As far as anyone can tell, today marks the 200th anniversary of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin getting up after a sleepless night and declaring: “I’ve found it! What will terrify me will terrify others. I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow”. She had hit upon the idea that would become Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus, the cautionary tale that has provided a vocabulary for the relationship between science and society ever since.

Appropriately, it has been a dark and stormy (OK, rainy) night on the shores of Lake Geneva, where I and other Frankenstein-botherers have been gathering at the Brocher Foundation, a few miles from the grand villa where Mary was staying with Lord Byron, her future husband Percy and associated hangers-on.

We are an unromantic bunch of sociologists, philosophers, scientists, historians and scholars of film and literature, brought together by a shared interest in what Frankenstein means now. Our conference has the title ‘Frankenstein’s shadow’, and some of the people here have some fascinating stories to tell.

Alexander Capron is now an esteemed law professor. In 1975, he was one of four non-scientists present when researchers met at Asilomar in California to discuss the hazards of genetic engineering, which had been invented two years earlier. At our conference, he described the echoes of Frankenstein in contemporary debates about bioethics. The lessons for scientists seem clear: don’t play God, don’t over-reach, don’t unleash uncontrollable forces, don’t treat humans as material, don’t act alone. These messages sound simplistic, but they were all articulated in the run-up to the Asilomar meeting. The mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University where much early biotechnology research was being conducted, expressed a concern that Victor Frankenstein realised too late: “I don’t think these scientists are thinking about mankind at all. I think that they’re getting the thrills and the excitement and the passion to dig in and keep digging to see what the hell they can do.” Capron described how, at Asilomar, scientists congratulated themselves on their interdisciplinarity because there were molecular biologists and microbiologists present. (I was reminded of the scene in Blues Brothers where the band are reassured by the manager of their new venue that she plays ‘both kinds of music: Country and Western’).

Other speakers provided a selection of Frankenstein cases. At the height of the furore over ‘Frankenstein foods’ in 1999, Tony Blair was represented on the Sun’s front page in full Boris Karloff get-up as the ‘Prime Monster’. But the story also found its way into public debates about test tube babies in the 1960s and 70s. The connection with my own Promethean obsession – geoengineering – begins with the volcanic eruption that cooled the earth and led to the terrible weather in 1816. When Louis Washkansky, the recipient of the first heart transplant, awoke after his operation, he told one of his nurses, “I am the new Frankenstein”. Given his condition, we can forgive the confusion between creator and creature. Many have made the same mistake, not helped by the book’s main character having no name, despite being extremely articulate (if not in Karloff’s famous groaning incarnation).

Although she lived to see various stage adaptations of her book, Mary Shelley had no idea of the monster that Frankenstein would become. Elizabeth Young has written about the Americanisation of Frankenstein, focussing on race and slavery. One of the first invocations of Frankenstein as a cautionary tale was in discussions of the abolition of slavery. Numerous conservative politicians and cartoons in the US and UK in the early 19th Century used the Frankenstein imagery to depict freed slaves as uncontrollable monsters.

The history of bioethics shows that we are slow to realise ethical transgressions in science. Kayte Spector-Bagdady, who has recently stepped down from Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, talked about the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, as well as a less well-known case, in which US government researchers deliberately infected sex workers with syphilis before sending them into prisons in Guatemala, a country in which prisoners were allowed such visits. The Commission’s report on the case is a damning indictment of a group of scientists and institutions that justified their actions in terms of the greater good.

Interviews with scientists suggest that the number one influence on responsible scientific practice is not regulations, nor training, but mentors. In the novel, Victor has a mentor, Professor Waldman, an evangelist for the methods of modern science, but soon strikes out alone. In the films, Victor has companions – first Fritz, then Igor – who give voice to the processes of creation. In the book he is alone, and his experiments are barely described. Lester Friedman and Allison Kavey have a book due out that charts mutated Frankenstein depictions across films, comics and other media. According to Friedman, one of the most faithful Frankenstein movies may be Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein because it, in a gloriously silly manner, humanises the relationship between Victor and the creature. We heard from the Pakistani writer Mahvesh Murad, who linked Mary’s creation to her experience as a teenage mother. For Murad, Frankenstein is a ‘birth story’ and a parable of poor parenting.



In 2012 the French philosopher Bruno Latour wrote that the real lesson of Frankenstein was not that we should prevent the creation of monsters, but that we should ‘love our monsters’: creators need to care for their creations. It’s a point that had been made thirty years earlier by Langdon Winner, who was the conference’s final speaker. Noting that Mary’s friend Byron was a prominent Luddite sympathiser, Winner wondered what she would make of our current debate about artificial intelligence and the replacement of jobs by automation. We see technological enthusiasts like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking ringing alarm bells about the existential risks of AI, but their responses seem a long way from ‘taking care’. Their suggested answer, Winner said, always seemed to be ‘more technology’. Margaret Atwood, the newly crowned winner of the PEN prize, nailed this in the New York Review of Books in 2003:

Asking these kinds of scientists what improved human nature should be like is like asking ants what you should have in your back yard. Of course they would say “more ants”.

As we gear up to the bicentennial of the novel’s first publication in 2018, a number of science museums are preparing new exhibitions. A project at Arizona State University will invite members of the public to engage with monstrous notions in playful ways. They get people to make little vibrating robots with felt-tip legs and set them loose on paper. Once the creatures have done their business, their creators are asked to discuss questions of creativity and responsibility: Does the robot object count as art? Has the robot itself created art? Are you responsible for its actions? If its drawing happened to sell for millions, who should get the money?

Scientists and museums recognise the public appeal of the Frankenstein story, but are nervous about the difficult questions it raises. Maybe Shelley’s greatest achievement has been to keep such questions alive.