Ancient Fables for the Neobiological Age
By Brian Bergstein,
Neo.Life
| 12. 28. 2017
What “Frankenstein” and the golem tell us about the power and responsibility of science.
January 1 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s remarkable novel about a scientist who cobbles together body parts and brings them to life in a “new species.” Because Victor Frankenstein’s project has terrible unintended consequences — he ditches his monster because it is ugly, and the creature roams the world in a destructive search for a mate — the novel can be read as a warning about messing with nature. Those sad and scary themes rear up when people use a term like “Frankenfoods” to denigrate bioengineered products.
But even if Shelley thought of the book as cautionary tale (and it’s debatablewhether she did), that isn’t a very useful cultural shorthand today, as we wrestle with the implications of gene editing, gene writing, and other technologies that give us more power than ever to manipulate biology. Caution is of course required with these technologies. But an excess of it—too much worry about unleashing Frankenstein’s monster—could be even more dangerous. Ultimately, we’re going to have...
Related Articles
By Hannah Devlin, The Guardian | 05.14.2024
Photo by Kind and Curious from Unsplash
When Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) published the results of its gene therapy trial for “bubble baby” syndrome it was hailed as a medical breakthrough. The treatment had a more than 95% success...
By Victoria Bisset and Adela Suliman, The Washington Post | 05.09.2024
Photo by CDC from Unsplash
A baby girl born with profound genetic deafness can now hear unaided after receiving a “groundbreaking” gene therapy trial, Britain’s National Health Service said Thursday.
Opal Sandy, an 18-month-old from Oxfordshire, England, is the first...
By Carrie Arnold, Nature Biotechnology | 04.17.2024
Tome Biosciences came out of stealth mode on 12 December with a haul of over $200 million to develop the company’s gene editing platform. Tome’s first order of business was to snap up Replace Therapeutics to expand its toolkit to...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 04.24.2024
Lisa Pisano was lying in a hospital bed at NYU Langone Health, hooked up to beeping monitors and an array of tubes. Her surgical wounds were still healing, and she looked tired. But the 54-year-old New Jersey woman said she...