# data[].attributes.headline
Science fiction: The science that fed Frankenstein

# data[].attributes.subject
Science fiction: The science that fed Frankenstein

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Altmetric: 411

Citations: 1

More detail

Books & Arts

Richard Holmes ponders the discoveries that inspired the young Mary Shelley to write her classic, 200 years ago.

In 1816, a teenager began to compose what many view as the first true work of science fiction - and unleashed one of the most subversive attacks on modern science ever written. Eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin (as she then was) had the idea for Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus that summer, while at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, with her lover and future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his friend and fellow poet Lord Byron. Forced inside by stormy weather, the group spent wild evenings telling ghost stories, while Byron's personal physician, the brilliant 20-year-old John William Polidori, regaled them with reports of the latest developments in medical science.

Mary Shelley, painted around 1840 by Richard Rothwell and housed in the National Portrait Gallery. Image: Photo: Tarker/Bridgeman Images

Mary's inventive mind was peculiarly primed to grapple with both literary and scientific controversy. Her mother was the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died from complications after Mary's birth. Her father was anarchist philosopher and novelist William Godwin, whose friends included chemists and pioneering electricity researchers Humphry Davy and William Nicholson, and the opium-addicted poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These influences shaped her youthful thinking, and were encouraged by Shelley, who had dabbled in science at the University of Oxford before being thrown out for atheism.

The myth of Victor Frankenstein, the crazed but idealistic young scientist who unwittingly lets loose his monstrous creation and struggles to accept responsibility, is a heady cocktail of gothic melodrama and disturbing speculation. It has proved astonishingly adaptable. The first theatrical version, Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, opened at the English Opera House in London in 1823, to huge audiences and scandalous publicity ("Do not take your wives, do not take your daughters, do not take your families"). Mary Shelley attended, noting that "in the early performances all the ladies fainted and hubbub ensued!" There have been more than 90 dramatizations since, including the Danny Boyle-directed 2011 production at London's National Theatre, which opened with the Creature dropping naked from a huge, pulsating artificial womb. The story has also been adapted for more than 70 films, including James Whale's iconic 1931 Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff. In May this year, a Frankenstein ballet was staged at the Royal Opera House in London. Choreographer Liam Scarlett shrewdly analysed it as a love story: "The Creature is like an infant. He's desperately seeking a parent or loved one to take him through the world."

Frankenstein's monster in the book's 1831 edition; played by Boris Karloff in 1931; and in a 2016 ballet. Image: Top: Illustration: Theodore Von Holst/Photo: The British Library Board, 11660.e.39.; Middle: Universal/The Kobal Collection; Bottom: Bill Cooper/ROH 2016

Although the myth is well known, the original novel is not. There are three versions. Mary Shelley began to write the first, probably as a short story, in two notebooks at Villa Diodati, expanding it during the winter of 1816-17 in simple direct prose of great intensity (the notebooks remained unpublished until 2008). The second, lightly edited by her husband and more literary in manner, was published in 1818. The third was radically revised by Mary Shelley alone, and was published in 1831, with a fascinating new introduction by her.

With each version, the basic plot remains the same, but the tone grows darker. Frankenstein becomes more passionate and ambitious, his science becomes more sinister and misdirected ("I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy") and his Creature becomes more alienated and agonized. The 1831 introduction also contains an inventive, retrospective account of the storytelling competition at the villa. Mary now calls the book her "hideous progeny", and claims that the whole idea came to her instantly, like an emotional bolt of summer lightning on waking from a terrible nightmare. "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. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion."

The book may, however, have had a more intellectual genesis. The best contemporary account of the ghost-story competition is Polidori's. A medical graduate of the University of Edinburgh, he had written his doctoral thesis on sleepwalking. Before the trip, he was commissioned by the publisher John Murray to keep a secret journal of Byron's adventures, and in this he recorded the villa party's speculative conversations and reading of German gothic "horror tales". Above all, he noted their wide-ranging discussions of fundamental scientific principles, and whether the human body "was thought to be merely an instrument". As Polidori put it, their brains "whizzed".

Polidori would have known about recent experiments in electrical resurrection techniques by Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini (nephew of bio-electrician Luigi Galvani), and the new anatomical theories of German physiologists such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Also making waves were the fierce 'vitalist' debates at England's Royal College of Surgeons between John Abernethy and William Lawrence, about the possible existence of an electrical 'life-force' and the unique nature of human consciousness. These controversial ideas, alive in the great universities and research centres of Europe, fed into Frankenstein, and especially into the moral issues that it raised about the perils of scientific interference with nature.

Thus began a writing process involving careful research over many months. Shelley first mentions this in her journal for 24 July 1816. She was in Switzerland while walking above Chamonix towards Mont Blanc, absorbing the bleak landscape of the Mer de Glace glacier that would later fill the book's central confrontation between scientist and Creature. "Nothing can be more desolate than the ascent of this mountain ... we arrived wet to the skin ... I write my story". Her notes on triumphantly completing the first draft, "Transcribe and correct F[rankenstein] ... Finish transcribing" do not appear until April and May 1817, just four months before the birth of her third child, Clara. It is no accident that metaphors of pregnancy, birthing and parentage suffuse this novel about the creation of life.

In the intervening period of composition, back in England, Mary Shelley's journal reveals an impressive reading list. She absorbed the extreme accounts of polar exploration in George Anson's 1748 Voyage Round the World; the distinction between alchemy and chemistry in Davy's 1812 Elements of Chemical Philosophy (based on his famous London lectures); and the new concepts of brain development explored in Lawrence's physiological lectures, given in 1816-17. In Coleridge's 1798 poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner, she encountered the psychology of guilt and abandonment; in John Milton's 1667 Paradise Lost, the theme of the demonic outcast. Her husband also made clear, in his anonymous preface to the 1818 edition, that they had discussed the scientific poetry of Erasmus Darwin, in The Temple of Nature, or The Origin of Society (1803). Everything she devoured was brilliantly recast as a new genre: science fiction.

Thus, Davy's lectures at London's Royal Institution were subtly transposed, sometimes almost phrase by phrase, into those of the fictional Dr Waldman, praising the work of contemporary scientists to young Frankenstein. "These philosophers ... 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."

From her first draft, Mary had devised a complex structure that nests three autobiographical narratives one within the other like Russian dolls, each bringing a different interpretation to the Frankenstein myth. The first, often overlooked in adaptations, is by polar explorer Robert Walton. Told in the form of letters to his sister, it bookends the novel in the Arctic Ocean, and presents a moral enigma. Is the idealistic young Frankenstein essentially philanthropic, blindly ambitious or simply insane? And is his Creature evil or innocent - an ugly outcast or a persecuted victim longing for love?

"The early chapters evoke the mysteries of experiment, naive excitement about electrical kites and the fascination of air pumps."

The second autobiography is Frankenstein's own, particularly his thrilling discovery of the deep "enticements of science". These early chapters are among the first fictional presentations of the education of a young scientist, evoking the mysteries of experiment, naive excitement about electrical kites and the fascination of air pumps. Brilliantly transformed in the 1831 edition, these become more sophisticated references to galvanism, the necessity of mathematics, the genius of Isaac Newton and the intoxicating delights and dangers of charismatic science lecturing.

The third narrative, dramatically held back until halfway through, is the Creature's. Written in a wholly different stylistic register, it swings violently between desperate exclamations, poignant appeals and furious menacings. In the great showdown with Frankenstein on the Mer de Glace, the Creature begs the scientist to delve further into experimentation to create a female companion whom he can love.

Faced with this terrible ethical dilemma, Frankenstein agrees: this second creation scene, in a secret laboratory on the Orkney Islands off northeast Scotland, is also often overlooked. Fearful of the consequences, he destroys his female creation at the last moment, turning the disappointed Creature into a vengeful demon. So emerges the central drama of the novel. It is not merely the creation of life itself, the technical ambition of science, that is called into question. It is the unfolding moral choices and unforeseen ethical responsibilities that may come with scientific advances: artificial intelligence or artificial life, nuclear power or nuclear weaponry, the genome sequence or invasive genetic editing.

One added irony makes Shelley's novel much greater than any film - and greater indeed than its popular interpretation as an anti-science myth. It is that in these exchanges, paradoxically, the Creature becomes even more expressive and human than Frankenstein. He produces arias of speech, begging for justice, understanding, compassion and human rights. In the encounter in the Alps, the Creature declares himself Frankenstein's unique responsibility: "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed ... Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded ... Misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

That is the enduring youthful genius and imaginative generosity of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It proclaims that the alien, the outcast, the rejected, finally must have claims on our humanity. And claims on our science, too.

Author information

Correspondence to Richard Holmes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Science fiction: The science that fed Frankenstein

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Altmetric: 411 Citations: 1 More detail Books & Arts Richard Holmes ponders the discoveries that inspired the young Mary Shelley to write her classic, 200 years ago. In 1816, a teenager began to compose what many view as the first true work of science fiction - and unleashed one of the most subversive attacks on modern science ever written.

# data[].attributes.headline
Media and the Public Perception of Science

# data[].attributes.subject
Media and the Public Perception of Science

# data[].attributes.body
Assignment brief

# data[].attributes.body
Ben Goldacre essay on science in the media.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We laughed, we cried, we learned about statistics ... Ben Goldacre on why writing Bad Science has increased his suspicion of the media by, ooh, a lot of per cents

Ben Goldacre
Thursday September 8, 2005
The Guardian

OK, here's something weird. Every week in Bad Science we either victimise some barking pseudoscientific quack, or a big science story in a national newspaper. Now, tell me, why are these two groups even being mentioned in the same breath? Why is science in the media so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong? Like a proper little Darwin, I've been collecting specimens, making careful observations, and now I'm ready to present my theory.

It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science. This week we take the gloves off and do some serious typing.

Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare stories and "breakthrough" stories. Last year the Independent ran a wacky science story that generated an actual editorial: how many science stories get the lead editorial? It was on research by Dr Kevin Warwick, purporting to show that watching Richard and Judy improved IQ test performance ( www.badscience.net/?p=84). Needless to say it was unpublished data, and highly questionable.

Wacky stories don't end there. They never end. Infidelity is genetic, say scientists. Electricity allergy real, says researcher. I've been collecting "scientists have found the formula for" stories since last summer, carefully pinning them into glass specimen cases, in preparation for my debut paper on the subject. So far I have captured the formulae for: the perfect way to eat ice cream (AxTpxTm/FtxAt +VxLTxSpxW/Tt=3d20), the perfect TV sitcom (C=3d[(RxD)+V]xF/A+S), the perfect boiled egg, love, the perfect joke, the most depressing day of the year ([W+(D-d)]xTQ MxNA), and so many more. Enough! Every paper - including this one - covers them: and before anyone bleats excuses on their behalf, these stories are invariably written by the science correspondents, and hotly followed, to universal jubilation, with comment pieces, by humanities graduates, on how bonkers and irrelevant scientists are.

A close relative of the wacky story is the paradoxical health story. Every Christmas and Easter, regular as clockwork, you can read that chocolate is good for you ( www.badscience.net/?p=67), just like red wine is, and with the same monotonous regularity, in breathless, greedy tones you will you hear how it's scientifically possible to eat as much fat and carbohydrate as you like, for some complicated reason, but only if you do it at "the right time of day". These stories serve one purpose: they promote the reassuring idea that sensible health advice is outmoded and moralising, and that research on it is paradoxical and unreliable.

At the other end of the spectrum, scare stories are - of course - a stalwart of media science. Based on minimal evidence and expanded with poor understanding of its significance, they help perform the most crucial function for the media, which is selling you, the reader, to their advertisers. The MMR disaster was a fantasy entirely of the media's making ( www.badscience.net/?p=23), which failed to go away. In fact the Daily Mail is still publishing hysterical anti-immunisation stories, including one calling the pneumococcus vaccine a "triple jab", presumably because they misunderstood that the meningitis, pneumonia, and septicaemia it protects against are all caused by the same pneumococcus bacteria ( www.badscience.net/?p=118).

Now, even though popular belief in the MMR scare is - perhaps - starting to fade, popular understanding of it remains minimal: people periodically come up to me and say, isn't it funny how that Wakefield MMR paper turned out to be Bad Science after all? And I say: no. The paper always was and still remains a perfectly good small case series report, but it was systematically misrepresented as being more than that, by media that are incapable of interpreting and reporting scientific data.

Once journalists get their teeth into what they think is a scare story, trivial increases in risk are presented, often out of context, but always using one single way of expressing risk, the "relative risk increase", that makes the danger appear disproportionately large ( www.badscience.net/?p=8). This is before we mention the times, such as last week's Seroxat story, or the ibuprofen and heart attack story last month, when in their eagerness to find a scandal, half the papers got the figures wrong. This error, you can't help noticing, is always in the same direction.

And last, in our brief taxonomy, is the media obsession with "new breakthroughs": a more subtly destructive category of science story. It's quite understandable that newspapers should feel it's their job to write about new stuff. But in the aggregate, these stories sell the idea that science, and indeed the whole empirical world view, is only about tenuous, new, hotly-contested data. Articles about robustly-supported emerging themes and ideas would be more stimulating, of course, than most single experimental results, and these themes are, most people would agree, the real developments in science. But they emerge over months and several bits of evidence, not single rejiggable press releases. Often, a front page science story will emerge from a press release alone, and the formal academic paper may never appear, or appear much later, and then not even show what the press reports claimed it would ( www.badscience.net/?p=159).

Last month there was an interesting essay in the journal PLoS Medicine, about how most brand new research findings will turn out to be false ( www.tinyurl.com/ceq33). It predictably generated a small flurry of ecstatic pieces from humanities graduates in the media, along the lines of science is made-up, self-aggrandising, hegemony-maintaining, transient fad nonsense; and this is the perfect example of the parody hypothesis that we'll see later. Scientists know how to read a paper. That's what they do for a living: read papers, pick them apart, pull out what's good and bad.

Scientists never said that tenuous small new findings were important headline news - journalists did.

But enough on what they choose to cover. What's wrong with the coverage itself? The problems here all stem from one central theme: there is no useful information in most science stories. A piece in the Independent on Sunday from January 11 2004 suggested that mail-order Viagra is a rip-off because it does not contain the "correct form" of the drug. I don't use the stuff, but there were 1,147 words in that piece. Just tell me: was it a different salt, a different preparation, a different isomer, a related molecule, a completely different drug? No idea. No room for that one bit of information.

Remember all those stories about the danger of mobile phones? I was on holiday at the time, and not looking things up obsessively on PubMed; but off in the sunshine I must have read 15 newspaper articles on the subject. Not one told me what the experiment flagging up the danger was. What was the exposure, the measured outcome, was it human or animal data? Figures? Anything? Nothing. I've never bothered to look it up for myself, and so I'm still as much in the dark as you.

Why? Because papers think you won't understand the "science bit", all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word "biophoton" on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.

Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.

But science journalists somehow don't understand the difference between the evidence and the hypothesis. The Times's health editor Nigel Hawkes recently covered an experiment which showed that having younger siblings was associated with a lower incidence of multiple sclerosis. MS is caused by the immune system turning on the body. "This is more likely to happen if a child at a key stage of development is not exposed to infections from younger siblings, says the study." That's what Hawkes said. Wrong! That's the "Hygiene Hypothesis", that's not what the study showed: the study just found that having younger siblings seemed to be somewhat protective against MS: it didn't say, couldn't say, what the mechanism was, like whether it happened through greater exposure to infections. He confused evidence with hypothesis ( www.badscience.net/?p=112), and he is a "science communicator".

So how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. "Scientists today said ... scientists revealed ... scientists warned"; And if they want balance, you'll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why (an approach at its most dangerous with the myth that scientists were "divided" over the safety of MMR). One scientist will "reveal" something, and then another will "challenge" it. A bit like Jedi knights.

The danger of authority figure coverage, in the absence of real evidence, is that it leaves the field wide open for questionable authority figures to waltz in. Gillian McKeith, Andrew Wakefield, Kevin Warwick and the rest can all get a whole lot further, in an environment where their authority is taken as read, because their reasoning and evidence is rarely publicly examined.

But it also reinforces the humanities graduate journalists' parody of science, for which we now have all the ingredients: science is about groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality: they do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory and, most ridiculously, "hard to understand".

This misrepresentation of science is a direct descendant of the reaction, in the Romantic movement, against the birth of science and empiricism more than 200 years ago; it's exactly the same paranoid fantasy as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, only not as well written. We say descendant, but of course, the humanities haven't really moved forward at all, except to invent cultural relativism, which exists largely as a pooh-pooh reaction against science.

And humanities graduates in the media, who suspect themselves to be intellectuals, desperately need to reinforce the idea that science is nonsense: because they've denied themselves access to the most significant developments in the history of western thought for 200 years, and secretly, deep down, they're angry with themselves over that.

That's what I'd have said three years ago. But now I'm on the inside, I can add a slightly different element to the story. I'm an all right-looking bloke, I get about: maybe I'm not the most popular bloke at science journalist parties, but I'm certainly talkative. For many months I had a good spirited row with an eminent science journalist, who kept telling me that scientists needed to face up to the fact that they had to get better at communicating to a lay audience. She is a humanities graduate. "Since you describe yourself as a science communicator," I would invariably say, to the sound of derisory laughter: "isn't that your job?" But no, for there is a popular and grand idea about, that scientific ignorance is a useful tool: if even they can understand it, they think to themselves, the reader will. What kind of a communicator does that make you?

There is one university PR department in London that I know fairly well - it's a small middle-class world after all - and I know that until recently, they had never employed a single science graduate. This is not uncommon. Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then a press release is written by a non-scientist, who runs it by their non-scientist boss, who then sends it to journalists without a science education who try to convey difficult new ideas to an audience of either lay people, or more likely - since they'll be the ones interested in reading the stuff - people who know their way around a t-test a lot better than any of these intermediaries. Finally, it's edited by a whole team of people who don't understand it. You can be sure that at least one person in any given "science communication" chain is just juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they've got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk.

Of course a system like that will cock up. The proof is in Bad Science, every week. See you in Berlin.

Bad Science will be continuing in the Guardian next week

[This article won Best Feature (Â£2,000!) at the Science Writers Awards for 2005]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
goldacre bad science nutrition nutritionism nutritionists nutritionist media pseudoscience gillian mckeith patrick holford mmr health scare medicine homeopathy homeopaths postmodernism alternative therapy therapies complementary hettie brain gym detox cosmetics evidence based medicine magnets mrsa phd kapferer statistics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We laughed, we cried, we learned about statistics ... Ben Goldacre on why writing Bad Science has increased his suspicion of the media by, ooh, a lot of per cents Ben Goldacre Thursday September 8, 2005 The Guardian OK, here's something weird.

# data[].attributes.body
Pay particular attention the Executive Summary.