Frankenstein and Philosophy

by Michaud, Nicolas

  The ancestors of the present populations of genetically modified salmon were generated in 1989 by micro-injecting into the fertilized egg of a wild Atlantic salmon a portion of recombinant DNA composed of one sequence coming from chinook salmon and one from ocean pout. The result is a salmon that grows to full size in about half the time of its wild counterpart. Needless to say, in no time the media baptized it “Frankenfish.”

  Are the Monster and the genetically modified salmon entities of the same type? Recall that the Frankenfood metaphor is mainly based on one property that the two entities which it connects are supposed to share, and that would make them entities of the same type: genetically modified organisms are, just like the Monster, patchwork creatures, assembled in an artificial way by scientists. Nevertheless, when we focus on the results of the process through which the entities at issue are produced, two important facts immediately appear:

  1.On the one hand, being a patchwork, a mixed creature, is not a peculiarity of our two monsters, hence this doesn’t seem to be one of their essential properties.

  2.On the other hand, by looking at the different properties that result from the different ways in which our patchworks are realized, we can learn interesting things about the nature of both the Monster and the genetically modified salmon. But those properties are precisely the ones that the metaphor makes us sidestep.

  When we consider point #1, a glimpse at the variety of life immediately shows that living entities are anything but unmixed. Surprising as it may be to some, we ourselves are patchwork beings. Just think of the fact that in every human being there are so many indigenous symbiotic bacteria—the vast majority of them living in our intestine—that bacterial cells outnumber “human” cells.

  At first sight, you may be inclined to view our bacteria and us as separate and autonomous organisms—unlike the pieces of dead matter that the Monster is made of. But is that really so? As a matter of fact, many of these bacteria are so-called “obligatory symbionts,” which means that they cannot survive outside us and we can’t survive without them. They are more than guests, they seem to be part of ourselves.

  And very important parts! We can survive without our nails or hair, we can lose an arm, a leg, or an eye, but we simply cannot survive without our bacteria. So then, being “mixed” doesn’t seem to be a property distinctive enough to legitimate the use of the Frankenfood metaphor, unless we’re prepared to go so far as to allow that the metaphor applies to every human being!

  As for #2, if the similarities between the Monster and the genetically modified salmon are not significant enough, what about the differences? What about the “microstructural properties” of the Monster and the genetically modified salmon, namely their genetic makeup?

  If you look at the DNA of the two creatures, you will find out that, while the Monster is genetically heterogeneous (the parts that compose him, coming from different people, each have different DNA, namely the DNA of the original owner), the so-called “Frankenfish” is genetically homogeneous (every part of it has the same DNA). This depends on the fact that the genetically modified salmon, unlike the Monster but like us, is the result of a unitary developmental process beginning with a single cell (the egg).

  As a consequence, the Monster could be classified as a sort of biological chimera—namely, an entity whose different parts have different DNA, and accordingly different observable properties, each corresponding to the DNA in those different parts. Just as the fruit of the Bizzarria of Florence can be partly an orange and partly a lemon, in the very same way the Monster could have a black arm and a white arm, or dark black hair and blond arm hair. As far as the genetically modified salmon is concerned, it could be considered, at most, a hybrid such as a mule, a creature made from the interbreeding of organisms belonging to different species.

  The Sons of the Monsters

  We have deployed what seems to be a very sound philosophical idea—namely, the view that the ultimate nature of a certain object is tied either to the way in which it has been brought into being (its origins) or to what the outcome looks like up close (its structure). Or, of course, both. We can now answer the question raised by the comparison between the Monster and genetically modified food.

  In spite of some striking but truly superficial similarities, Frankenstein’s creature and the so-called “Frankenfood” are not entities of the same type. Instead of helping us to increase our understanding of genetically modified food, the Frankenfood metaphor muddies the waters and leads us astray. From a metaphysical point of view, the problems plaguing this metaphor are vividly illustrated by the example of the genetically modified salmon.

  First, the property of being a patchwork, a mixed entity—supposedly defining the ultimate nature of both the Monster and genetically modified food—is in fact shared by many living beings, including humans. Secondly, the actual, relevant differences between the Monster and genetically modified food—the differences that help us to understand genetically modified food better—are ignored.

  Imagine cloning the Monster: you pick up some of his cells, let’s suppose the cells of his arm. But his arm previously belonged to, let’s say, John. The cloning process would end up with an organism whose DNA is that of John, and not that of the Monster (or is only that of a small part of the Monster). But cloning the genetically modified salmon we talked about would simply give us another salmon, genetically identical to the original one.

  In metaphysics, and in philosophy more generally, truth is the name of the game. So there seems to be little doubt that we should treat the Frankenfood metaphor as intellectual junk, and simply get rid of it. But is this really possible?

  Well, we can’t be sure. The enduring success enjoyed by Frankenstein-related metaphors depends on their triggering a deep-rooted feeling that no amount of philosophical or scientific analysis may be able to sweep away. The very flaws of the Frankenfood metaphor lie at the heart of its allure: Frankenstein’s creature being an—apparently living—patchwork made of materials taken from corpses makes it a living(ish) threat to our view of ourselves as unmixed, integral, “pure” organisms. But we humans are also pretty much a patchwork. So, wouldn’t that make each of us at least something of a “Monster”?4

  _________________

  1Jon Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics, and Popular Culture (Yale University Press, 1998).

  2Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 3.

  3For a criticism of the principle of substantial equivalence see M.W. Ho and R. Steinbrecher, “Fatal Flaws in Food Safety Assessment: Critique of the Joint FAO/WHO Biotechnology and Food Safety Report,” Environmental and Nutritional Interactions 2 (1998), pp. 51–84. A book discussing the political aspects of genetically modified food production is Peter Andrée, Genetically Modified Diplomacy (University of British Columbia Press, 2008).

  4We’re thankful to Andrea Borghini, Gustavo Cevolani, Giulia Ferraresi, Jorge Marques da Silva, Marica Romano, and Achille Varzi for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

  6

  Frankenstein’s Failure

  DANIEL KOKOTZ

  I have lost every thing and cannot begin life anew.

  —Victor Frankenstein

  When we meet Victor Frankenstein for the first time in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, he’s a dying, distressed, and terrified man, without friends, family, or hope. He survives just long enough to tell his tale to his new-found friend Robert Walton, who saved him from freezing to death in the Arctic ice.

  From his tragic tale we learn that Victor, as far as we know still in his twenties or early thirties, has spent most of his life studying the secret mysteries of alchemy and even created a living being as the final goal of his studies. But now his once brilliant scientific mind is reduced to a maniacal obsession with murdering his creation.

  So what has happened? One might think that Victor, after creating life from dead matter, should have been
one of the most famous scientists of his day, teaching alchemy and being invited to share his knowledge all over the world. Instead he lived his last days trying to destroy this being, so, obviously, something in his accomplishment must have gone terribly wrong. Why did his enormous success turn into utter failure?

  So Much Has Been Done, Far More Will I Achieve

  Although the discipline of alchemy was frowned upon by some of the professors in Ingolstadt, Victor perceived more potential behind its principles than many of his contemporaries. Instead of seeing an art that was about to die out, he decided that there had to be more to it than just superstition and cheap tricks. His belief in this science was so strong that he hoped to banish disease and even tried to defeat and find a cure for death.

  Victor really had two goals: From a purely scientific point of view he wanted to unfold the mysteries of creation itself, and from a practical perspective he wanted to use his alchemical knowledge in order to find new ways of fighting diseases. But it wasn’t just medical treatment he was looking for but rather a way to rid humanity of disease and death entirely. In other words, he dreamt of using the natural sciences to create technology that would help him directly manipulate the human body in order to enhance his physical and mental abilities.

  Victor’s hope might sound utterly crazy and over the top if you hear it for the first time. But his idea is an ancient one. Ever since the famous Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, where the hero dedicates himself to finding a rare plant that will grant him eternal life, humanity has sought a cure for disease and hoped to find a cure for death. Death, to make things just a tiny bit simpler, is the ultimate pathology, where not only some parts of the body do not function properly, but nothing works at all anymore—it is the final enemy of human life.

  It should be no shock to anyone if I say that our human bodies are far from perfect. We are susceptible to all kinds of diseases, injuries, accidents, heat, cold, hunger, thirst, parasites, predators, murder, and natural disasters. We are biologically utterly underequipped to live in the wilderness, and our evolution failed to provide us with much to be proud of—our eyes are weak, our claws almost non-existent, our fur not thick enough to keep the cold away—we are feeble, slow, and fragile. So, for as far back as we find humanity, we find the hope to discover something that will lift at least some of the burden of pretty-much-everything-is-able-to-kill-you off our shoulders.

  We have accomplished quite a bit already. Many of us are nowadays in no danger of attack from predators, and we can treat many diseases and heal a lot of injuries. Yet, we almost always change our surroundings instead of ourselves. We live in cities, where predators are rather rare, and use our medical knowledge to treat illness and injuries. Our intelligence is the only advantage that we have, enabling us to modify nature to suit our demands, mostly by means of technology.

  But isn’t it logical to advance to the next step and alter our bodies so that they become more resistant to everything that can harm us? If we make up for our biological inaptitude by scientific means, we can rid humanity of its ancient enemies disease and, perhaps, even death! Victor Frankenstein believed this and was therefore just one more person in the eternal struggle of man against death, so his desire to improve the human body is no isolated case in the history of mankind.

  This movement of attempting to alter our bodies ourselves is nowadays called “enhancement.” Proponents of enhancement, like the young Victor, are of the opinion that we should change our bodies technologically so that we become more resistant to illness, heal faster, upgrade our capacity to store memories and knowledge, and generally become stronger, more agile and ultimately perfect in every aspect of our lives. Human nature, it is argued, is too faulty and we need to take evolution in our own hands in order to create the bodies, minds, and lives we want to have.

  Such enhancement is much more than medical treatment. Doctors can only treat something that’s already there, which means that any injury or disease must already have come into being before treatment can be applied. Enhancement, on the other hand, seeks to prevent diseases from happening at all. If our bodies are manipulated so that they prevent disease from occurring, and are resistant to injury, then medical treatment becomes almost unnecessary.

  Many of the goals of the enhancement movement are still far away, since Victor always kept his groundbreaking discoveries to himself, but there are already some enhancements applied even today. Vaccination, which enhances our natural resistance to many diseases, is a widely applied and ethically unproblematic example of modern enhancement.

  So we can say without any difficulty that Victor Frankenstein was and is still known as one of the most famous proponents of enhancement. And we might spontaneously agree that enhancement is something positive. After all, the verb “to enhance” means that something is made better than before, and my dictionary offers synonyms like “to improve” and “to ameliorate.” If enhancement changes our physical abilities to make them better than before, it appears to be a most desirable scientific movement. The young Victor had thought so, and, although the events around him and his creation happened earlier, he would probably have agreed with John Stuart Mill’s famous analysis from 1859:

  The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. (Mill, On Liberty)

  Victor’s desire to find a cure for most of humanity’s ailments and the possibility of success was enough reason for him to venture his experiments and keep him going even after many, many failures. Freeing humanity from illness and death through an ultimate enhancement occupied his mind more than anything else, making him become so dedicated in his work that he overlooked a few important things. So the result of his experiments came about quite differently than expected . . . and he realized his mistake way too late.

  You Are My Creator, but I Am Your Master

  Victor’s creation is usually called “daemon” by him, so we might as well stick with that name. This daemon surpasses the bodily limits humans have in almost every aspect and thus constitutes everything Victor had hoped to achieve with his alchemical knowledge. So let’s have a closer look at the daemon to help us understand why his creation was a mistake in the first place.

  The daemon is first of all a gigantic being. He stands eight feet tall, and his massive body holds more strength and agility than one would expect even from a well-trained and muscled human athlete. He can climb nearly perpendicular mountains without any supportive gear and run at extremely high speeds. His joints are more supple; he can endure greater heat and cold and needs less food in spite of his enormous build. Although he still feels pain and does not heal much faster than humans, he does not get knocked down as easily and can even survive in the wilderness without proper medical treatment after being shot in the shoulder.

  Apart from those physical enhancements the daemon has a lot of mental characteristics, which, though not all of them are by themselves superior to those of humans, are of a kind we generally find delightful if found in our fellow humans. He is incredibly intelligent, first in an instinctive and later in an intellectual way, and quite a fast learner, too. He comes to understand his environment as well as his position in the world, and even learns language in less than two years. He is generally a kind, helpful being with a delicate sense for beauty and sophisticated sense of morality. On quite a few occasions throughout Victor’s narrative the daemon utters his moral indignation about several incidents he had heard of during his early existence (like imperialism). Furthermore, he lives on a vegetarian diet, because he does not want to kill other beings simply for food, as mankind does.

  So physically as well as socially the daemon at least matches average human levels of ability, and in some of them even surpasses us. What, then, is wrong with him?
Why is everyone more than scared of a being that possesses so many agreeable traits? There are, I think, two answers to that question.

  First of all, the daemon is incredibly ugly. We do not get that much information about his outward appearance, but as far as Victor explains, the daemon consists of dead body parts of different people stuck together and connected with each other, and although Victor has also tried to create a beautiful being, he could not prevent his skin, which barely covered the facial muscles, from turning yellowish, and his watery eyes suffered the same fate. His black lips got the same color as his hair, and on top of all that his voice turned out to be of an unpleasant harshness. When Victor saw his creation move for the first time, he was deeply shocked and avoided attending to the daemon’s first movements. He did not stay to realize all of the positive things about him, to really get to know his creation and to realize the success he had had. And everybody else reacted in pretty much the same way—they all started running and screaming (or turning violent against him) as soon as they laid eyes on the daemon and realized how hideous he looked.

  Eventually the daemon comes to realize that his life is entirely miserable this way, forced to hide all the time and with no companionship. He starts pondering the possibility that death might be better than life, but instead of suicide he chooses revenge on Victor, since he owes his existence to the young scientist. Here we find the second reason why the creation of the daemon causes so much horror. Deprived of basic needs like companions, friends and other people he could relate to, he vows to destroy the cause of his desperate situation. Victor even turns down the daemon’s last (more or less) peaceful suggestion of creating a wife for him because, in spite of his own fear of suffering under his creation’s revenge, he did not want to have the daemon reproduce and consequently be the founder of a race of beings that could subdue all humankind. (We now know that this would have been out of the question, since any possible offspring would have been the normal, human, non-monstrous product of the two individuals from which the two daemons’ sexual organs had been harvested. And even supposing the offspring to be somehow non-human, two individuals are not enough to found a viable breeding population. But we can’t blame poor Victor for not knowing what Mendel and Weismann would discover decades later.)