Frankenstein: 200 Years of Scientific Dread

Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein” has terrified the world for nearly two centuries, thanks to countless adaptations and the timeless nature of the 1816 text. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian discuss the modern world that this science-fiction horror classic emerged from and the dark shadow it continues to cast over scientific endeavor.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Here my tale. It is long and strange,
and the temperature of this place is not fitting to
your fine sensations. Come to the hut upon the mountain.

(00:23):
The sun is yet high in the heavens before it
descends to hide itself beyond yon snowy precipices and illuminate
another world. You will have heard my story and can
decide on you would rest, whether I quit forever the
neighborhood of man and lead a harmless life, or become
the scourge of your fellow creatures and the author of

(00:43):
your own speedy ruin. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I am
Christian Seger. And as you might have guessed from the
title or from Robert's reading just now, we are talking
about Frankenstein. It is the month of October, it is

(01:04):
our favorite time of year, and Frankenstein is two hundred
years old this year, so we felt like we had
to do an episode on Frankenstein. Yeah, it's such a
great topic because it's it brings everything together, Like Frankenstein,
of course, is just as a horror stand out, just
a horror icon, um that the novel itself is a classic,

(01:25):
and more importantly, I guess for a science show is
Frankenstein continues to cast this shadow over the sciences. It
emerges from science, and and it continues to color our
understanding and at times fear of science. It is. It
is essentially science fiction. People often, you know, you forget

(01:46):
about that when you just get caught up sometimes and
just the sheer monster aspects of the thing. Yeah. I
even read one account that described it as the first
science fiction novel. I don't know if that's necessarily true,
but certainly we think of it as horror, probably more
because of the movies. But the book itself is a
little bit of both. And it's not the book itself,

(02:08):
which we're gonna mainly focus on the book today. Of course,
we'll talk about the other pop culture resonance of this
book throughout history. But the book is not gory. It's uh,
you know, the scenes where the monster kills people are
pretty much just like then he's snapped her neck. You know,
it wasn't like, uh, it's it's not it's not Boris
Karlafi even right, Yeah, it's it's really a tremendous book,

(02:30):
but I think stands the test of time rather nicely.
I don't think it communicates well to modern viewers. It's
it's it's a complex book. The the monster, the creature
is not just it's not it's not just a you know,
a shambling killer. He's a complex creature. Likewise, Victor Frankenstein
is neither hero nor pure villain in this There are

(02:54):
there are shades of gray and him as well. So
it's a it's a story ultimately of two complex into
vide rules of a creator and the created, and all
the various um interpretations of that that flow both religiously
scientifically and purely cultural. Yeah, there certainly are a lot,
and that's not really our mission here on this show. Um.

(03:15):
I'm sure there are lots of other podcasts that are
doing great uh literary readings of Frankenstein and sort of
tearing apart its themes. We'll talk about those, but we're
here mainly to look at the science behind it. Uh.
We will briefly talk though, as we usually do, about
you know, the the cultural importance of this media artifact basically,

(03:37):
and I think it would be great for us to
start off by saying what's your favorite? What's your favorite Frankenstein. Yeah,
I mean we all have our favorites, and these favorites
are not always going to be colored by our you know,
our appreciation for the text. You know, it's just growing
up with the monster. Yours is the Aaron Eckhart form.
My Frankenstein isn't that. I haven't seen that, and I
kind of want to. It's real bad um for me.

(04:03):
I have to start by saying, I've never seen an
adaptation where I felt like the monster, the creature, you know,
captured the essence of the creature from the novel. So
so I'm being perhaps a little unfair there, but but yeah,
there's a there's this sort of idea of what the
monster could be, and I've yet to see that really
come to fruition on film. I do have to say, though,

(04:27):
I have very strong memories of seeing what was probably
for many a rather lackluster Frankenstein. I don't know if
I may be alone in this being like an iconic
Frankenstein for me. But there was a TV movie, and
I believe it aired on tnt UH titled Frankenstein, and
it starred Patrick Bergen as Dr Frankenstein and Randy Quaid

(04:50):
as as the creation and it it was it was
quite I remember it as being good. I don't know
if you would hold up Randy Quaid. And it was
a seri serious movie. It was like a comedic Frankenstein.
It was a serious period piece. And Quade gave really
a great serious performance as the monster. That was you know,

(05:10):
I'm on par with what's in the book, you know,
maybe not not perfect, but still in keeping with the novel.
And and Patrick Bergen is always great. Uh. It featured,
you know, all the arctic intrigue that that I always
loved in the book that is absent from some of
the film adaptations, many of the film adaptations really Uh.
It also has some wonderful scenes in which the monster
and later he is doomed bride or created out of

(05:32):
like a lead red liquids just kind of like a
primordial soup that he brews up in a tank. And
it was directed by David Wicks, who also did a
Jekyl and Hide TV movie from nineteen ninety that starred
Michael Caine and Cheryl Ladd and Josh Auckland. And I
remember seeing that one on TV and finding it rather terrifying.
As well. Wow. Well, this was a period of time

(05:55):
where I didn't live in the United States, so I
must have it must have been off my cultural radar
because I didn't have American television then, but I had
never heard either of these. Wow, I was like Nursed
on American television. There was no avoiding it for me.
But yeah, I remember that's That's a film adaptation that
I think back to a lot, even though I haven't
seen it since I've seen it on TV in like,

(06:17):
I should really give it another viewing. Yeah. Well, from
my part, I have two that I really love. The
first is Bernie writz In, who a lot of people
out there know as just a famous illustrator, especially in
the horror genre. He in the late seventies early eighties
had this passion project where he wanted to do an
illustrated version of Frankenstein, and uh he did. It took

(06:42):
him years to finish it, but Marvel Comics published it,
I think in the early eighties. Since gone out of print,
but earlier this year, I was at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon,
and I found an oversized edition of this Frankenstein copy.
In fact, that's right in front of me. Right now.
And man, the illustrations in it are gorgeous. I think

(07:03):
writs In is like one of the few people who
captures the monster's essence, uh, at least according to the book. Um.
And this is just a really beautiful copy. So I
always think of when I think of the Monster, and
when I think of Victor Frankenstein, I think of these drawings.
But I have to say, there's a totally whacked out
version of Frankenstein that I also love from the comics that, uh,

(07:26):
a guy we often talk about on the show, Grant
Morrison did very short for issue series Frankenstein, Agent of Shade,
and uh, Frankenstein is basically a monster hunter. The monster,
not Victor Frankenstein. He's a monster hunter and uh he
goes like all over the world and even to Mars

(07:47):
to hunt monsters. Uh. And it's just this absolutely insane,
uh psychedelic Frankenstein ride. Uh and and uh so yeah,
he's like part of like a group called Shade that's
basically like like the government version of like a paranormal
control team or something like that. So they send him in.

(08:10):
The Bride is in it too, and she's also an agent,
and they have like sown extra arms on her, so
she's like she's got a bunch of guns and weapons
and stuff like that that she you know, she's adept
at fighting with like I think six or seven limbs
or something like that. Well, this sounds about right for
for Grant Morrison. You have a gothic um horror creature

(08:30):
that is also kind of a Hindu goddess that involved
in some sort of paranormal psychedelic and oh yeah, he
very much plays up the Hindu goddess part. She even
has like a jewel I think on her forehead and yeah,
I should check that out. Um. And then of course,
just from growing up the ones that well not growing
up the ones that I love to or tom Noonan
and Monster Squad, he was my Frankenstein because he was

(08:52):
just like the nicest Frankenstein who helped out the kids
at the end of that movie. He was a good
guy Frankenstein. He was yeah, the monster and uh lately,
uh Penny dreadful. Rory Kneer's performance in that as the
monster is wow, really great and it's essentially Robert Smith

(09:13):
is very much Yeah, I can't remember the name of
the guy who plays Victor Frankenstein. But he's incredible as well.
The whole Frankenstein arc in Penny Dreadful Is is amazing,
very well done. Um. I have to say too that
I have a lot of love for the Hammer Horror films,
and there are spredations of of Frankenstein and the creature
Christopher Lee, right, um it it depends on who's involved,

(09:38):
you know. It's kind of a a revolving cast at times. Though.
Peter Peter Cushing played Victor or Dr Frankstein or whatever
or Baron Frankenstein, whatever twist they were doing on it
in a number of them, so he's kind of like
the iconic Frankenstein, the Man, the Monster varied, but from
a purely design level, I really love David the Prowls

(10:01):
monster from Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell from Yeah.
I'm sure you've seen this one where the monster looks
like a gorilla with like the top of its headstone
back on classic Hammer Horror special effects. Yeah, so it
looks tremendous. Yeah, we're really you know, uh, here in
the States, I really wish that there was like easier

(10:22):
access to all of those Hammer things. You can find
a lot of them on YouTube nowadays, but like man,
it would be great if you could just like stream
all of those on like one service or or get
them at your local video shop or something like that.
They're really you have a great local video shop like
video yeah can, but that's it's harder with these streaming services. Yeah, yeah,
they're not as readily available. Although Hammers making a comeback

(10:44):
right now, so maybe they'll, I don't know, put their
archives up so everybody can watch these crazy Frankenstein movies again.
You know, I should go ahead, and we should go
ahead and make one point before we move on into
the media the episode, and that is, of course, there's
always the whole Uh, there's Frankenstein the man, there's the
creature of the monster. And some people get really upset
if you refer to the monster as Frankenstein. And yes,

(11:07):
technically that is so the creature is not named Frankenstein,
but at this point in the tradition of the character,
it's it's almost interchangeable, it is. Yeah. In fact, almost
every article I read for researching this episode had that
disclaimer in it. And I believe it was St. Joshi,

(11:27):
who we've talked about on the show before. You've interviewed
him on the show before he's a famous horror Uh
would you say literate critic? Uh? He was basically like,
look at this point, like it's not even worth arguing about.
Like it's just become a cultural norm that people refer
to the monster as Frankenstein. Just let it go. Let's

(11:48):
all move on. Yeah, so we're probably gonna do a
little bit of both and just there with us forgive us. Personally,
I love it when someone refers to plural Frankenstein's monsters
by calling them Frankenstein's likens. Took the field and defeated
I don't know, the New England Patriots. That would be
a great I would actually watch sports if that was
if that was available with Victor is the Coach, Ye

(12:12):
green One, make that movie you heard it here first.
All right, Well, on that note, let's let's move Let's
move ahead, and in doing so, let us move back
in time and talk about the origins of Mary Shelley's
um classic novel. Yeah. So, like I said, this isn't
a literary podcast, but I do think it's important that
we established some bit of a setting here for how

(12:37):
this book was created, for what we're going to talk
about science wise later on, Because some of this is
important and the listeners may not be aware of this.
Some of it I wasn't aware of until dove in yesterday. So, uh,
it's the two d year anniversary. We've been talking about this.
Why is that important? Well, eighteen sixteen was referred to
as the Year without a Summer. Most people know the

(12:59):
story that Mary Shelley Percy Shelley, lord Byron and John Paula.
Doori were in Switzerland vacation ng and they had a
competition with one another to see who could write the
best horror story, and Mary came out with Frankenstein. What
a lot of people don't know is that this was
during an unexpectedly cold summer in Switzerland, So that's why

(13:21):
they were enclosed indoors the whole time. And the reason
why was it was a year after an eruption at
Mount tim Bora and that had affected the climate somehow
and made it much colder. I guess because the ash
was still in the Yeah. Yeah, Like, if anyone anyone
out there is familiar with the nuclear winter and theories
regarding that, it's the same thing. You have. Yeah, you
have material that's ejected into the upper atmosphere and it

(13:43):
serves as kind of a shade that chills the world.
So they were stuck indoors trying to amuse themselves, and
they came up with this contest and Mary started working
on Frankenstein Um. For their parts, Byron wrote sort of
like a summary and I guess polla DOORI then like
took it further and wrote it into a story called
The Vampire, which is another horror classic, and it later

(14:05):
influenced brom Stoker's Dracula. So this, you know, um Year
without a Summer is like highly influential on the genre
of horror as we know it. But here's another thing
I didn't know. I'm curious if you've heard of this before.
I learned about it from a comic book, a graphic
novel by Warren Ellis and an artist named Marrik Olick

(14:26):
SICKI called Frankenstein's Womb. And apparently there's two theories of
real life events that also contributed to the book. The
first is that before they went to Switzerland for this
infamous vacation, Mary and Percy visited the real Frankenstein castle
that's near Drumstock, Germany in eighteen fourteen, and the story

(14:50):
about that place goes that Conrad Dipple was there and
he had experimented with human bodies there in his pursuit
of alchemy. So it's possible that Mary heard about all
of this before uh they even went and had their
horror story competition, and that she based Victor Frankenstein on

(15:12):
Conrad Dipple. He claimed to have invented in a mixer
of life, and he was rumored to have experimented on
dead bodies. So there's lots of similarities. But this is
like one of those things that sort of lost to history.
Nobody really knows well. I mean, there's certainly a alchemical
DNA and Frankenstein's yeah, yeah, you know, it seems likely
the second theory that comes out of this Frankenstein's Womb book,

(15:33):
and it has been expressed in other places. Obviously, it's
not like Warren Ellis cooked it up? Uh? Is that
thematically Frankenstein is about a premature birth that Mary had
an eighteen fifteen where their baby died two weeks after
it was born. So this is uh again like there
and I'll get into this, like this woman had a

(15:54):
horrible life full of medical misfortune, and honestly, it really
seems like Percy Elly treated her like garbage. But it
said that he didn't even care about the baby's condition
after it was born, and went on to have an
affair with her step sister right after I was born. Uh,
and that Frankenstein. The writing of it is her reconciliation

(16:14):
with giving life and then that life dying, the death
of her baby, and the horrible father that she had
to put up with. So um and just all right,
here's a little a side note about Percy Shelley. It
sounds like an awful person all the way around. Like
everything I've read about it, he just doesn't sound like
a pleasant guy. Um. Not only was he this obnoxious adulterer,

(16:35):
but according to Paula Dory's diary from that summer, this
is just one little instance of him. They were all
sitting around telling stories or something, and Shelley just stood
up and grabbed his head and started shrieking and ran
out of the room like very pretentiously, and everybody was like,
what is this all about? And he runs into the bathroom,
he throws water into his face, and he comes back
and he goes, well, I'm sorry, it's just while you

(16:57):
were talking. Just then, I suddenly imagine a woman who
had eyes instead of nipples, and everybody was just like, oh, okay,
moving on. Uh so he seems like a real character. Um,
And I imagine for for Mary's part, you know, she
I think they got together at like super early age,
like she was like sixteen or something like that, and

(17:18):
they were married maybe when she was nineteen or twenty,
but like she had already given birth to this premature child.
A lot, a lot of weird stuff around this, And well,
I guess I'm that theories like that. I can certainly
see where it could be a part of the genesis
of the story, because certainly misfortune and life in Vincent
general tend to color our creative endeavors. But I guess

(17:42):
I tend to shy away from theories that say, oh,
this book right here is all about this one thing. Yeah,
and I just don't think life necessarily works like well,
and Frankenstein is one of those books right that, like
I'm trying to remember if I read it in high school.
I definitely read it in college because I took a
horror classes in college. But like, um, it's one of
those books sort of like Catcher in the Rye where

(18:02):
you can like you as the reader, bring your themes
to it, and lots of people try to apply those
and say, like this, this is what this is about, right, Uh,
and Frankenstein is one of those. I mean it it's
very universal in that way. Um, and so a lot
of people take different things from it. So, yeah, you're right,
there isn't Those are just two sort of little maybe
factoids about its genesis. Another thing I read was an

(18:25):
article called the Medicine of Shelley and Frankenstein out of
a journal called Emergency Medicine, and this sort of traced
the medical misfortunes as I mentioned earlier, of Mary Shelley
and how they may have influenced it. That she was
very much aware of science, medicine, and the ideas of

(18:45):
life and death because of all of these things. So
I'm gonna hit you with him real quick. So Mary
Shelley's mother was Mary Wolston Kraft, who was a prominent
feminist at the time, but she literally died ten days
after giving birth to Mary from puerre parole fever, which
was a pretty common occurrence at the time. I think. Uh.
There's also a mention of the birth of their daughter,

(19:08):
who I talked about earlier. Clara, that's the one who
died at twelve days of age. Reportedly, Mary had dreams
of this dead daughter being reanimated by fire right afterwards.
So you can imagine how like traumatized this woman was,
Like she grew up without a mother, her first kid dies,
she's I guess like eloped with this kind of jerk. Uh.

(19:29):
In eighteen sixteen, just after Mary gave birth to their
second child, William, her sister Fanny, committed suicide with laudanum.
Then in eighteen seventeen, Percy had another wife and her
name was Harriet, and she committed suicide while she was
pregnant with his child. Two weeks later, two weeks after

(19:49):
this woman commits suicide, Percy, Mary's Mary. And then they
have a third child, and that's Clara Everina Shelley, and
she died at thirteen months of age from dysenterry. Then William,
who was the one who was born earlier, he dies
in eighteen nineteen from malaria. So she's she's had three

(20:11):
kids who died, her sister, her what do you call
her other wife, and then her mother, they've all, like
every everybody around her just died. Uh. And then Percy
himself is lost at sea in eighteen two. Mary contracts
smallpox in eight and she lives until the ripe old
age of fifty two, when she died from a brain tumor.

(20:34):
So you guess you could say her short life was
full of life, death, and the the whims of brilliant
but unstable men exactly, which makes sense regarding the book,
and and just that, like she would have been aware
of a lot of the medical scientific goings on of
the time, not just because of this, but also because

(20:55):
her father and Percy and Byron they were all sort
of interested in this stuff and talked about it and
met with scientists at the time, as we'll talk about later.
So at the heart of Frankenstein, of course, we have
the tale of a of a human creating life, particularly
a human male creating life, using science to do so.
Uh and and in and in that, like the mythic

(21:18):
roots of this thing run pretty deep. And and if
you follow the mythic roots far enough, you also reach
like the basic uh, psychological underpinnings of this this whole
notion of of humans giving life to an unliving object. Um.
So I'm just gonna gonna gonna coast through some of

(21:38):
this here for you. So so we have numerous examples
of this to draw in myth of course you've got uh.
For instance, the Greek myth of Pygmalion, in which you know,
female scalp sculpture is is awoken with the help of
the god Venus. Uh. Medieval Jewish folk tales are full
full of golems um, artificial beings that are you know,

(22:00):
brought to life via a tablet of sacred words that
are inserted beneath the clay, humanoids, tongues, um. Countless other
examples exist now. But humans have a knack for attributing
life to artificial likenesses. And it's we call this anthropomorphism,
and it refers to when we take non human or

(22:20):
impersonal objects and we give them human or personal characteristics
or behaviors. Yeah, and so this is a good spot
for us to note something about Shelley's version of the monster, Uh,
that this Frankenstein's Monster was not sewn together and blasted
to life with lightning, as we've come to understand from

(22:41):
James Whale's ninety one film Uh. In fact, the machines
that are in that were actually inspired by Nicola Tesla's
high voltage devices. In the book, however, the monster is
more like a golem or homunculous and that it's brought
about by what is called, quote, an elemental principle of
life like alchemy that is then applied to various quote

(23:05):
raw materials from the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse. So yes,
it's undead meat, I guess, but it's not even necessarily
human parts. It's more like a flesh goum. Yeah. And
while there is you know, an allusion to some sort
of electrical nature to the secret, it's very much a
secret in the book because the book is is is

(23:25):
told from the point of views of Victor and the creature,
and Victor, as a first person uh narrator here does
not want to share his secret. Like most of the
book is about how ashamed and awful he feels about
having brought this thing into being, and therefore he wants
to die with the secrets. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Remember the

(23:49):
narrative setup is that they're in the Arctic. He's on
a ship with the ship's captain I think, or somebody
who's on the ship and just basically telling recounting the
story to him and is full of woe at all
the tragedy that it has wrought him. Yeah, as he
and his created chase each other to the ends of
the earth. But but yeah, we have this basic idea

(24:10):
that just that we have the power to think things
to life, not in a literal sense, but in a
you know, in a metaphoric and psychological sense. A brick
is just a brick until we paint a smiley face
on it, and then it becomes inevitably a little harder
or a little easier to throw that brick down a well,
because he'ven imbued it with a sense of being. And

(24:32):
this interesting court stems from something anthropologists called the law
of similarity, which holds that humans inevitably links superficial, real
life resemblances to deep, unreal resemblances. So a baby doll
is in an actual infant, but it resembles one enough
to make it real to the child who plays with it.
And there's a way to test the law of similarity
on your own. You can sketch a face of a

(24:53):
loved one on a scrap of paper and then crumple
it in your hand. And when you do that, do
you feel a connection? Do you feel like connects in
that your mind forms, including the resemblance and the thing
itself probably so. Uh so. Out of this phenomenon, we
have innumerable magical and religious practices that emerge in human culture,
such as harming a person's likeness to produce the same

(25:14):
effect on the actual person uh so called sympathetic magic
that includes the burning of effigies, the use of voodoo dolls.
And the roots of anthropypomorphic thinking lie in the human
capacity for reflective consciousness, the ability to use what we
know about ourselves to understand and predict predict the behaviors
of others. And these empathetic qualities gave early humans and

(25:38):
evolutionary advantage along that did not only outthink other people,
but also to fit the behaviors of domesticated animals within
the confines of human society. Yeah yeah, that's very important.
Yeah so. And then as a as kind of a
sidebar to that, it also gives us the place and
human cognition to dream about bringing man made likenesses to life,

(25:59):
be it a at you of a woman or a
flesh golemn in a Gothic basement, which brings us to alchemy. Um,
and I want to read a passage here from the book. Actually,
before we dive into this, there is Mary Shelley was
obviously well aware of alchemy at the time, and she
works it into the book. There's a point where Victor's

(26:20):
studying at the university and he's got some um I
guess mentors, and one of them is referred to They
don't give his first name, he's just M. Waldman. But
Waldman sort of, you know, guides Victor's study and says,
you can use my machine. So he's it's implied Waldman
sort of knows how to do this himself. Maybe uh.
And he says this about alchemists. He says, the ancient

(26:44):
teachers of this science promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The
modern masters promised very little. They know that metals cannot
be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera.
But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble
in dirt and their eyes to pour over the microscope
or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the

(27:08):
recesses of nature and show how she works in her
hiding places. They ascend into the heavens. They have discovered
how the blood circulates and the nature of the air
we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers.
They can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake,
and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.

(27:31):
So there's a little bit of a set up here
that Shelley's giving us, which is, yes, alchemy was a thing,
and we acknowledge that Victor Frankenstein is pretty influenced by it.
But modern science is here to pave the real way
the alchemy left behind. Yeah, And and then I think
it gets to the heart of what alchemy was, uh,

(27:52):
you know, basically from the sixteenth of the eighteen centuries,
it was a hodgepodge of early chemistry, occultism, essential all
these these uh, these these graspings for understanding, some rooted
in in pre scientific chemistry, like in an actual attempt
to understand how these chemical properties interact with each other

(28:12):
and other. But but that is kind of muddled in
together with a bunch of essentially who we uh, some
actual like you know, there were some interesting discoveries that
came out of alchemy, but you didn't have scientific rigor
there to guide it right. And remember Conrad Dipple, who
may or may not have influenced this story, was an
alchemist and claimed that he had found the elixir of life. Now,

(28:36):
the elixir of life is also known in alchemic circles
as the Philosopher's Stone. Yeah, the philosopher's Stone was certainly
one of the main alchemical um uh goals. Maybe well,
but there were a couple of other things that were
interesting as well. Of course, there's there's always the attempt
to turn things into gold, um right. For instance, there

(28:59):
was a seventeen entry alchemist Hinnig Brundt distilled countless buckets
of urine in an attempt to turn urine into gold.
And if only we could do that only yeah, uh so,
if I could only spin urine into gold. His experiment failed,
which would come to know, there's no surprise to anyone.

(29:19):
But it did allow him to discover the element phosphorus.
So so you can see here and how even though
it was unguided and uh and uncertain and muddled with
all these other disciplines, they still occasionally accidentally achieve something
now and again, it's the history of science. Yea. Now,
the fictional Frankenstein's work closely resembles alchemical attempts to produce H,

(29:42):
a minuscule artificial human avoid known as a homunculus. Uh
and and uh. I've looked into this summing in the past.
I'm always fascinated by the homunculus. Do you have a
monster science episode about homunculi? I don't know. I just
I've done a few posts here and there about it.
There's a there's a mini text known as the Libavack

(30:02):
or the Book of the Cow, and it it lays
out the homunculous creation formula and bizarre details so that
the process begins by mixing human semen with a mystical
phosphorescent elixir and ends with a newborn humunculous emerging from
a cow, growing human skin and craving its mother's blood
inside of a large glass or lead vessel. That sounds

(30:24):
totally legit to me. I mean, at any time I've
mixed human semen with phosphorescent elixir, something close to this happens.
I think I've been missing the cow ingredient. But but
but at hard here? So what while lost amid false
concepts of spontaneous generation and magical Tomfoolery. Alchemists were pondering

(30:45):
the possibility of creating an artificial rational animals, as they
sometimes referred to it, through learned manipulation of organic tissue,
and at the time, it was widely believed that humans
could mimic and manipulate such natural reproductive processes, but biological
science was still incubating, and humanity's first breakthroughs came in

(31:05):
the form of machines, uh, not flesh. And it's worth
noting here too that the novel states that Victor specifically
studied books by Albertus Magnus, Paris Celsus, and Cornelius Agrippa,
who were all known alchemists, and that he considered lords
of his imagination. Uh. Now, let's take a quick break.

(31:28):
But when we get back, we can get into the
machinery aspect of this of bringing life about by talking
about automatons. Alright, we're back. So the automaton uh slightly
different deal than Frankenstein. I can't think offhand of any

(31:49):
examples of like Frankenstein adaptations where they've gone for like
a purely mechanical monster. The one that immediately pops into
my head is Frankenstein's Army. Have you seen that? Yes, Yeah,
they're very mechanical, but there is like organic tissue stone
in there too, right, Yeah, they're kind of like steam punky.
Side words, Josh Clark turned me to that movie and

(32:10):
I watched it on Netflix one time, So if you've
never seen it, the premise of the movie is that
Victor Frankenstein, it's like his grandson or somebody like that,
is alive during World War two and the Russians. He's
working for the Russians and he builds like this army
of Frankenstein's that then just destroyed Nazis. And it's it's

(32:32):
a found footage film too, like somehow they're filming the
entire thing during World War Two. It's a it's pretty great.
It's been a sixteen it's more of a filmed haunted
attraction that's more of a house than it is a movie.
But it's still a lot of fun if you're in
for that. The monster designs are amazing. That's the the
best part. Now, as far as it's Frankenstein is concerned, Uh,

(32:56):
you know, we don't see a purely mechanical Frankenstein. It
certainly that's not what he presented in the book, But
it's really difficult to think about Frankenstein's historical underpinnings without
thinking about the obsession of of automatons, the idea that, Okay,
certainly people can't build something out of flesh, but we
can build machines. And if we build machines that look

(33:18):
like humans, if they if we can program them to
to or make them so that they move in certain ways,
then we are at least mimicking a living body. Um.
They're not intelligent in any sense of the world at word,
but they serve as a forerunner to modern computational robots. Now.
Accounts of automatons date back as far as the fourth

(33:39):
century b C. When when a Greek poet Pindar wrote
of animated statues on the streets of Rhodes uh and
you had accounts of other individuals building self propelled mechanical birds. Overtime,
Countless engineers and inventors applied their intellect to create mechanical, pneumatic,
hide rolic and even electric mimicry of biological life, and

(34:03):
their attempts rained from Leonardo da Vinci's fifteenth century robotic Night,
which was apparently designed to walk and sit to Jacques
de w Consin's eighteenth century digesting duck, which which made
the rounds, it was really more of a performance thing.
It was supposedly this mechanical duck was using its motorized
chewing abilities, uh, to to eat and then it's digesting,

(34:26):
and then it has a mechanical sphincter to mimic defecation. Uh.
Reportedly the inspiration for the tre ducan. Yeah, in a way,
kind of a mechanical tre duncan, but it didn't actually
digest anything. It was just kind of a part of
the trick, but it didn't include actual biomimicry mechanics. But
it all reflects this this idea that Okay, if the

(34:49):
body may be mechanical in nature, and if we can
build machines that replicate it, then then perhaps this is
the first step and getting to the point where we
can we can build a rational animal, that we can
build a human, We can build an animal, we can
build a duck that digests. That these things are within
the graphs of human achievement. Yeah, this speaks to I

(35:09):
think just like this ongoing theme throughout human myth and
also in science to a certain degree. But of you know,
us creating life outside of our regular reproductive means, right,
And of course Frankenstein's about that, But you can even say,
like I don't know data from Star Trek. The next
generation is also about that, right, like the way in

(35:30):
his own way he's at Frankenstein. You know it. It
gets down to stuff we're still struggling with today, Like
whatever we can create that that resembles a human, that
resembles a human human thought, that that tweaks the human design?
Like what's the divide between all that? That that that biology,
the biomechanics, and actual identity, actual consciousness. Seventeenth century French

(35:54):
philosopher Reneed de Cartes viewed nature is primarily mechanical. He
avoided the messier existential complications of this view by defining
the human soul as an independent force, as as the
ghost in the machine, as as philosopher and Descartes's critic
Gilbert Ryle would later describe it, Yeah, Descartes classic philosopher,

(36:16):
the old am I a brain in a jar? How
do I prove that I'm not just a brain in
a jar? And a demon is torturing me into thinking
that existence is real? That was That was like pretty
much a whole semester of college for me, was trying
to wrap my brain around that one. Yeah, and like
I said, it, stuff we're still were worrying about today
as we we were further and further towards the sort
of artificial intelligence that potentially reflects our own consciousness. So

(36:41):
that too, is as a major theme and in Frankenstein,
because because the creature is, like I say, unlike some
of the more basic uh film adaptations, he is a
rational creature, he has them, he has emotions. You feel
a lot of sympathy for him in the book, really
more in my heating anyway, you feel more sympathy for

(37:02):
the creature than you do for Victor, who who is
reckless and impulsive and uh, just kind of a disaster
and and what is the creature but a result of
his disastrous choices. Yeah, And this brings us around to
the alternate title of the book, which is the modern Prometheus. Uh.

(37:22):
And in many ways, Victor is that modern Prometheus. And
as we were talking about earlier, there's a million different
ways that you can try to dissect that and figure
out what the themes are going on there. I think
the term modern Prometheus was coined by Emmanuel Kant and
in reference it was referencing Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity.

(37:44):
So let's take this apart for just a second. Here,
Prometheus in the Greek iteration stole fire from the gods, right,
But then there's a Latin iteration as well of Prometheus,
and he was basically bringing men to life I think
from clay by using particles of quote, heavenly fire, so
also electricity maybe. Um So there's there's a lot going

(38:07):
on in there. Was Mary Shelley purposely connecting it to
both of those and how did she envision this the
I guess symbology of Prometheus as as relevant to her
context right the time that she lived in when people
were experimenting with electricity, trying to discern what the meaning
was between life and death and whether you could use

(38:29):
electricity to revive a dead body. Yeah, I mean the
Promethean figures are are fascinating and in various mythologies, be
at actual Prometheus or some other generation of where you
have a character, uh an individual demigod, even sometimes it's
just kind of a semi human hero who takes something
from the gods and gives it to humans generally, it's
like a technology or an ability. Their their Chinese myths

(38:51):
where it's uh, it's more agricultural in nature, and so like,
what does that what does that mean? Does that mean
that that humans here have they have they stepped out
of beyond their boundaries? Are they doing so they dabbling
in God's domain? Or is it simply like, hey, they
have mastered something. Here is something that previously was the

(39:11):
domain of of of of of of forces beyond their imagination,
and now it is within the human experience. Yeah. Obviously
makes me think of the recent movie Prometheus, set within
the alien mythology and the beginning of that where these
uh what are they? These statuesque engineer aliens come to

(39:34):
Earth and give life to earth basically by I mean,
there's the first five minutes of the film, like one
of them just dissolves, right and like his cellular parts
become the nature of life. Well, yeah, they're presented as titans.
Prometheus was a Titan, So it's it's I mean, it's
really the the metaphor is strong in that one. Yeah.

(39:55):
So this brings us to the real nuts and bolts
science behind Frankenstein and that all starts with bioelectricity. So
I want to do just a real basic encyclopedia breakdown
of what we mean by bioelectricity. Here we're referring to
the electric potentials and currents that are produced by or

(40:19):
occurring within living organisms. So this is not necessarily Frankenstein's monster,
but the experiments of people like Luigi Galvani and Alessandro
Volta in the eighteenth century influenced this field of study,
and we're gonna talk about them much more in the
next couple of minutes. Generally, they were looking for a
connection between electricity and the muscle contractions and frogs and

(40:43):
other animals, and it lead to modern developments where we
can now measure bioelectric effects and clinical medicine. Right, you know,
we can measure uh, how electricity emanates from our hearts
and our brains, etcetera, as part of our modern medicine.
The difference is that bioelectric city currents consist of a
flow of ions, whereas the kind of electrical current that

(41:05):
we use for power UH is more of a movement
of electrons. Bioelectric pulses a company all muscular contraction and
a nerve and muscle cells Basically what happens there's a
chemical or electrochemical stimulation that changes the cell membrane, so
they discharge a current along those fibers and activate the

(41:27):
contractile mechanism, so the contraction of these muscles. Now, Professor
Sharon Rustin has written quite a bit about the science
behind the context of the time that Mary Shelley was
living in the influence this, and I want to talk
about a couple of these. There's uh three or four.
The first is that at the time of the novels writing,

(41:50):
drowning and resuscitation from drowning were a very big thing,
as she tells it, despite the fact that a lot
of people worked along the Thames in London, they couldn't
necessarily swim uh. And so there was this group that
was started called the Royal Humane Society in London. It
was established in seventeen seventy four, but its first name
was the Society for the Recovery of Persons apparently drowned uh,

(42:15):
and its whole aim was to publish information on how
to resuscitate others and save lives. Saving people from drowning
was such a big deal that they used to have
an annual procession in London of all of the people
that were quote raised from the dead by these methods, okay,
one of these people was Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wolston Craft,

(42:36):
who had tried to kill herself by jumping off of
Putney Bridge into the Thames, and afterwards she complained that
she was inhumanely brought back to life and misery. And
as a consequence of these resurrections, there was a growing
fear that wasn't just drowning, Like maybe you could appear

(42:57):
dead and then you'd, oh, you'd be alive. So what
if I get buried alive? This is where people really
start freaking about the idea of being buried alive. Uh. Yeah,
this is interesting to think about because if you think
back to a time where we're falling in the water,
not being able to swim, essentially drowning, that that's just
a complete death sentence, And then you see an uptick

(43:17):
in the survivability of these experiences. Um he could we
view it today is just a basic reality that individuals
can be resuscitated. But but when the idea is fresh,
it takes on these kind of supernatural aspects. Yeah very
much so. Uh, I mean Here's the thing is that
doctors at the time, in fact, one of them was

(43:39):
Shelley's doctor. His name was James Curry, wrote a book
where he argued that the only way to be sure
that someone was dead was if putrification began. Other states
like painting, or being in a coma, or even being
asleep were sort of considered to be like death. And
we see this reflected in the book Frankenstein in the
way that she uses language to describe like when Elizabeth

(44:01):
faints or when Victor collapses. They talk about it as
if like they were momentarily dead and then came back.
So it was a very different understanding of the difference
between life and death at that time. Now we get
into Galvani, Volta and Aldini. These are the Italian electrocutioners,
as I like to call them. These guys played with electricity.

(44:24):
My understanding is you guys talked about the You and
Joe talked about them in a previous episode that was
all about sort of the zany religious antics around electricity.
Uh yeah, yeah, Well, I'll be sure to include a
link to to that episode of those episodes in the
on the landing page for this episode. So in the
eighteen thirty one preface to the book, Shelley mentions that

(44:46):
modern scientific discussions in galvanism influenced her story, and what
she was referring to was the work of Italian physician
Luigi Galvani. Uh And this guy basically found that a
dead frog's leg would twitch as if they were alive
when they are struck with a spark of electricity. He
figured this out in seventeen eighty one while he was

(45:07):
dissecting a frog nearby a static electricity machine. His assistant
accidentally touched a scalpel to a nerve in the frog's leg.
The leg moved, and Galvanni immediately changed all of his
research into something he called animal electricity. Tried to replicate
this experiment over and over again. His contemporary, Alessandro Volta,

(45:30):
was one of the earliest readers of these papers, and
he had already earned a reputation as discovering electric potential
and charge, as well as being the first person to
isolate methane gas. So Volta reproduced Galvani's experiments, but he
had a totally different conclusion. He thought the electricity actually

(45:51):
came from the metals in the in the room. The
dissimilar metals and that the frog itself was just simply
a conductor for those. Galvani in the meantime, believed that
electricity resided in the frog itself and thought the two
dissimilar metals were merely conducting electricity from one part of
the frog to another. He thought electrical energy was actually

(46:11):
intrinsic to biological matter. And they developed this bitter feud
over it, and academics from you know, around all just
took sides and it became like an issue. It was
like a modern debate. Um. They were both kind of
right in their own ways. They were also both kind
of wrong in their own ways. I mean, it was
a time when we were still trying to figure out

(46:33):
what electricity was and how it worked, and then certainly
how it it was involved in the in the processes
of the human body and the movement of muscles, etcetera.
And an electricity kind of had this holy area at
the time, but it was this mystery of it was
there was something divine in it. And this is even
before like we get into uh Edison and Tesla and

(46:55):
their electricity wars and all that. In Volta invented the
voltaic pile. Uh. This was basically a stack of disks
of two different metals that were separated by brine soaked paper.
This was the world's first battery. He invented it, and
we know his stack worked today because dissimilar metals transfer

(47:17):
electrons in an oxidation reduction reaction. We also know that
the reason why the frog legs moved is because of
what I was talking about earlier. Electricity plays a role
in muscular contractions. So again, they're both right, they're both wrong.
Galvani actually responded to both the skepticism though, and he's
just he just keeps conducting more sets on various animals

(47:39):
and their exposed nerves and keeps recreating muscle contractions without
those dissimilar metals present. Uh. And he absolutely believed nerves
were insulated with non conductive coding, which we now call myelin,
and that electrical impulses traveled through them to muscle cells.
There's another article that I read by guy named Richard Shaw,

(48:01):
and it's called Volta's Battery, Animal Electricity and Frankenstein. All
this stuff is connected. Uh. Shaw argues that Volta's invention
was significant to the novel, as was Galvani and the
existence of the idea of animal electricity. Uh. He argues
that Shelley's book is actually a challenge of Volta's research

(48:22):
trying to distinguish life in the near appearance of life.
So uh, it puts her in the book right in
the middle of this big debate that was going on.
And this is a quote from his paper. He says,
Shelly understands animal electricity not as life, but as a
token for life, and thereby arrests the tendency of the

(48:43):
vitalists to make it an object and to mistake it
for life itself. So this brings up a question where
we talked about this earlier. It's very unclear in the
book what science is actually being used to create Frankenstein,
and it seems to come out of as I recall,
like he's just he's working himself over, clocking himself to

(49:05):
the point of just near just I meanbe actually complete
physical exhaustion. So he he alone has the brilliance, madness,
and determination to grasp the secret, and he's not about
to share it with the rest of us because it's horrible. Well,
we might be able to unpack this a little bit.
Maybe the secret was the voltaic battery, at least in
terms of what Shelley knew about at the time. Now

(49:28):
here's where things get even weirder. And this also happened
before Shelley wrote the book. Galvani had a nephew and
his name was Giovanni Aldini, and he went a step
further and he tried to reanimate hanged criminals with electricity
in eighteen oh three at Newgate Prison in London. He
did this with the some success and a guy named
George Forster who was found guilty of murdering his wife

(49:51):
and child. Now a whole crowd was there and they
all reported that they saw Forster's eye open, his right
hand raise up and clench, and his leg move. And
by the way, Aldini used Volta's pile in his electrocution experiment. Now,
obviously he didn't bring the individual back to life so

(50:11):
much as he just made a dance around a little
bit exactly. But it would have been interesting. What what
if he had what have you been able to That
would have been, Yeah, does he have to does he
get another death set finance? Where is that sentence served?
That's a good yeah. Yeah. The ethics, so many ethical quandaries,
In fact, we're gonna get into that the end of
this episode. There's a fun bit of ethics played with

(50:33):
the science here. Uh, but let me even just finish
with some more scientific stuff here. That that Mary Shelley
was clearly aware of. Another was Humphrey Davy's book The
Elements of Chemical Philosophy. Now, Humphrey Davy and William Nicholson
were the era's leading electrical researchers, and they were friends
of her father, so she probably knew all about them

(50:55):
as well as this history of electrical experiments with corpses,
whether they be human or animals. Uh. Davy used Volta's
battery for what is now called electrolysis and isolated a
series of substances for the first time. He basically invented
electro chemistry. He went on to invent the Davy lamp,

(51:16):
to which separated flame from gas so that there was
safer usage of like lanterns in minds that were filled
with methane gas. And he published this book, Elements of
Chemical Philosophy in eighteen twelve as an account of the
field within which he worked. So it's very much thought
that this is a book that influenced Shelley. She was

(51:37):
aware of it. He was a friend of the family,
uh and clearly brought it into her work on Frankenstein.
Now one last little tie in here. There was a
big focus on life and the body at the time
as well, and another debate was going on between two surgeons,
this time John Abernathy and William Lawrence, and they were

(51:58):
arguing about the Nate sure of life. Now here's the thing.
William Lawrence had been the Shelley's doctor previously. I mean,
think about all those medical misfortunes we talked about earlier.
She must have visited a lot of doctors. So he
was seen as a radical because he argued that life
was simply the working operation of a body's functions and

(52:20):
he didn't take the soul into account. And people got
really upset about this. So subsequently he was forced to
withdraw his book about this topic from publication and he
had to actually resign from the hospital he worked at
because he didn't have a scientific principle for the soul. Now. Abernathy,
on the other hand, argued that life didn't depend on
the body's structure, and that our bodies were just these

(52:42):
material substances that life was attached to as what he
called quote a vital principle. Now this goes right back
to what we were talking about earlier with alchemy and
the biomechanical soul and especially goalms. I mean, essentially what
abernatheists thing is like, Oh, we're just all golems that
are filled with souls. You know, when one uh one

(53:05):
thing about all these historical um dissections I guess you'd say,
of of Frankenstein and the and the the the individuals
and the works that and they may have inspired Frankenstein
is that sometimes when when you start absorbing a lot
of it, it begins to feel like an attempt to
ground a female authors success in the works of male

(53:30):
UH scientists and male writers and male professionals, etcetera. So
I think it's important to note that no matter what
her influences were, no matter what work she was, she was,
she was drawing off of the way she assembled at
all UH is brilliant. The way she assembled at all
is is just above reproach. So we don't we don't
want that to to bleed away in the dissection. Not

(53:52):
at all. None of these guys that I just mentioned
could have created a work as imaginative and insightful as Frankenstein.
And let's let's be honest here, neither did her husband
or Lord Byron or Paula Dorri on that fateful summer.
She was the only one who wrote, you know, who
finished a novel. Paul Dory had that vampire story. That's fine,

(54:13):
but I mean she created this uh long lasting, two
hundred year epic that we're still looking back on today.
Uh let's take a quick break, and then when we
get back, let's talk about that. Where we are now
two hundred years later and what Frankenstein's influences on all
of us. Alright, we're back, So yeah, Frankenstein continues to

(54:38):
cast this long shadow not only over our culture, but
also over our perception of science. And you'll still you
go into something like Eureko Alerts or or any of
the various science journalism websites, if you do a search
for Frankenstein, you're gonna you're gonna find some some articles
that are out directly related to Frankenstein is somewhere or another.
But you're also just gonna find Frankenstein used repeat as

(55:00):
an adjective, as is even a slur um Tell me
about it yesterday, trying to do research for this episode. Man,
Like I really had to make use of all of
the filters in our library search engine to try to
really hone down what I was looking for. Because yeah,
the just the term Frankenstein is used now as a bird, right,

(55:22):
like to Frankenstein something. I use it like that, of course,
but like there are scientific articles that throw it around
pretty pretty uh easily to draw attention. Yeah. And you know,
as as much as we said we can discount and
say all right, you're over using using this term, using
it poorly, etcetera, it has still become a part of

(55:43):
the way that we view science. I mean, that's how
influential this was as a work of science fiction. Um,
you know, I think Frankenstein, Man, it's a real quintessential
work obviously, but it really speaks to what we do
here on the show. I think, like our mission here
was stuff to blow your mind. Frankenstein is sort of
this perfect text that we can attach what we do

(56:06):
with and that like it is about science, but it's
also about the larger world and the human experience. Uh
it's just man, revisiting it this last year, I've just
really fallen in love with it. Yeah, it is it's
it's a wonderful text, and it has a little bit
of every Everything that we love here on the show
is president in the book. But because one of the
things with science fiction, first of all, it's a brilliant example,

(56:29):
because she was vague and exactly how Victor is bringing
life to this thing. And if you're vague enough, then
nobody's gonna come along ten years later and say, oh,
you've got it wrong, because he never he never actually
shares the secret with the reader, totally right. So so
there's that. But then also we obviously have not reached
the point in time where human achievement has equalled the

(56:51):
fictional u achievement in the book, the creation of life.
But we have made a number of advances that continue
to push the boundaries and and and and certainly give
life to this The shadow of Frankenstein is hanging over things.
I mean, advances in that synthetic biology and other fields. Uh.
In nineteen fifty two we unlock the mysteries of DNA,

(57:14):
and subsequent breakthroughs in genetics have empowered and the science
of cloning. In two thousand ten, researchers created synthetic bacteria
in the lab, the first one to be controlled entirely
by man made genetic instructions. Elsewhere, robotics continue to develop
increasingly complex, increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence, and biologically inspired mechanical forms.

(57:36):
And through all of this, uh yeah, Frankenstein's Monster continues
to resonate as a powerful model of unchecked scientific advancement,
as well as a reminder of the murky philosophical and
ethical quagmires we wish to avoid. So as as kind
of a modern myth, Frankenstein taps into that fear that
the like Victor will lack the wisdom or responsibility to

(57:59):
control our scientific creations and uh and the Monster embodies
such modern fears as a lab created black hole or
man made plagues, nuclear annihilation. And the story also poses
the possibility that liked the Monster himself, science will deliver
us to a place where we find the integrity of
the human body violated, in the nature of the human

(58:20):
soul scourged. And these are themes. All of these are
themes that we have talked about in the last year
on the show, like whether we're talking about bioengineering or
body hacking, or biosynthesis or you know, you and Joe
did the electricity episode, like we're circling around this stuff unintentionally,

(58:40):
we're all in Frankenstein's orbit. Yeah, I mean, as we uh,
as we've discussed um some biotechnology episodes in the summer,
we see great examples of the science clearly outpacing our
ability to really drive home what our rules and regulations
and expectations should be. And I mean, what's more Frankenstein
than that they absolutely advances are beyond what we were

(59:02):
prepared for. So this leads us to my favorite article
that I found in the whole pile of stuff about Frankenstein.
This is one of the most fun papers I've ever read.
It reminds me of that one that we did when
we did an episode on vampire blood drinking, the one
about like how what the rate of infection would be

(59:22):
if vampires were real. This is called Victor Frankenstein's Institutional
Review Board Proposal, and it's written by G. Harrison and W. Gannon.
It came out last year in It's a very fun
idea for an article. The idea is what would it
be like if Victor Frankenstein had to submit his research
to an institutional review board the way all scientists aff

(59:45):
to today. So. Um, they basically took uh the I
r B proposal, and they said it in seventeen nine
at Ingolstadt, which is where he went to school. Uh,
in the book where Frankenstein was a student, and in
his proposal they made him consider comparative anatomy medical experimentation
in theories of life related to the debates around animal electricity. Now,

(01:00:08):
because the theme of the novel is that he didn't
consider the ethical consequences of his work and therefore suffered tragedy,
they think that the I r B shows that it
would have compelled him to consider the consequences of this experiment.
I like this, I've never heard of it's so yeah. Yeah,

(01:00:28):
it was published in Science and Engineering Ethics. Um. They
note that in the novel Victor talked, as I mentioned earlier,
he talks about all these alchemists that he studied. Uh.
But they say, in addition, you know, they basically create
what you do for an IRB a literary review, and
they add a long list of authors prevalent before that
time in natural history who would have influenced the debates

(01:00:51):
about reproduction, regeneration, anatomy, body functions in the interplay between
electrochemical and pneumatic forces in living systems. Galvani, Volta, and
Davy are all among these. They also remind us that
the electrical machines are from the movie. Again that's Nicola
Tesla's inspiration. They're not in the book. They also say that,

(01:01:13):
and this is maybe for all of you out there too,
if you're unfamiliar, if you haven't been in an academic setting.
The purpose of an i r B is to protect
those involved in research using uh, anything that's impacting to
living human beings. So the present i RB structure was
inspired by something called the Belmont Report, which drew its
inquiries from both the Nuremberg Trials and the Tuskegee Syphilis study.

(01:01:39):
And we're going to talk about irbes again in our
other episode this week about Creepy Pasta's, but i'll keep
it grunted here for now. These led to three broad
principles for the Belmont Report. The first is to respect
people's autonomy, the second is to do no harm to
the people involved in the study, and the third is
justice or basically a fair sharing of the benefits of

(01:02:03):
the research. Today's i RB is essentially a group of
people at each institution who must have at least five
members and conduct an initial and continuing review of these
research projects. I you know, in my time as a
graduate student and working at the UM Georgia State University
here in Atlanta, UH submitted many proposals to the RB.

(01:02:25):
Everything from my thesis about Captain America had to go
to them. To UM when I worked at the library
at Georgia State University, if we wanted to interact with
students and do some studies on like how they're using
library materials, we had to submit it to the IRB.
So they look at pretty much everything, and they make you,
UH take refresher courses on the Belmont Report over and

(01:02:48):
over again so that you're really up to date on
this stuff. The principles of the i RB. The big
argument of this, this fun paper is that the principles
of the IRB are all essentially what the monster is
appealing to Victor for throughout this entire novel. UH. One
is his acknowledgment and respect as an autonomous human being,

(01:03:10):
to the promotion of his welfare and to protect him
from harm, and three to just treat him with some
justice and equity. So from this and the books accounting.
They argue that Victor always intended to create life from
lifeless matter, which could constitute as impacting living human beings,
and the outline a proposal. It's real. I'm gonna very

(01:03:30):
briefly cover it. It's like a twenty page paper, but
uh he They cover the basic building blocks of life,
including the protocols for how he's gonna catalog and carefully
store all of his body parts, uh, the reconstitution of
simpler organisms, basically, how he's going to reverse the process
of death in all the various systems of a body,

(01:03:50):
and then how he applies biotechnology to the creation of
a human being. And they speculate the way that he
would pitch this is by generating electrical charges in a
series of Leyden jars and supplementing them with a jolt
of electricity from a bolt of lightning. All of this
would convulse this organism systems back into life. Their conclusion
is that if Victor Frankenstein had just completed an i

(01:04:14):
RB proposal, he would have had to consider the consequences
of his experiment and acknowledge his responsibilities to his creature,
and it would have given him the chance to think
through what he was doing ethically. I love it. My
favorite quote from this paper is him saying, this is
them writing in his voice, if I animate a human creature,

(01:04:37):
I will assess risks for the being as well as
for the surrounding community with whom the creature might interact.
And another one is should I succeed in creating a
rational being, I will ensure its privacy and try to
ensure that it does not become a spectacle or a
monster for the amusement of others. It's this is like

(01:04:57):
one of the most fun papers I've ever read. It's
a it's a brilliant idea. Yeah, I want them to
do a sequel to this where they write a proposal
for Herbert West reanimator. I think that that would be
another worthy cause. Oh yeah, just about any mad scientists
would work, because I mean that's what I love about
looking at a mad scientist character is asking like, what, like,

(01:05:17):
what were your goals here? What were you really trying
to do? What was how do how does this possibly
fit into any kind of actual um you know, scientific
rigor so circling back to the two hundred year old thing,
I just want to lead us out here with two
of I think that we could easily say this the

(01:05:38):
leading minds in horror literature that are alive today. The
first is st. Jochi, who I mentioned at the top.
He has a book that I have mentioned on this
show many times that is a survey of all of
horror literature called Unutterable Horror uh and his section on
Frankenstein in it, he says it is a richly complex

(01:05:59):
tale that fully justifies the mountains of commentary it has inspired.
So we mentioned that earlier. All of the swirling conversation
about themes and intentions and influences and everything. He says,
it's all justified because this book is great. Um. He
also says, the passages that are about science show that
Shelley is departing from the Gothic traditions reliance on medieval

(01:06:24):
superstition as the source for terror, and that's the real
important point of this book is it's like a huge transition,
turning point in the world of horror literature. He also
argues that what gives the book merit is the creatures
moral complexity. We talked about it earlier. Both the creature
and Victor Frankenstein are so morally complex. Joe she says

(01:06:47):
it may be the sole genuine contribution of Gothic fiction
to the great literature of the world, and its themes
are eternal, and Shelly, to her credit, doesn't provide simple
solutions to them, so it constantly makes us keep thinking.
That's why we keep turning back to it. For two years.
And then Uncle Stevie Stephen King from his book Dance

(01:07:09):
maccob back in. I think that came out in like
eighty two, maybe eighty one. Yeah, this one I've never read,
but I always remembered seeing it on the on the
King racks. When I would, I would I would skip
lunch for a week, uh in school to say about
my lunch money to spend on Stephen King paperbacks, And
I always I would consider that one, and I'm like, oh,
it's not it's not a tale, this is nonfiction. Yeah,

(01:07:30):
I'm gonna I'm gonna spend it on you know, uh,
different cycle of the Werewolf cycle. No, I never get cycled.
The Warwold was always a little bit more expensive prestige books.
It was like that was like seven. Your cheapest was
the Dead Zone at like four. So that was the
first one I read out of cheapness. And then you
have to work like some of the bigger ones. Though

(01:07:51):
you're talking a thousand plus page books, that's like two
weeks of lunch money, maybe three. See I always just
hitting the library from bullies and read all of my
Stephen King's books in there during lunch. But don's maccab
if you haven't read it. Is King's attempt to sort
of gather all of the thoughts about the horror genre

(01:08:14):
together in one book. Keep in mind he wrote this
in like the late seventies, early eighties, so there's a
lot that has happened since then. But I love it.
I think you'd really like it, Robert. I keep going
back to it. But in the book he outlines basically
his argument is that there are three major archetypes of
horror that we keep coming back to, and Frankenstein's Monster

(01:08:34):
is one of them. He calls it the Thing without
a Name, which is important because Victor never names the monster.
That's why we have this problem. There's no name for it.
There is that like sort of I think there's a
passage in it, or maybe it's something Shelley said outside
of the book of like referring to it as Adam,
like his atom. Some people call the monster Adam, and
maybe he was just trying to, you know, retain scientific objectivity.

(01:08:56):
He knew that had been named it, he'd have to
copy that. Um So King says that there are many
examples of Frankenstein's inheritors, So everything from The Hulk, the
Marvel Superhero The Hulk is a version of that too.
The Thing from Another World that came out in ninete.

(01:09:19):
Now remember King wrote this like two years before John
Carpenter's version of the Thing came out. Uh, so he
would have surely included that as the Thing without a Name.
In fact, uh just last night Joe McCormick and I
went and saw the Thing here in Atlanta at our
Plaza Theater. This first time I saw it on the

(01:09:40):
big screen, and it was a wonderful experience. But yeah,
I think it would qualify as this Thing without a Name.
So when you're thinking of the types of horror that
you watch, that's probably one of them. King also says
this book has probably been the subject of more films
than any other literary work in history, including the Bible,

(01:10:00):
and I find it hard to argue with that. I mean,
I haven't counted them, but man, there's a lot. I mean,
it was one of the earliest. You saw Edison's short
Frankenstein film, and and then you have you go to
IMDb and you put in Frankenstein or Victor Frankenstein. It's
just yeah, you know, hundreds. It seems different generations of
value those characters. So I just want to end on this.

(01:10:20):
He argues that it uses one of horror's most common themes,
that there are things that mankind was not meant to know.
And this brings us right back around again to the
mission of stuff to blow your mind, and why Frankenstein
is so important to it. This this idea of science
and wonder and oddity and how much can we know

(01:10:44):
and how far should we prod? Yeah, I think I
think the the answer. My view on it is that
we should. We should not be afraid to prod and
to move forward, but we should use if we're going
to turn to Frankenstein, we used it as cautionary tale
to say, hey, keep pushing, but no it you are
going to discover things that you might not be prepared
for as an individual, as a culture, as a legal system.

(01:11:06):
And uh, and therefore you have to remain ever vigilant
and and ever ready to adapt your mindset, even your
worldview to the new revel as revelations to come. All right, well,
on that note, we're gonna go ahead and close out this, uh,
this chapter of Frankenstein until we inevitably do another Frankenstein
episode with perhaps some new angle in the years ahead. Hopefully, yeah,

(01:11:30):
hopefully we'll be here to do the fourth anniversary of Frankenstein.
We'll use a biotechnology to keep ourselves alive for two
hundred more years so we can talk about it again. Then.
All right, so this is one of our Halloween episodes.
Obviously we are in the Halloween season and it's sufforable
in your mind. We're probably gonna stretch that Halloween season
as far through the remainder of as possible, hopefully pushing

(01:11:52):
Christmas and the holidays uh into January or a pit somewhere. Uh. So, Hey,
if you're listening to this, dearing how aween, be aware
that the stuff to blow your mind. Uh monster video
series Monster Science is back with a fourth season or
series of episodes. We have six of them. Uh, and

(01:12:13):
as you're listening to this, there should be two or
three episodes already out. The first three are sex education
oriented with takes on sexy vampires, alien husbands, and uh
and face huggers from the alien films. Yes, and then
we've got a lovely face hugger here hanging in the
office from the ceiling. Now pretty good. Yeah, and then

(01:12:33):
the back half of the series are going to deal
with dragons, Godzilla, and of course the threat of pod people.
So Robert would never say this, but I'm gonna say it.
Monster Science is my absolute favorite thing that how Stuff
Works produces. I love it. I'm an unabashed fan of
this series. Even if I wasn't involved in Stuff to
Bowl your mind and didn't work here. It is the,

(01:12:55):
in my opinion, the best thing that we put out here.
I definitely recommend that you watch it. They're funny, they're informative,
they're fun, and they revolve around the lovely October horror
themes that we like to play around with here on
the show. I've seen two of these episodes. Joe and
I are in a couple of them. Uh, They're they're great.

(01:13:16):
And our producer, Tyler Man, he really goes out of
his way, just makes great special effects. It's so much fun.
So we'll check them out and on that note, I'd
like to throw out to a project on my own,
which is I do another podcast outside of here called
super Context, and this episode was a very scientific look
at Frankenstein. But super Context is a show that's a

(01:13:38):
autopsy of various forms of media. We do movies, television, music,
we look at comics sometimes, and we talk about literature
as well. So if you want to show that's more
along those lines but sort of plays in the same
research heavy orientation that we do here, please check it out.
It's called super Context and you can find us on

(01:13:59):
Twitter and Tumbler. All right, And as far as stuff
to Blow your Mind goes, as always, head on over
to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is
the mothership. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes.
You'll find a new monster science episodes, you'll find blog posts,
you'll find links out to our various social media accounts
as well. Yeah, we are on Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, and Facebook.

(01:14:20):
We're all over those. Follow us there to find out
more about these videos, to see what new episodes are
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we come across in our journeys. And if you want
to write us the old fashioned way. You can send
us an email at blow the Mind at how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of

(01:14:48):
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. Fine
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