I have always been an avid reader but until I started dating my (now) husband, I had never thought to pick up Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. It was his favorite book and so, I made quick work of it and was surprised not just by the beauty and depth of the writing, but that it had come from one so young. Mary Shelly was only 18 years old when she began writing it. Further, I was surprised by how profound the subject matter was and how it struck a chord in me – it was a warning about science and man’s pursuit of knowledge going too far that is still relevant and much needed today.
Frankenstein is the story of a scientist, Victor Frankenstein who desires knowledge without limits. The story is recounted from a series of letters written by a captain of a ship in the Artic to his sister in England. The captain is on a grand journey of discovery with his crew, but it becomes dangerous, and the ship gets trapped in ice. The captain and crew are surprised to find Victor on an iceberg with a sledge in the middle of the icy wastes. They rescue Victor and the captain desires greatly to befriend him and hear his story; he craves intellectual discourse, something he feels he cannot find among the crew. Victor recounts his horrifying tail to the captain, who records it in letters to his sister.
In his narration Victor reveals that he felt a longing for knowledge very early in age. He describes it as, “The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine. Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember.” Victor attends university and studies ancient alchemy and obscure philosophy. He said,
It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed at the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.
Forbidden knowledge and Godhead was what Victor sought. Power to remove any limitations bound in the human body and soul was his hubristic goal. Victor begins pilfering cemeteries for body parts and building a grotesque simulacrum of a human. Like God, he creates a creature in his own image but with dire consequences. The creature, who is never fully described other than being hideous, enormous, of incomprehensible strength, with yellow eyes and black hair becomes an automaton. How? The secret science is never revealed, the reader nor the captain are ever given the clandestine means of animating the horrendous amalgamation of body parts.
Victor is at once disgusted with his creation and flees the scene. The creature escapes and it is some years before he surfaces again, and then he begins tailing his maker, ever longing to know his purpose and why he was made. The fiend, as Victor often refers to him, learns to speak, read, and write. He needs little sustenance to survive, and is impervious to injury, and extreme weather. Victor finds himself haunted by his creation and becomes a shadow of himself, withered by grief as the creature begins picking off Victor’s family members and friends. First, his little brother, later his wife, and his best friend. There are several confrontations between maker and beast, in which the fiend reveals himself a sensitive mind with extreme emotional depth capable of merciless savagery. At times, the reader is compelled to sympathize with the creature despite his murderous nature. His complaint to his maker is a wail in the abyss of existential dread,
Hateful day when I received life! … Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow-devils, to admire and encourage him; but I am solitary and abhorred.
The fiend is lonely in his solitary existence, the only one of his kind, and demands Victor make him a bride in exchange for disappearing into the jungles of South America, never to bother mankind again. Victor begins the process but soon becomes so overwhelmingly disgusted with himself and his task that he tears the corpse to bits and refuses to deliver the beast his due. The rest of the story follows maker and creature until their bitter end.
Victor comes to regret his creation and sets out to destroy it, knowing he has unleashed something upon humanity that would be its end. His main reason for destroying his second creation was fear that they would breed and take over the world, destroying humanity. Such sentiments seem absent in the mind of modern scientists, and I cannot help but wonder if they ever ask themselves: how far is too far? To ask that would require humility, a virtue seldom seen today.
In a recent article in the MIT Technology Review, Antonino Regalado writes about Martine Rothblatt – a transwoman and transhumanist genius who created Sirius satellite radio, sold the company, started a pharmaceutical company called United Therapeutics overnight to buy the patent on an orphaned drug to save the life of her daughter dying from a rare lung disease. Wow! Sounds like a comic book character, does it not?
Rothblatt in recent years has turned her sights upon transplant and creating organs to address the organ shortage (over 100,000 people are waiting for a transplant and more will need transplants in the decades to come). She had a vision of the future that Frankenstein would shudder at. She envisions an,
…organ farm set on a lush green lawn, its tube-like sections connected whimsically in a snowflake pattern. Solar panels dotted the roofs, and there were landing pads for electric drones. The structure would house a herd of a thousand genetically modified pigs, living in strict germ-free conditions. There would be a surgical theater and veterinarians to put the pigs to sleep before cutting out their hearts, kidneys, and lungs. These lifesaving organs—designed to be compatible with human bodies—would be loaded into electric copters and whisked to transplant centers.
If you are familiar with the series MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood, you will be thinking what I am thinking: pigoons! The trilogy is about a post-apocalyptic world in which the main character, who goes by Snowman, recounts what happened to cause the world’s ruin. For the most part, the entire human race has been destroyed by a biological weapon, genetically modified pigs run around hunting the few people left, floods and tropical storms are plaguing the planet, and the rise of a benevolent genetically modified human-like species is taking the place of humans because their creators’ believed humanity was not worthy saving and should be destroyed. An antinatalist’s paradise if ever there was one. Atwood sagely incorporated a lot of biotechnology in her books that is on the rise – including the things Rothblatt is investing in.
But Atwood’s science fiction is not the only thing coming to fruition in Rothblatt’s plans. She also has created a religion based on the science fiction works of deceased author, Octavia Butler. Butler wrote a series called Earthseed, another post-apocalyptic world where a heroine rises to establish a haven in the chaos of a world destroyed by ecological disasters. Earthseed is the plan to seed other planets with humanity and move off world, leaving our true home behind. The MIT article stats,
… a prolific philosopher on the ethics of the future who has advocated civil rights for computer programs, compared the traditional division of the sexes to racial apartheid, and founded a transhumanist religion, Terasem, which holds that “death is optional and God is technological.” She is a frank proponent of human immortality, whether it’s achieved by creating software versions of living people or, perhaps, by replacing their organs as they age.
What is at the heart of this desire to move off-world, live forever, and recognize man’s creation (computers) as having rights? This is Frankenstein without the humility, without the recognition for having pursued something beyond our human limits. What Rothblatt pursues is Satanic in every sense of the world. Just as in Paradise Lost, the hubris and pride of Lucifer represented the greatest of sins, because it was the desire to be Gods. That is what the metaphorical fall is about. Which is Rothblatt’s intention – “Death is optional, and God is technological.” Who is God in this equation? I think Rothblatt considers herself in the role, beyond limitation and with a desire to remove anything that stands in the way of immortality by any means necessary. Not only that, but the creators of technology, and therefore God by Rothblatt’s assertion, is mankind. With this mindset, we have no need to limit ourselves and we should pursue science and knowledge without limits until we fulfill every narcissistic or cruel whim.
What’s more, there was a link to another article in the MIT Technology Review related to changing out one’s organs to live longer, and not just because the organ has failed and not from animals. Brace yourselves, the article states, “In a search for novel forms of longevity medicine, a biotech company based in Israel says it intends to create embryo-stage versions of people in order to harvest tissues for use in transplant treatments.”
You read that correctly! This company is starting trials with mice and now using the lead scientist, Jacob Hanna’s, own genetic material to create cloned fetuses for the purpose of harvesting early organ stem cell tissue to grow perfectly matched organs for elderly and sick people. What is equally disturbing is that in the span of two paragraphs, they claim that these clones are not actually embryos at all and in the next, describes them as you would an embryo.
Remarkably, when stem cells are grown together in specially shaped containers, they will spontaneously join and try to assemble an embryo, producing structures that are called embryoids, blastoids, or synthetic embryo models. Many researchers insist that despite appearances, these structures have limited relation to real embryos and zero potential to develop completely.
By adding these synthetic mouse embryos to his mechanical womb, however, Hanna managed to grow them further than ever before, to the point where hearts started beating, blood began moving, and there was the start of a brain and a tail.
Perhaps technically, by scientific standards these are not authentic embryos, because they were not the meeting of sperm and egg, nor grown in a human womb, but the fact that these “entities” as Hanna calls them – to avoid the mistake of humanizing them – grow hearts that pump blood and begin growing a brain is staggering. Hanna chooses his words so carefully, to remove any suggestion of humanity in his creation; that should tell you that he knows he is playing God and that only by dehumanizing his creation can he justify its existence and his blind pursuit of knowledge, and the defiance of our mortality.
We cannot at this point clearly state where consciousness comes from, whether it is material or not, but it’s safe to state you think with your brain, and thinking is consciousness and if these fetuses have brains could they develop or have they developed consciousness? Even comatose patients who have a heartbeat and brain, but no chance of ever waking up, have rights and are recognized as human beings. To make this science work, you must think that these embryos are not human at all, otherwise you’d be committing a crime against humanity. Starting life, growing babies, just to harvest their budding organ tissues is criminal and ethically abhorrent. Just as Rothblatt’s desires are Satanic, so, too, are Hanna’s and anyone desiring to benefit from this biotechnology. C. S. Lewis describes this inclination best,
The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the centre - wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake...what Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they 'could be like Gods' - could set up on their own as if they had created themselves - be their own masters - invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come...the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
What horrifies me the most about these emerging biotechnologies is that it does not recognize the sacredness of the human and the soul – something I wrote about before. When we abstain from this belief, when we abandon this axiom in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake – perhaps as Lewis describes, a happiness outside of God – we can turn people into vermin and justify just about any depravity you can imagine. It has happened before; it will happen again. Without the belief in the sacredness of the individual, without the belief that we should strive to live up to a higher, divinely inspired standard, we have no boundaries and nothing to stop us from creating monsters for the sake of being able to do so or creating diseases in labs for gain of function just to study them. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a dangerous, arrogant pursuit that leads to inhuman developments. We need ethics to guide us before we wander off a cliff as a species, and the best place to look might be to religion.
Great essay. I sometimes wonder if creatures like the locusts in Rev 9:7, for example, are ancient attempts at describing some of these future biotech creations. They’d probably be some kind of rogue AI-infused, lab-grown-cyborg monstrosities. With what companies like Boston Dynamics are up to, and the examples here, it doesn’t seem like a huge stretch anymore.