropy is ever the offspring of discontent." ("Make me happy," the creature begs Frankenstein, to no avail.)

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley took pains that readers' sympathies would lie not only with Frankenstein, whose suffering is dreadful, but also with the creature, whose suffering is worse. The art of the book lies in the way Shelley nudges readers' sympathy, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, even line by line, from Frankenstein to the creature, even when it comes to the creature's vicious murders, first of Frankenstein's little brother, then of his best friend, and, finally, of his bride. Much evidence suggests that she succeeded. "The justice is indisputably on his side," one critic wrote in 1824, "and his sufferings are, to me, touching to the last degree."

"Hear my tale," the creature insists, when he at last confronts his creator. What follows is the autobiography of an infant. He awoke, and all was confusion. "I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch; I knew, and could distinguish, nothing." He was cold and naked and hungry and bereft of company, and yet, having no language, was unable even to name these sensations. "But, feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat down and wept." He learned to walk, and began to wander, still unable to speak-"the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again." Eventually, he found shelter in a lean-to adjacent to a cottage alongside a wood, where, observing the cottagers talk, he learned of the existence of language: "I discovered the names that were given to some of the most familiar objects of discourse: I learned and applied the words fire, milk, bread, and wood." Watching the cottagers read a book, "Ruins of Empires," by the eighteenth-century French revolutionary the Comte de Volney, he both learned how to read and acquired "a cursory knowledge of history"-a litany of injustice. "I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty; of rank, descent, and noble blood." He learned that the weak are everywhere abused by the powerful, and the poor despised.

Shelley kept careful records of the books she read and translated, naming title after title and compiling a list each year-Milton, Goethe, Rousseau, Ovid, Spenser, Coleridge, Gibbon, and hundreds more, from history to chemistry. "Babe is not well," she noted in her diary while writing "Frankenstein." "Write, draw and walk; read Locke." Or, "Walk; write; read the 'Rights of Women.' " The creature keeps track of his reading, too, and, unsurprisingly, he reads the books that Shelley read and reread most often. One day, wandering in the woods, he stumbles upon a leather trunk, lying on the ground, that contains three books: Milton's "Paradise Lost," Plutarch's "Lives," and Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther"-the library that, along with Volney's "Ruins," determines his political philosophy, as reviewers readily understood. "His code of ethics is formed on this extraordinary stock of poetical theology, pagan biography, adulterous sentimentality, and atheistical jacobinism," according to the review of "Frankenstein" most widely read in the United States, "yet, in spite of all his enormities, we think the monster, a very pitiable and ill-used monster."

Sir Walter Scott found this the most preposterous part of "Frankenstein": "That he should have not only learned to speak, but to read, and, for aught we know, to write-that he should have become acquainted with Werter, with Plutarch's Lives, and with Paradise Lost, by listening through a hole in a wall, seems as unlikely as that he should have acquired, in the same way, the problems of Euclid, or the art of book-keeping by single and double entry." But the creature's account of his education very closely follows the conventions of a genre of writing far distant from Scott's own: the slave narrative.

Frederick Douglass, born into slavery the year "Frankenstein" was published, was following those same conventions when, in his autobiography, he described learning to read by trading with white boys for lessons. Douglass realized his political condition at the age of twelve, while reading the "Dialogue Between a Master and Slave," reprinted in "The Columbian Orator" (a book for which he paid fifty cents, and which was one of the only things he brought with him when he escaped from slavery). It was his coming of age. "The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers," Douglass wrote, in a line that the creature himself might have written.

Likewise, the creature comes of age when he finds Frankenstein's notebook, recounting his experiment, and learns how he was created, and with what injustice he has been treated. It's at this moment that the creature's tale is transformed from the autobiography of an infant to the autobiography of a slave. "I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing," Douglass wrote. "It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy." So, too, the creature: "Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was." Douglass: "I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead." The creature: "Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live?" Douglass seeks his escape; the creature seeks his revenge.

Among the many moral and political ambiguities of Shelley's novel is the question of whether Victor Frankenstein is to be blamed for creating the monster-usurping the power of God, and of women-or for failing to love, care for, and educate him. The Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model considers only the former, which makes for a weak reading of the novel. Much of "Frankenstein" participates in the debate over abolition, as several critics have astutely observed, and the revolution on which the novel most plainly turns is not the one in France but the one in Haiti. For abolitionists in England, the Haitian revolution, along with continued slave rebellions in Jamaica and other West Indian sugar islands, raised deeper and harder questions about liberty and equality than the revolution in France had, since they involved an inquiry into the idea of racial difference. Godwin and Wollstonecraft had been abolitionists, as were both Percy and Mary Shelley, who, for instance, refused to eat sugar because of how it was produced. Although Britain and the United States enacted laws abolishing the importation of slaves in 1807, the debate over slavery in Britain's territories continued through the decision in favor of emancipation, in 1833. Both Shelleys closely followed this debate, and in the years before and during the composition of "Frankenstein" they together read several books about Africa and the West Indies. Percy Shelley was among those abolitionists who urged not immediate but gradual emancipation, fearing that the enslaved, so long and so violently oppressed, and denied education, would, if unconditionally freed, seek a vengeance of blood. He asked, "Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent?"

Given Mary Shelley's reading of books that stressed the physical distinctiveness of Africans, her depiction of the creature is explicitly racial, figuring him as African, as opposed to European. "I was more agile than they, and could subsist upon coarser diet," the creature says. "I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs." This characterization became, onstage, a caricature. Beginning with the 1823 stage production of "Frankenstein," the actor playing "------ " wore blue face paint, a color that identified him less as dead than as colored. It was this production that George Canning, abolitionist, Foreign Secretary, and leader of the House of Commons, invoked in 1824, during a parliamentary debate about emancipation. Tellingly, Canning's remarks brought together the novel's depiction of the creature as a baby and the culture's figuring of Africans as children. "In dealing with the negro, Sir, we must remember that we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child," Canning told Parliament. "To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength, in the maturity of his physical passions, but in the infancy of his uninstructed reason, would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance." In later nineteenth-century stage productions, the creature was explicitly dressed as an African. Even the 1931 James Whale film, in which Karloff wore green face paint, furthers this figuring of the creature as black: he is, in the film's climactic scene, lynched.

Because the creature reads as a slave, "Frankenstein" holds a unique place in American culture, as the literary scholar Elizabeth Young argued, a few years ago, in "Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor." "What is the use of living, when in fact I am dead," the black abolitionist David Walker asked from Boston in 1829, in his "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World," anticipating Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice" by a century and a half. "Slavery is everywhere the pet monster of the American people," Frederick Douglass declared in New York, on the eve of the American Civil War. Nat Turner was called a monster; so was John Brown. By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein's monster regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked black man, signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the nation that created him.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was dead by then, her own chaotic origins already forgotten. Nearly everyone she loved died before she did, most of them when she was still very young. Her half sister, Fanny Imlay, took her own life in 1816. Percy Shelley drowned in 1822. Lord Byron fell ill and died in Greece in 1824, leaving Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, as she put it, "the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me."

She chose that as the theme behind the novel she wrote eight years after "Frankenstein." Published in 1826, when the author was twenty-eight, "The Last Man" is set in the twenty-first century, when only one man endures, the lone survivor of a terrible plague, having failed-for all his imagination, for all his knowledge-to save the life of a single person. Nurse the baby, read. Find my baby dead. ♦

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The Strange and Twisted Life of "Frankenstein"

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From 2018, Jill Lepore on why Mary Shelley's novel has accreted so many wildly different and irreconcilable readings and restagings in the two centuries since its publication.

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The novel is usually considered a cautionary tale for science, but its cultural legacy is much more complicated.

Like Victor, we make
The bicentennial of Frankenstein started early. While Mary Shelley's momentous novel was published anonymously in 1818, the commemorations began last year to mark the dark and stormy night on Lake Geneva when she (then still Mary Godwin, having eloped with her married lover Percy Shelley) conceived what she called her "hideous progeny."

In May, MIT Press will publish a new edition of the original text, "annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds." As well as the explanatory and expository notes throughout the book, there are accompanying essays by historians and other writers that discuss Frankenstein 's relevance and implications for science and invention today.

It's a smart idea, but treating Frankenstein as a meditation on the responsibilities of the scientist, and the dangers of ignoring them, is bound to give only a partial view of Shelley's novel. It's not just a book about science. Moreover, focusing on Shelley's text doesn't explore the scope of the Frankenstein myth itself, including its message for scientists.

This is one of those stories everyone knows even without having read the original: Man makes monster; monster runs amok; monster kills man. It may come as a surprise to discover that the creator, not the creature, is called Frankenstein, and that the original creature was not the shambling, grunting, green-faced lunk played by Boris Karloff in the 1931 movie but an articulate soul who meditates on John Milton's Paradise Lost. Such misconceptions might do little justice to Shelley, but as the critic Chris Baldick has written, "That series of adaptations, allusions, accretions, analogues, parodies, and plain misreadings with follows upon Mary Shelley's novel is not just a supplementary component of the myth; it is the myth."

In any case, the essays in the MIT edition have surprisingly little to say about the reproductive and biomedical technologies of our age, such as assisted conception, tissue engineering, stem-cell research, cloning, genetic manipulation, and " synthetic human entities with embryo-like features "-the remarkable potential "organisms" with a Frankensteinian name.

That feels like a missed opportunity. Frankenstein is still frequently the first point of reference for media reports of such cutting-edge developments, just as it was when human IVF became a viable technique in the early 1970s. The "Franken" label is now a lazy journalistic cliché for a technology you should distrust, or at least regard as "weird": Frankenfoods, Frankenbugs. The "wisdom of repugnance," the phrase coined by the U.S. bioethicist Leon Kass and which informed the decision of the George W. Bush administration to pose drastic restrictions on federally funded stem-cell research in 2001, harked back directly to Mary Shelley's novel.

Let's be in no doubt: Frankenstein is one of the most extraordinary achievements in English literature. It's not flawlessly written, the construction is sometimes awkward-yet it is a profound and unsettling vision, deeply informed about the science and philosophy of its day. That it was written not by an established and experienced author but by a teenager at a very difficult period in her life feels almost miraculous. It's in fact those troubled circumstances and those flaws that have helped the book to persist, to keep on stimulating debate, and to continue attracting adaptations and variations-some good, many bad, some plain execrable.

It's too often suggested-some of the commentaries in the MIT edition repeat the idea-that Frankenstein is a warning about a hubristic, overreaching science that unleashes forces it cannot control. "Victor's error is failing to think harder about the potential repercussions of his work," writes the bioethicist Josephine Johnston. To Mary Shelley's biographer Anne Mellor, the novel "portrays the penalties of violating Nature." This makes it sound as though the attempt to create an "artificial person" from scavenged body parts was always going to end badly: that it was a crazy, doomed project from the start.

But Mary Shelley takes some pains to show that the real problem is not what Victor Frankenstein made, but how he reacted to it. "Now that I had finished," he says, "the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart." He rejects the "hideous wretch" he has created, but nothing about that seems inevitable. What would have happened if Victor had instead lived up to his responsibilities by choosing to nurture his creature?

One might answer that the result would have been a pretty dull and short novel. But I'm not so sure. Imagine the story of Victor struggling to have the creature accepted by a society that shunned it as vile and unnatural. We would then be reading a book about social prejudice and our preconceptions of nature-indeed, about the kind of prospect one can easily imagine for a human born by cloning today (if such as thing were scientifically possible and ethically permissible). The moral and philosophical landscape it might have explored would be no less rich.

That Victor did not do this-that he spurned his creation the moment he had made it, merely because he judged it ugly-means that, to my mind, the conclusion we should reach is the one that the speculative-fiction author Elizabeth Bear articulates in the new volume. It is for Victor's "failure of empathy and his moral cowardice," Bear says-for his overweening egotism and narcissism-that we should think ill of him, and not because of what he discovered or created.

Mary Shelley, however, gives her readers mixed messages. What she shows us is a man behaving badly, but what she seems to tell us is that he is tragic and sympathetic. All of her characters think so well of "poor, dear Victor" that we're given pause. Even Robert Walton, the ship's captain who finds Victor pursuing his creature in the Arctic and whose letters describing that encounter begin and end the book, sees in him a noble, pitiable figure, "amiable and attractive" despite his wrecked and emaciated state. Frankenstein's only critic is his creature.
"Unnatural" is not a neutral description ... Its use threatens to prejudice or shut down discussion before it begins.
This could be seen as a rather exquisite piece of authorial artifice, an early example of the unreliable narrator. It seems more likely to me that Shelley herself wasn't clear what to make of Victor. In her revised edition of 1831, she emphasized the Faustian aspect of the tale, writing in her introduction that she wanted to show how "supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." In other words, it was preordained that the creature would be hideous, and inevitable that its creator would recoil "horror-stricken." That wasn't then a character failing of Victor's.

This idea invites the interpretation that Mellor offers in the new edition: "Nature prevents Victor from constructing a normal human being: His unnatural method of reproduction spawns an unnatural being, a freak."

She sees this as a feminist interpretation (Nature being, in her view, feminine and inviolable), I feel that to the extent that Shelley's book supports a feminist reading, it is not this, and to the extent that one might draw this interpretation, it is not a feminist one. To condemn Victor for violating "Mother Nature" with his "unnatural being" seems plain disturbing in the 21st century. Certainly it bears out the complaint of the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane in 1924:

There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion.

By accepting that Victor's work is inherently perverted and bound to end hideously, Mellor's accusation leaves us wondering what exactly is meant by "unnatural." Which real-life interventions are guaranteed to produce a freak? Might that be so with IVF, as its early detractors insisted? Is it the case for so-called "three-parent babies" made by mitochondrial transplantation, a misleading term apparently invented for the very purpose of insisting on its unnaturalness? Would the first human clone be the next "unnatural freak," if ever that technology becomes possible and desirable?

"Unnatural" is not a neutral description but a morally laden term, and dangerous for that reason: Its use threatens to prejudice or shut down discussion before it begins.

There's something of this rush to judgment also in the commentary of Charles Robinson, the Frankenstein scholar who introduces the new annotated text. Speaking about the evils released from Pandora's box by Prometheus's brother Epimetheus in Greek myth-Shelley subtitled her novel "The Modern Prometheus"-Robinson says that such terrible consequences of careless tampering are reflected in "the pesticide DDT, the atom bomb, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl," and the British government's allowing a stem-cell scientist to perform genome editing "despite objections that ethical issues were being ignored."

But each of these modern developments in fact involved a complex and case-specific chain of events, and incurs a delicate balance of pros and cons. Some, such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident, had rather little to do with the intrinsic ethics of the underlying technology, but were a consequence of particular political and bureaucratic decisions. To imply that they unambiguously show a lack of foresight (Epimetheus's name means "afterthought") or indeed of responsibility on the part of the scientists whose work made them possible would be to cheapen the discourse and to evade the real issues.

The decision on genome editing, meanwhile-presumably this refers to the granting of a license by the U.K. Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority for gene-editing of very early stage, non-viable embryos-supports medical research that might, among other things, help to reduce rates of miscarriage. Such work will never be free of ethical objections raised by those opposed to all research on human embryos. Without a doubt, Frankenstein asks challenging questions about research like this that touches on interventions in human life. But to suggest that it warns us to abjure such work doesn't do Mary Shelley justice.
Frankenstein in our own image.
What, then, does the story of Victor Frankenstein's doomed and misguided quest have to tell us about modern science in general, and technological intervention in life in particular? I think that, to find an answer, we needn't try too hard to discern Shelley's own intentions. Her text arose not out of a conscious desire to tell a moral tale-not, at any rate, one about science-but literally out of a nightmare. In her preface to the 1831 edition she described how the "ghastly image" of a "pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together" came to her as she tried to sleep after listening to conversations between Byron and Percy Shelley deep into the night, concerning the "principle of life."

That retrospective account surely included some embellishment, but it seems fair to accept Shelley's assertion that "my imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me." The impact and enduring fascination of her novel depend on the author not having worked too hard to impose a meaning on the "ghastly image" she dreamed, to resolve the conflicts that it evoked in her, or to maintain a consistent attitude as she reworked her book.

So we can draw Luddite conclusions if that's what we look for, just as we can read into the text Shelley's fears about childbirth, her frustration and anger at her father's rejection, political worries about the destructive potential of the inchoate mob, or an examination of male terror of female sexual and procreative independence.

But it surely matters at least as much now not just what Frankenstein is about but what the Frankenstein myth is about-what as a culture we have made of this wonderful, undisciplined book, whether that is Hollywood's insistence that the artificial being be a stiff-limbed quasi-robotic mute or more contemporary efforts to tell a story that is sympathetic to the creature's point of view. Frankenstein, after all, was never intended as an instruction manual to the bioethicist or the engineer. It is better seen as a catalyst, even an agent provocateur, that lures us into disclosing what we truly hope and fear.

The ambiguity of the book is an essential feature of myth, and all modern myths come from a similar fertile lack of authorial control. That isn't a failing. Everyone loves a well-crafted story, but those crafted partly by the unconscious and delivered to us misshapen and unfinished hold a particular potential to be reanimated, time after time, to fit and to dramatize the anxieties of the age. Like Victor, we make Frankenstein in our own image.

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'Frankenstein' Reflects the Hopes and Fears of Every Scientific Era

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The novel is usually considered a cautionary tale for science, but its cultural legacy is much more complicated.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/learning/lesson-plans/teaching-frankenstein-with-the-new-york-times.html