56 APRI L 2018
Victor Frankenstein Is
the Real Monster
MARY SHELLEY’S MISUNDERSTOOD MASTERPIECE TURNS 200.
RONALD BAILEY
CONCEIVED AND WRITTEN 200 years ago by the 19-year-old Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley during a dreary summer sojourn to Lake
Geneva, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is the story
of a scientist who, seduced by the lure of forbidden knowledge,
creates new life that in the end destroys him.
When the novel debuted, it created a stir for its lurid gothic
style and unusual conceit. Early reviewers scolded the then-
unknown author, complaining that the slim volume had “nei-
ther principle, object, nor moral” and fretting that “it cannot
mend, and will not even amuse its readers, unless their taste
have been deplorably vitiated.”
Yet almost from the moment of its publication, Shelley’s
narrative has been pressed into service as a modern morality
play—a warning against freewheeling scientific experimenta-
tion. That reading is pervasive to this day in policy conversations
and popular culture alike, cropping up everywhere from bioen-
gineering conferences to an endless string of modern cinematic
reboots. There’s just one problem with the common reading of
Frankenstein as a cautionary tale: It flows from a profound mis-
understanding of the original text.
‘I SAW AND HEARD OF NONE LIKE ME’
IN THE ANONYMOUSLY published 1818 edition of the book, an ado-
lescent Victor Frankenstein dreams of discovering the elixir
of life, imagining “what glory would attend the discovery, if I
could banish disease from the human frame, and render man
invulnerable to any but a violent death!” Later, enraptured by
the study of natural philosophy at the university in Ingolstadt,
he devotes himself to the question of whence the principle of
life proceeded. “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds,
which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light
into our dark world,” he exults.
Frankenstein’s arduous study of physiology and anatomy are
eventually rewarded by a “brilliant and wondrous” insight: He
has “succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life”
and is “capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.”
Colin Clive as Dr. Frankenstein, 1931 movie version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Working alone and in secret, Frankenstein sets about creat-
ing a human being using materials gathered from dissecting
rooms and slaughterhouses. Because it is easier to work at a
larger scale, he decides to make his creature 8 feet tall. (The
average height of Englishmen was then about 5 and a half feet.)
After two years of work, Frankenstein on a late night in
November ignites “a spark of being into the lifeless thing that
lay at my feet.” Although he “had selected his features as beau-
tiful,” in that moment he is overcome with revulsion and runs
out into the city to escape the “monster” he has brought to life.
When Frankenstein slinks back to his lodgings the creature is
gone, having taken his coat. Frankenstein promptly succumbs
to a “nervous fever” that confines him for several months.
Later we learn that the creature, whose mind was as unformed
as a newborn baby’s, fled to the woods where he learned to sur-
vive on nuts and berries and enjoy the warmth of the sun and
birdsong. When the peaceful vegetarian encountered for the
first time people living in a village, they drove him away with
stones and other missiles.
He found refuge in a hovel attached to a cottage. There he
learned to speak and read while observing from his hiding place
the gentle, noble manners of the De Lacey family.
The lonely creature comes to realize that he is “not even of
the same nature as man.” He notes: “I was more agile than they,
and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat
and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded
their’s. When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me.”
The fact that the creature learned to speak and read in a
period of just over a year indicates that he is far more intelligent
than human beings, too. In any case, he eventually unravels the
mystery of his origins by reading notes he finds in the coat he
took from Frankenstein.
After even the De Laceys reject him as monstrous, the crea-
ture despairs of ever finding love and sympathy. He vows to seek
and enact revenge on his creator for his abandonment.
Nearing Geneva some months later, he by chance encoun-
ters Frankenstein’s much younger brother, William, in the
REASON 57
woods. Thinking a child will be “unprejudiced” with regard to
his “deformity,” the creature seeks to whisk him away as a com-
panion. But the boy cries out, and in an effort to silence him, the
creature chokes William to death. He subsequently frames the
family servant for his crime, leading to her execution.
When Frankenstein and the creature meet again, the latter
justifies his actions on the grounds that all of his overtures of
friendship, sympathy, and love have been violently rejected. He
then persuades his creator to agree to fashion for him a female
companion. Seeking “the affections of a sensitive being” like
himself, he vows that “virtues will necessarily arise when I live
in communion with an equal.” He pledges that he and his com-
panion will lose themselves in the jungles of South America,
never to trouble human beings again.
Only after Frankenstein betrays his promise does the crea-
ture retaliate by killing all the people closest to his creator. The
two eventually perish chasing one another across the ice floes
of the Arctic Ocean.
‘IT’S ALIVE. IT’S ALIVE!’
“ON THE BASIS of its prevalence in culture, it may be presumed
that Frankenstein is one of the strongest memes of modernity,”
argues the Polish literary critic Barbara Braid in a 2017 essay.
“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of the most adaptable and
adapted novels of all time, spurring countless renditions in
film, television, comic books, cartoons, and other products
of popular culture.” About 50,000 copies of the book are still
sold each year in the United States. According to the Open Syl-
labus Project, it is the most commonly taught literary text in
college courses.
Steven Jones, in The Illustrated Frankenstein Movie Guide,
counts over 400 film adaptations between the Edison Studio’s
Frankenstein in 1910 and Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein in 1994. There have been at least 15 further Fran-
kenstein-themed movies in the years since. “A complete list of
films based directly or indirectly on Frankenstein would run
into the thousands,” notes University of Pennsylvania English
professor Stuart Curran. A new movie, Mary Shelley, starring
Elle Fanning, is set to join the cinematic canon this year.
Yet everywhere that Frankenstein’s creature goes, he and
his creator are misunderstood. Almost without exception, his
cinematic doubles are embedded in narratives that depict sci-
ence and scientists as dangerously bent on an unethical pursuit
of forbidden knowledge. That trend was established in the first
Frankenstein talkie, in which Colin Clive hysterically repeats
“It’s alive! It’s alive!” at the moment of creation.
It is an idea that has quietly seeped into popular culture in
the last 200 years, shaping even those movies and books not
explicitly based on Shelley’s work. In 1989, University of York
58 APRI L 2018
sociologist Andrew Tudor published the results of a survey of
1,000 horror films shown in the United Kingdom between the
1930s and the 1980s. Mad scientists or their creations were the
villains in 31 percent; scientific research constituted 39 percent
of the threats. Scientists were heroes in only 11 percent of the
movies.
In 2003, German sociologist Peter Weingart and his col-
leagues looked at 222 movies and found scientists frequently
portrayed as “maniacs” and “unethical geniuses.” Scientific dis-
coveries or inventions are depicted as dangerous in more than
60 percent of the storylines. In nearly half, power-hungry sci-
entists keep their inventions a secret. In more than a third, the
breakthrough gets out of control; 6 in 10 depict the discovery or
device causing harm to innocent people.
The popularity of stories that present uncontrollable, malev-
olent technology as a threat to humankind shows no sign of abat-
ing. Consider how cinematic Frankenstein clones run amok in
more recent offerings. In the HBO series Westworld (2016), the
android hosts at an amusement park break free of their program-
ming and rebel against their creators. Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
depicts a nascent insurrection by bioengineered human “repli-
cants.” And Ex Machina (2015) offers a beautiful android, Ava,
who kills her designer before escaping into our world.
‘ARE PESTICIDES THE MONSTER THAT WILL
DESTROY US?’
HOW DID THE Frankenstein meme become an avatar for skepti-
cism of scientific experimentation and progress? Largely not
because of what Mary Shelley actually wrote. A transmutation
began shortly after her novel was published, when hack play-
wright Richard Brinsley Peake, freely borrowing from the book,
wrote and produced his melodrama Presumption; or, The Fate
of Frankenstein in 1823. Peake simplified the moral complexity
of the story into a gothic parable of hubristic damnation. He
also introduced the convention of portraying the creature as
an inarticulate beast.
Ever since Peake’s wildly popular play debuted, the creature,
who eloquently and incisively reproaches the hapless Franken-
stein in Shelley’s novel, has been silenced. The culmination of
this trend was, of course, the iconic 1931 James Whale film in
which Boris Karloff played the creature as a neck-bolted, square-
headed mute.
This version of the story has stuck around in part because it’s
so incredibly useful. The meme of Frankenstein as a mad scien-
tist who unleashed a disastrously uncontrollable creation on
the world has been hijacked by anti-modernity, anti-technology
ideologues to push for all manner of bans and restrictions on the
development and deployment of new technologies.
“The mad scientist stories of fiction and film are exercises in
antirationalism,” argued University of South Carolina anthro-
pologist Christopher Toumey in a 1992 article. He points out
that stories like Frankenstein “thrill their audiences by brewing
together suspense, horror, violence, and heroism and by unit-
ing those features under the premise that most scientists are
dangerous. Untrue, perhaps; preposterous, perhaps; low-brow,
perhaps. But nevertheless effective.”
Technophobic zealots cannily wield Peake’s reimagining of
the novel as a rhetorical club with which to bash innovations
not just in biotech but in artificial intelligence, robotics, nano-
technology, and more.
After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in August 1945, New York Times military analyst
Hanson W. Baldwin warned in Life magazine that as soon as
such weapons could be attached to German missiles, mankind
would have “unleashed a Frankenstein monster.” Reviewing
Rachel Carson’s 1962 anti-pesticide philippic Silent Spring, the
Jamaica Press wondered, “Chemical Frankenstein: Are Pesti-
cides the Monster that will destroy us?”
As threatening as nuclear explosions and chemical poisons
might be, the Frankenstein meme exerts its greatest rhetorical
power when deployed against scientists who study living crea-
tures. As such, science writer/scholar Jon Turney deemed Fran-
kenstein “the governing myth of modern biology” in his 1998
book, Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics, and Popular
Culture. The Franken- prefix is often used to stigmatize new
developments.
“Ever since Mary Shelley’s baron rolled his improved human
out of the lab,” wrote Boston College English professor Paul
Lewis in a 1992 letter to The New York Times, “scientists have
been bringing just such good things to life. If they want to sell
us Frankenfood, perhaps it’s time to gather the villagers, light
some torches and head to the castle.”
In fact, the anti-biotech “Pure Food Campaign” used the pre-
miere of 1993’s Jurassic Park to protest the development of the
first commercially available genetically engineered tomato. The
activists didn’t light torches, but they did picket 100 theaters
showing the film while passing out fliers that depicted a dino-
saur pushing a grocery basket labeled “Bio-tech Frankenfoods.”
In that movie, biotechnologists use cloning to bring dino-
saurs back to life. “Our scientists have done things which
nobody’s ever done before,” venture capitalist John Hammond
explains to mathematician Ian Malcolm. “Yeah, yeah, but your
scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could
that they didn’t stop to think if they should,” retorts Malcolm.
Unsurprisingly, the ingeniously created beasts proceed to
escape their enclosures and wreak devastation across the land.
When Jurassic Park came out 25 years ago, few scientists
thought it would be possible to use biotechnology to bring back
extinct creatures. While it remains unlikely that dinosaurs
will ever be resurrected, researchers such as Harvard’s George
Church are working to bring back species including wooly mam-
moths and passenger pigeons. Last year, Church said his group
may be as little as two years away from engineering a mammoth
embryo by modifying an Asian elephant genome. The Califor-
nia-based Revive & Restore project estimates that engineered
passenger pigeon look-alikes could hatch in 2022.
Such “de-extinction” efforts have their detractors. Deploy-
ing the Franken-meme, University of California, Santa Bar-
bara ecologist Douglas McCauley warns of “Franken-species
and eco-zombies.” In a 2014 essay, Stanford University biol-
ogist Paul Ehrlich suggests that would-be “resurrectionists
have been fooled by a cultural misrepresentation of nature and
science…traceable perhaps to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”
While Ehrlich’s chief fear is that de-extinction efforts will divert
resources from conserving still extant species, he also warns
that resurrected organisms could become pests in new environ-
ments or vectors of nasty plagues.
Yet all these fears are mild compared to the vitriol that arises
in response to experiments involving human life.
‘A MATTER OF MORALITY AND SPIRITUALITY’
“THE FRANKENSTEIN MYTH is real,” asserted Columbia Univer-
sity psychiatrist Willard Gaylin in a March 1972 issue of The
New York Times Magazine. A successful frog cloning experi-
ment had been recently completed in the U.K., and he believed
human cloning was now imminent. As a co-founder of the
Hastings Center, the world’s first bioethics think tank, Gaylin
and his musings caught the public’s attention.
His alarm was not confined only to cloning, however; he also
warned that researchers were about to perfect in vitro fertiliza-
tion (IVF), which would enable prospective parents to select the
sex and other genetic traits of their progeny. Artificial insemi-
nation, though still controversial, was by this time fairly com-
mon—the first successful birth from frozen sperm was achieved
by American researchers in 1953—but this would take things a
big step further.
Infertile women would soon be able to bear children, Gaylin
said, using eggs donated from other women. Furthermore, he
speculated darkly, a professional woman, out of “reasons of
necessity, vanity, or anxiety, might prefer not to carry her child,”
and such a woman might soon be able to pay another to act as a
surrogate. And if an artificial placenta were developed, it would
entirely do “away with the need to carry the fetus in the womb.”
For Gaylin, such biotechnological advances would be fearful
transgressions. “When Mary Shelley conceived of Dr. Franken-
stein, science was all promise,” he wrote in his New York Times
Magazine piece. “Man was ascending and the only terror was
that in his rise he would offend God by assuming too much and
REASON 59
The creature, who eloquently and
incisively reproaches the hapless
Frankenstein in Shelley’s novel, has
been portrayed as an inarticulate beast.

60 APRI L 2018
reaching too high, by coming too close.” But after two centuries
of heedlessly pursuing technological prowess, he said, the “total
failure” of the human project could be nigh.
Gaylin expressed hope that researchers would resist the
temptation to cross certain lines. “Some biological scientists,
now wary and forewarned, are trying to consider the ethical,
social and political implications of their research before its use
makes any contemplation of its use merely an expiating exer-
cise,” he wrote. “They are even starting to ask if some research
ought to be done at all.”
In 1973, biologists Herbert Boyer of the University of Cali-
fornia at San Francisco and Stanley Cohen of Stanford Univer-
sity announced that they had developed a technique enabling
researchers to splice genes from one species into another. But
instead of pushing forward with this breakthrough, scientists
adopted a voluntary moratorium on recombinant DNA research.
In February 1975, 150 scholars and bioethicists gathered at
the Asilomar conference center in Pacific Grove, California, to
devise an elaborate set of safety protocols under which gene-
splicing experimentation would be allowed to proceed. Even so,
when Harvard University researchers announced in 1976 that
they were about to initiate genetic engineering experiments,
the mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, declared that the City
Council would hold hearings on whether to ban them.
“They may come up with a disease that can’t be cured—even
a monster,” Mayor Alfred Vellucci warned. “Is this the answer
to Dr. Frankenstein’s dream?” A worried Council imposed two
successive three-month moratoria on recombinant DNA experi-
ments within the city limits.
Fortunately, in February 1977, the body voted to allow the
research to proceed, despite Mayor Vellucci’s continued oppo-
sition. Today there are more than 450 biomedical companies
headquartered in and around Cambridge; the city is at the center
of the largest cluster of life sciences firms in the world.
But that was hardly the death of the controversy. Twenty-five
years after Gaylin raised his alarm, fearmongering over human
cloning revved into high gear once again.
On February 22, 1997, Scottish embryologist Ian Wilmut
announced that his team had succeeded for the first time in
cloning a mammal—a sheep named Dolly. Official reaction was
swift. On March 4, President Bill Clinton held a televised press
conference from the Oval Office to warn mankind that it might
now be “possible to clone human beings from our own genetic
material.” Adding that “any discovery that touches on human
creation is not simply a matter of scientific inquiry, but is a
matter of morality and spirituality as well,” Clinton ordered an
immediate ban on federal funding for human cloning research.
The revulsion Victor Frankenstein felt upon sparking his
creature into life caused him to reject the being, eventually
driving it to a murderous existential crisis. With the news of
Boris Karloff in the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein, Universal Pictures. NYPL, Billy Rose Theatre Division
Wilmut’s success, the conservative bioethicist Leon Kass echoed
and endorsed Frankenstein’s disgust and fear. In a June 1997
New Republic essay, he acknowledges that “revulsion is not an
argument” but immediately asserts that “in crucial cases, how-
ever, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom,
beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it.” Like Gaylin, he
warns that human cloning would “represent a giant step toward
turning begetting into making, procreation into manufacture.”
Here again, Mary Shelley’s monster rears his head. Ulti-
mately, writes Kass, such biomedical advances would be mis-
begotten endeavors epitomizing a “Frankensteinian hubris to
create human life and increasingly to control its destiny.”
‘HOW MANY POOR PEOPLE MUST DIE?’
SINCE 1972, MANY of the supposedly Frankensteinian technolo-
gies predicted by Gaylin and others have been perfected. For
the most part, they are are widely accepted.
In July 1978, the first “test tube baby,” Louise Joy Brown, was
born in the United Kingdom thanks to in vitro fertilization tech-
niques developed by embryologists Robert Edwards and Patrick
Steptoe. In April 2017, the Society for Assisted Reproductive
Technology reported that more than 1 million children have
been born in the United States alone via IVF. Across the world,
the number is nearly 7 million.
Just as Gaylin feared, some women today do use egg donors,
and paid surrogacy is no longer unheard of. Parents can use pre-
implantation genetic diagnosis to select embryos for traits, such
as sex, or the absence of genetic diseases, such as early onset
Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and cystic fibrosis.
No human clones have yet been born, nor are artificial wombs
currently available. But in April 2017, researchers at the Chil-
dren’s Hospital of Philadelphia announced that they had man-
aged to keep a premature baby lamb alive for several weeks
inside a device they call a “Biobag.” The ban on federal funding
for human cloning still stands, but privately supported research
has not been outlawed.
One of the conveners of the Asilomar conference was James
Watson, a co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA,
for which he won the Nobel Prize along with Francis Crick and
Maurice Wilkins in 1962. In a 1977 interview with the Detroit
Free Press, he looked back on the rush to regulate nascent genetic
engineering with some regret. “Scientifically, I was a nut,” he
said. “There is no evidence at all that recombinant DNA poses
the slightest danger.”
Today, the Super Science Fair Projects company will sell you
a Microbiology Recombinant DNA Kit for just $77. It’s labeled
as appropriate for ages 10 and up.
Forty-five years after Boyer and Cohen’s first gene-splicing
experiments, bioengineers have gifted us with a cornucopia
REASON 61
of effective new pharmaceuticals, biologics, vaccines, and
other treatments for cardiovascular ailments, cancers, arthri-
tis, diabetes, inherited disorders, and infectious diseases. It is
impossible to tell for how many years the regulations stemming
from the Asilomar conference delayed these developments, but
there can be no question the delay was real.
Despite scientifically absurd and mendacious activist cam-
paigns targeting “Frankenfoods,” agricultural researchers have
created hundreds of safe biotech crop varieties that yield more
food and fiber by resisting disease and pests. The adoption of
bioengineered herbicide-resistant crops has enabled farmers
to control weeds without having to plow their fields, contribut-
ing to a 40 percent reduction in topsoil erosion since the 1980s,
according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Twenty-two years after commercial biotech crops were intro-
duced, they are now grown on nearly 460 million acres in 26
countries. A 2014 review published in the journal PLoS One by
a team of German researchers found that the global adoption
of genetically modified (G.M.) crops has reduced chemical pes-
ticide use by 37 percent, increased crop yields by 22 percent,
and increased farmer profits by 68 percent. Every independent
scientific organization that has evaluated these crops has found
them safe to eat and safe for the environment.
But activist campaigns are still cowing regulators into deny-
ing poor farmers in developing countries access to modern G.M.
crops. Activism is also slowing the introduction of a panoply of
new enhanced plants and animals. These include crop varieties
bioengineered to resist drought and pigs bioengineered to grow
faster using less feed.
Opposition to these developments has cost lives number-
ing in the millions. Vitamin A deficiency causes blindness in
between 250,000 and 500,000 children living in poor countries
each year, half of whom die within 12 months, according to the
World Health Organization. To address this crisis, rice contain-
ing beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A, was developed. A
study by German researchers in 2014 estimated that activist
opposition to the deployment of this “golden rice” had resulted
in the loss of 1.4 million life-years in India alone.
An open letter signed by 100 Nobel laureates in June 2016
called upon Greenpeace “to cease and desist in its campaign
against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved
through biotechnology in general.” “How many poor people in
the world must die,” the laureates pointedly asked, “before we
consider this a ‘crime against humanity’?”
‘I WAS BENEVOLENT AND GOOD; MISERY MADE
ME A FIEND’
FOR DECADES, THE specter of Frankenstein’s monster has been
invoked whenever researchers report dramatic new develop-
62 APRI L 2018
ments, from the use of synthetic biology to build whole genomes
from scratch to the invention of new plants and animals that
can better feed the world. Experiments in repairing defective
genes in human embryos, which have been conducted in China
and the U.S., are routinely described as precursors to the cre-
ation of “Frankenbabies”—the long-dreaded but not yet seen
“designer babies.”
The transhumanist movement offers another way to think
about Frankenstein’s creature—as an enhanced post-human.
After all, he is stronger, more agile, better inured to extremes of
heat and cold, able to thrive on coarse foods and recover quickly
from injury, and more intelligent than ordinary human beings.
There is nothing immoral in Frankenstein’s aspiration to
“banish disease from the human frame, and render man invul-
nerable to any but a violent death.” The people who will choose
to use safe enhancements to bestow upon themselves and their
progeny stronger bodies, more robust immune systems, nim-
bler minds, and longer lives will not be monsters, nor will they
create monsters. Instead, those who seek to hinder the rest of us
from availing ourselves of these technological gifts will rightly
be judged moral troglodytes.
Despite the din raised by anti-technology ideologues and the
claque of conservative bioethicists, our world is not filled with
out-of-control Frankensteinian technologies. While missteps
have occurred, the openness and collaborative structure of the
scientific enterprise encourages researchers to take responsi-
bility for their findings. During the past 200 years, scientific
research has indeed poured “a torrent of light into our dark
world.” At nearly every scale, technological progress has given
us greater control over our fates and made our lives safer, freer,
and wealthier.
Victor Frankenstein variously condemns his creature as a
“demon,” a “devil,” and a “fiend.” But that is not quite right. “My
heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy,” the
creature insists. “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a
fiend.” He was endowed with the capacity for hope, sharing the
same moral faculties and free will exercised by human beings.
Frankenstein is not a tale about a mad scientist who looses
an out-of-control creature upon the world. It’s a parable about
a researcher who fails to take due responsibility for nurturing
the moral capacities of his creation. Victor Frankenstein is the
real monster.
In 1972, Gaylin lamented that “the tragic irony is not that
Mary Shelley’s ‘fantasy’ once again has a relevance. The tragedy
is that it is no longer a ‘fantasy’—and that in its realization we
no longer identify with Dr. Frankenstein but with his monster.”
That is just as it should be.
RONALD BAILEY is science correspondent at Reason.
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