•Nature’s forceful retribution against human arrogance in daring to challenge its fundamental prescriptions, laws and productions, exemplified already in ancient Greek times by the original Prometheus myth in whose shadow Frankenstein explicitly stands, and as Shelley unmistakably invokes in the novel’s choice of subtitle. It is the penalty for overweening human pride in the modern scientific age.
Take exactly these three components, then, gathered and more elegantly stitched together from different fresh grave sites and hospital morgues in Shelley’s narrative, and you have at once the secret ingredients that have accounted for the popularity of the Frankenstein myth she creates and into which she breathes literary life. We love a frightening monster, and we are as cautiously suspicious of, as we are dependent in so many aspects of modern life on, applied science and what it is capable of doing for us and to us.
Hitch human progress to the wagon of experimental science, create ill-advisedly in the process a terrible monster, one that crosses the line between the natural and unnatural, that cannot be controlled, and with a mind of its own, without venturing into the supernatural, and we have, in miniature, the dilemma that all of modern culture with the rise of scientific method seems to have made inevitable.
The modern world is humbled like Victor Frankenstein for audacious attempts to rule nature through an understanding of its laws. We may be doomed like Prometheus whose liver was torn out every day by an eagle for bringing down fire from the gods to improve human existence. There is a sting in the scorpion tail of science, against which novels like Shelley’s Frankenstein sensibly urge caution. With science and its applications here to stay, and in light of its increasing repertoire of successes and menacing potential for unthinkable catastrophe, it’s no cause for astonishment that Shelley’s story of Frankenstein resonates so profoundly with an ever-expanding appreciative readership and audience. It’s the modern myth of what science can dare, and of what happens when it goes too far.
Shelley’s novel is not a tale of doom and gloom inevitably resulting from the excesses of unrestrained experimental science. As the daughter of social philosophers, activist Mary Wollstonecraft and liberal political theorist William Godwin, Mary Shelley was cultivated in an atmosphere of advanced free-thinking social morality. Indeed, for some contemporary male readers, Frankenstein’s Creature may have been less frightening than the prospect of educated women winning the vote—something with which the Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Shelley families were associated. If only Victor Frankenstein had fulfilled his responsibilities toward the Creature, the tragic events of the novel need never have occurred.
Having created a monster, Victor was obligated to cultivate its life and education, in the performance of which duty he abjectly failed. “Unfeeling, heartless creator!’ the Creature wails at one point, rebuking his maker. “You had endowed me with perceptions and passions and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind” (p. 141).
It’s not science and technology themselves that are morally dangerous, but rather the unwillingness to take responsibility for their application. If we are Frankensteins in the most general sense of the word, if we use science to accomplish unnatural ends for the sake of enhancing human life, then, unlike Victor Frankenstein, we must own up to the ominous consequences. Frankenstein tragically seals his fate only by bringing the Creature to life and then abandoning it to its own resources. If he had taken appropriate care of the monster he made, he might not have made such a monster.
Wait. Come Back. I Was Gonna Make Espresso
The blind cottager played by Gene Hackman in the Mel Brooks’s 1974 movie spoof Young Frankenstein alone tolerates the Creature’s presence. His hospitality nevertheless leaves a lot to be desired. It includes dousing the monster’s lap not once but twice with scalding soup, smashing his cup of wine in an excessively enthusiastic toast before a drop can reach Peter Boyle’s lips, and finally igniting his cigar-like thumb ablaze with a candle flame. He is sincerely instructed: “Blow on the tip until it glows.”
The Creature in Shelley’s novel eventually laments, in posing an ultimate philosophical question about existence and the human condition:
But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred to be answered only with groans. (p. 124)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his brilliant posthumous Philosophical Investigations (1951) seems to anticipate the Creator’s difficulty, writing in §261: “So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.”2
The monster Frankenstein created answers its own question of existence with the same inarticulate groans. Along with the monster, we can only listen in the dark and hope for a comforting answer. (Closing credits roll. Fade to Igor—It’s pronounced ‘Eye-gore’—Marty Feldman on a dismal mountain crag blowing a mournful theme on an alpine hunting horn.)
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1Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus (London: Penguin, 2003).
2New York: Macmillan, 1968. Wittgenstein has in mind something rather different than Shelley’s Creature, referring to the desire to avoid circularity and infinite regress in using language to explain how language functions.
II
Dr. Frankenstein’s Treatment Notes
5
That Frightening Frankenmetaphor
ELENA CASETTA AND LUCA TAMBOLO
When people want to alarm us about some technological development, they usually compare it to Frankenstein’s Monster. The Monster metaphor makes us think of a patchwork creature put together in an artificial way by scientists, which then runs amuck and does a lot of damage.
So the name “Frankenstein” is often muttered darkly by people suspicious of genetic engineering. Frankenstein has become the governing myth of modern pop biology,1 and the Monster often features on magazine covers along with bioengineered tomatoes and papayas, disturbing featherless chickens, and other—allegedly diabolical and menacing—lab products.
You may think this is inevitable, especially if you recall that, in shaping the character of Dr. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley had in mind the work of important scientists of her age such as the physician and anatomy professor Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) and Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802)—who was a physician and a naturalist himself and the grandfather of both Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and the eugenicist Francis Galton (1822–1911).
The most popular Frankenstein-related metaphor is the term “Frankenfood,” made famous by Jeremy Rifkin’s Pure Food Campaign but coined in 1992 by Paul Lewis, Professor of English at Boston College. In a letter to The New York Times, Lewis echoed the countless movies inspired by Shelley’s novel by suggesting that, if scientists tried to sell us Frankenfood, then perhaps it would be time to gather the villagers and head to the castle with lighted torches.
But does it really make sense to evoke the Monster to describe genetically modified organisms? Is the Frankenfood metaphor a good one? Does it fit?
Frankenfood—food derived from genetically modified organisms, be they plants, animals, or even micro-organisms such as the genetically modified yeasts used to ferment beer—may seem to be very similar, in some important respects, to the Monster.
As we learn from Mary Shelley, in assembling the Monster, Dr. Frankenstein selected his features as beautiful. Similarly, biotechnologists often select organisms’ features aiming at enhancing their natural beauty (think of ornamental and flowering plants such as torenias and petunias, or the angelfish that glows in the dark); or their resistance to insects and pests (genetically modified crops such as some varieties of wheat, corn, canola, potatoes, and soybeans); or to improve
their shelf life, like tomatoes, or their nutritional value, like rice.
The Monster is assembled by putting together scattered materials stolen from dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses. Dr. Frankenstein, a scientist whose profane fingers disturbed the secrets of the human frame, collects the bones that he puts together to produce the Monster in charnel-houses, and as a result, he animates the filthy daemon that makes his life miserable. Genetically modified organisms, at least as understood by most of the public, seem to work in a similar way. Their production can sound pretty scary when described to consumers: in the most common procedures, scientists can “assemble” pieces of DNA coming from organisms belonging to different species thanks to particular types of bacteria which are naturally able to penetrate cells; or scientists can shoot, like micro-bullets, portions of DNA bounded onto gold particles. Sometimes, cells’ membranes are destabilized by means of electric shocks (an echo of what breathed life into the Monster?) to make them permeable to delivered portions of DNA.
Both the Monster and genetically modified organisms inspire fear, probably for similar reasons. First, because we’re not certain whether or not we will like the result of the experiment: once his job is done Dr. Frankenstein’s heart is filled with horror and disgust; similarly, we could at a certain point discover that food containing genetically modified ingredients are unsafe or unhealthy. Second, because most people think that transgressing boundaries that are supposed to be natural is something wrong in itself, which can bring unpleasant consequences.
Are the similarities between the Monster and genetically modified organisms strong enough to make ”Frankenfood” a good metaphor? Not really, because the similarities that the metaphor highlights are less significant than the differences that it ignores. We can learn more about genetically modified organisms by looking at the differences that the metaphor overlooks than at the similarities on which it is based. Frankenstein’s creature and Frankenfood, while similar in certain respects, are different in the most important ones, namely in their nature.
This is what we can call a “metaphysical issue.” According to a view that finds its roots in Aristotle’s (384–322 B.C.) Metaphysics, the task of metaphysics is to explain the ultimate nature of the things that exist in the world. At first sight, Frankenstein’s Monster and genetically modified organisms may seem entities of the same sort, since they are talked of as evil, dangerous, manmade concoctions. But this impression vanishes on a closer look.
Monstrous Metaphors
Metaphors are much more than a device that we use to make our language colorful and entertaining: they help to shape the way we view the world, and sometimes they can help us to improve our knowledge of it. In technical terms, when you use a metaphor, you connect a so-called “source domain” (A) to a “target domain” (B): in the case under consideration, for instance, you connect Frankenstein’s creature (A) to genetically modified food (B).
This connection allows you to exploit your knowledge of A to describe B, which may be less well-known—and the implication is that what holds for A, holds for B too, at least approximately. This is why the language of science and of scientific communication is filled with metaphors: physicists speak of “waves” and “particles,” biologists speak of genes as “blueprints” and DNA as “information.” The examples of metaphors used in science may go on forever: think of the struggle for survival, of the selfish gene, of the mind as a computer. And all of modern science owes something to René Descartes’s (1596–1650) metaphor of the world as a machine.2 Metaphors help us to connect things that we know well to things that we don’t know so well: the things that we know (the source domain) give us an idea, even if approximate and incomplete, of the things that we don’t know (the target domain).
But, now we return to the Frankenstein metaphor in connection with genetically modified organisms. . . . Do we know the source domain (the Monster) that well? Does our knowledge of the Monster really improve our understanding of genetically modified organisms? In other words, is the Frankenfood metaphor a good one?
A first problem is that, in technical terms, using the Monster to describe genetically modified organisms is a flagrant violation of the so-called “principle of unidirectionality.” According to this principle, in metaphors, the typical path is the one that goes from the more concrete, and well-known, to the more abstract, and less well-known. Terrifying as he may be, the Monster doesn’t exactly seem to be anything concrete. But here, one may object that the violation of unidirectionality is only apparent. In the context of the novel the Monster, which starts as an imaginary or abstract entity—the object of Dr. Frankenstein’s ambitious dreams—soon becomes very concrete; in the same way, in the real world, bioengineered food used to be thought of as a futuristic dream, which has now become concrete.
A more serious problem concerns our knowledge of the source domain. What is the Monster’s nature? The Monster himself isn’t very sure about his own nature: he claims to be similar yet at the same time strangely unlike human beings. “Who was I? What was I?” he repeatedly asks, without ever being able to answer the question. Moreover, Dr. Frankenstein is totally secretive about the particulars of his creature’s realization, since he doesn’t want anyone to repeat his mistakes and create another demoniacal enemy for the world. And in the very last pages of the novel, the Monster announces that he will collect his own funeral pyre and make sure that no track remains of his miserable frame.
So again: do we know the Monster that well? And if so much concerning Frankenstein’s creature is so studiously kept secret, how can we hope that the source domain of the Frankenfood metaphor (the Monster) will help us to understand its target domain (genetically modified organisms)?
Manufactured Monsters
In order to investigate the nature of our two monsters, Frankenstein’s creature and Frankenfood, and see if they actually compare, we choose to examine their “genesis” (origin) and their “sort” (as determined by their structure). Our choice is not accidental: according to some philosophers (for instance, Saul Kripke), a thing is ultimately defined by its origins and its essential properties (generally, microstructural properties: molecular structure for chemical substances; DNA for living entities). In simplified terms, this view of the ultimate nature of things takes the form of two doctrines called, respectively, “origin essentialism” and “natural kinds essentialism.”
According to origin essentialism, an object could not have had a radically different origin from the one it actually had without ceasing to be that very object: for instance, a given human being could not have originated from a different zygote without ceasing to be that specific human being, and a given table could not have originated from a different block of wood without ceasing to be that specific table.
According to natural kinds essentialism, an object could not have been different in its microstructure from how it actually is without ceasing to be that very object: for instance, a substance which is not H2O cannot be water. Now, whether origin essentialism or natural kinds essentialism are true or false isn’t something we can settle here. But it seems reasonable to buy into the general idea that the nature of a certain object is somehow tied to the way in which it has been brought into being (its origins) and to its structure. So let’s begin with how artificially created monsters are originated.
A first, obvious, difference is that the Monster is made by assembling together medium-sized pieces of dead matter, while genetically modified organisms are the result of the insertion of a microscopic portion of some DNA into other DNA. No dead matter, no corpses.
A less blatant difference has to do with the naturalness of the process through which the two types of creature are made. While the Monster is the product of a completely artificial process, with no possible analogue in nature, bioengineering techniques can be viewed, at least in principle, as a human attempt to replicate natural processes, the far end of a continuous that begins with grafting, hybridizing, and crossbreeding.
The i
dea of bioengineering techniques as a means to replicate natural processes lies at the very heart of the so-called “principle of substantial equivalence.” Widely used in the US as a basis for the safety assessment of food produced with the help of biotechnologies, the principle states that organisms deriving from biotechnological processes ought to be substantially equivalent—with no significant differences, whatever that might mean—to their “spontaneous” cognates. In other words, to be considered safe, bioengineered tomatoes ought to be an analogue of homegrown tomatoes.3
At this point we’re not concerned with the moral legitimacy of certain genetic manipulations or the risks connected to them, but only with the features of the processes through which the Monster, on the one hand, and genetically modified organisms, on the other hand, are brought into being.
In origin, then, genetically modified organisms are very different from Frankenstein’s Monster. Let’s now move from origins to results.
The Monster and the Salmon
Why would we want to consider Frankenstein’s Monster and a genetically modified food to be entities of the same type? To make the comparison between the Monster and bio-engineered food more tangible, let’s put the Monster face to face with a concrete example of genetically modified food: a salmon recently engineered by a US biotechnology company—and at the time of writing under the review of the Food and Drugs Administration: if approved, this would be the first genetically engineered animal meant for human consumption.
Frankenstein and Philosophy Page 6