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An Age of Frankenstein: Monstrous Motifs, Imaginative Capacities, and Assisted

Reproductive Technologies
Author(s): Shannon N. Conley
Source: Science Fiction Studies , Vol. 45, No. 2, Frankenstein (July 2018), pp. 244-259
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.45.2.0244

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244 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES VOLUME 45 (2018)

Shannon N. Conley

An Age of Frankenstein: Monstrous Motifs, Imaginative

Capacities, and Assisted Reproductive Technologies
The Birth of a Monster. Imagine a scientist standing over a dead man. Metal
rods, awaiting electrical impulses, are affixed to various places on the body,
including face, torso, and limbs. The scientist and the body are not alone;
encircling them is a crowd of onlookers, holding their breaths in a hush of
fearful anticipation. Will the dead man come back to life?, they wonder. The
silence becomes even more palpable as the scientist makes a motion to apply
electricity to the metal rods. Electricity courses through the rods into the body
of the deceased. The dead man begins to move.
The scene described above is not pulled from the latest television science-
fiction (sf) drama or the most recent of the summer blockbusters. The year was
1803, the scientist was a real scientist, Giovanni Aldini, and the dead man was
a real dead man—convicted murderer George Forster. In January 1803, at the
Royal College of Surgeons, Aldini applied bimetallic electricity via metal rods
to make Forster’s freshly executed body convulse and move as if it still had
vestiges of life (Parent 638). When electricity was applied to Foster’s mouth and
an ear via metal rods, “the jaw immediately began to quiver, the adjoining
muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened” (Aldini 80),
and when applied to both ears, the entire face began to convulse, and “a motion
of the head manifested.” When Aldini applied electricity to Forster's rectum,
“such violent muscular contractions were excited, as almost to give the
appearance of re-animation” (80).
Aldini's experimental theater was the birthplace of the Frankenstein motif,
an image that would ultimately come to represent science as a runaway force,
as innovation out of control. Aldini's gruesome experiments, part of an
emerging field known as “galvanism,” catalyzed early debates around the
limitations of responsible science and whether scientists were overstepping their
boundaries. The newspapers reported on the experiments in vivid detail over the
course of the next few decades. Their accounts illuminated the debates about
whether the galvanists were controlling nature in order to raise the dead or
whether their research could provide important societal benefits, if “judiciously
regulated” (“Hydrophobia Cured”).
Capacities for Anticipatory Governance? This paper situates the galvanists’
experiments and the accompanying public discourse regarding galvanism’s
benefits and dangers within the framework of anticipatory governance and
within a broader narrative exploring the use of monstrous motifs from sf in
debates around emerging technologies in Britain. The anticipatory governance
literature has proposed that it is indeed possible to remedy the apparent gap
among emerging technologies, ethics, and the law—that with the proper tools

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 AN AGE OF FRANKENSTEIN: REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES 245

and by establishing governance capacities throughout society, it is possible to

govern proactively and to assess technological progress critically in real time
(Barben et al.).
A common theme in social discourse around technology is that society tends
to fall behind technological progress (Winner 10) and that new technologies
advance with little attention given to their potential implications until it is too
late. One dominant perspective within this discourse is that “ethics and law have
typically lagged far behind technological change,” and that if something is not
done, technology will continue to outpace them (French ix). While ethics and
law may not keep pace with technological change in specific cases, when this is
stated as a dictum, it erases numerous counter-examples in which society is
actively thinking about the implications of new and emerging technologies long
before the technologies themselves came into existence. Moreover, anticipatory
governance requires not only formalized institutional procedures and data
analysis but also creative and imaginative capacities for envisioning possible
futures. Ethical reasoning in particular is central to balancing scientific freedom,
societal benefit, and the needs for legal and regulatory forms of governance.
One way that the capacities are forged in the public sphere is through sf, which
serves as a mechanism for engagement with both desirable and undesirable
scientific and technological futures. This paper illustrates how sf has cultivated
these capacities in deliberations around assisted reproductive technologies.
In further developing the anticipatory governance concept, this paper
advances the notion that anticipatory governance is an ongoing societal activity
distributed among a number of formal and informal societal capacities that
evolve in tandem with emerging technologies. Specifically, I explore historical
deliberative moments in the governance of biological and reproductive
technologies and the ways in which those moments indicate the cultivation of
capacities for grappling with new technologies. It challenges the assumption that
society is always sleepwalking through fundamental socio-technical
configurations (Winner 10) and that society does not understand or is not well
equipped to grapple with such issues. Rather, historical and contemporary
capacities for anticipatory governance do exist—beyond formal governmental
entities such as the United Kingdom’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Authority—and these capacities are rich and extensive in a way that perhaps
seems surprising, especially when juxtaposed against commonly held
assumptions that society is perennially lagging behind.
Miller and Bennett’s work on sf and democracy serves as an entry point for
thinking about the ways that the imaginative capacities of society might also
serve as important anticipatory capacities. They argue that this approach is not
“prediction.” Instead, “tools built on science fiction might serve as a means for
building a reflexive capacity into the governance of technology” (598). A major
challenge for modern-day democracies is to “engage the public in questions
about the future.” Integrating narratives of socio-technical futures into
technology assessment practices might serve as a means of combating Winner’s
problem of “technological somnambulism”(10). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and others have “cast

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246 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES VOLUME 45 (2018)

indelible shadows over the meaning and imagination of science and technology
in modern societies” (Miller and Bennett 599). Science fiction can provide a
means for the public to “engage vitally with scientific and technological futures”
(605).
In order to investigate the role of the literary imagination as an anticipatory
governance capacity, this paper analyzes themes of birth and reproduction from
Mary Shelley’s lived experiences and her encoding of them in her novel. It
analyzes archival newspaper evidence from 1800 onwards in order to explore
long-running conversations in British society that occurred prior to the 1978
birth of Louise Brown, the first “test-tube baby.” And it explores how the
“monster” and “test-tube baby” motifs from Frankenstein and Brave New World
framed debates around emerging reproductive technologies and also served as
tools for thinking about their governance.
The analysis is divided into three cases. The first case discusses the social
and scientific context from which Frankenstein emerged, focusing on the
development of galvanism, a real-life emerging technology that influenced Mary
Shelley as she was writing her novel. It investigates early calls for the
responsible innovation of galvanism leading up to the publication of
Frankenstein in 1818. This section also draws from the body of literary criticism
on the novel and analyzes the themes of sex, abandonment, reproduction, and
death in Mary Shelley’s life and the ways in which they were woven into her
novel as a literary and personal “birth myth” (Moers 319). The second case
discusses the context surrounding the publication of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New
World. It serves as a kind of transition, linking Shelley and Frankenstein to
modern considerations around reproduction and technology. The third case
looks at the context leading up to the birth of Louise Brown and how
Frankenstein and Brave New World shaped the debates around the responsible
innovation of reproductive technologies in Britain.
Societal Benefits and Reflections on the Darker Side. Even as early as 1800,
the societal benefits of galvanism were being discussed in the public sphere. An
article by William Pigram, writing for the Observer in 1800, provides one such
example. The application of electricity to medicine had seen great successes,
commented Pigram, “where the blind have been restored to their sight, the deaf
to their hearing, and the palsied limb to vigour and health” (3). Despite the
advances that had been made by trailblazers such as Benjamin Franklin, Pigram
noted that the science was “yet in its infancy” (3). The new science of
galvanism, remarked Pigram, has given insight into the properties of different
metals, that some “have an influence on animals, and so powerful indeed, as to
occasion their limbs to contract, and to evince other symptoms of life, even after
the animal is dead!” (3). Research in this area would not only be philosophically
gratifying, but could also “provide in the highest degree useful to mankind” (3).
While Aldini was unable to restart the heart of a dead animal or human, he
did travel through Europe demonstrating his experiments in sending electrical
currents through dead bodies in order to make them convulse and move as if
alive. Another scientist, Carl August Weinhold, even claimed to have brought

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 AN AGE OF FRANKENSTEIN: REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES 247

dead animals back to life. In one instance, Weinhold used the bodies of
decapitated kittens to demonstrate the power of electrical current. By removing
their spinal cords and replacing them with zinc and silver batteries, Weinhold
was able to start their hearts beating, and the bodies even “bounded around” for
a short amount of time (Pilkington).
An early newspaper account of Aldini’s experiments describes his
experimental work to the British public in vivid detail. He captivated the
attention and imagination of his audience by applying electricity to the body of
a dead dog, whose head had been severed from its body, causing it to move as
if vestiges of life were still present. Aldini’s display made such an impact that
it elicited the suggestion that, out of curiosity, galvanism might be tested on the
fresh body of a dead criminal (“Polic”). George Forster would have the
unfortunate honor of serving as Aldini’s best known human subject.
Other reflections on galvanism illuminated its darker side, speculating that
the possibility of raising the dead could be a tangible reality. In January 1820,
a commentary on galvanic experiments labeled the practice as “horrible
phenomena!” (cf. Johnson). The experiments, carried out by a Dr. Ure on the
corpse of a murderer known as “Clydsdale,” were judged to be “truly
appalling” (Johnson 1319). In one of the experiments electricity was applied to
the neck of the corpse, and it appeared as if it were going to come back to life.
Many observers left the room over the course of the experiment, and one fainted
from “terror or sickness” (Johnson 1319). When electricity was applied to the
nerves in the elbow, some of the spectators thought the criminal had come back
to life, and Dr. Ure felt that the body would have been fully reanimated had the
spine not been severed.
Emerging alongside the graphic descriptions of the effects of galvanism on
dead bodies were accounts regarding its healing properties—it was “found
beneficial in cases of blindness as well as deafness” (“A Character”). The
technique was reported to have “great success” in combating paralysis of the
optic nerve and even cured a man of madness. The madman, who was bitten by
a dog, had suddenly become petrified of water and any object that shined
(considered to be symptoms of hydrophobia). He was taken to Professor Rossi
at Milan, where the application of galvanism led to an “astonishing cure.” The
Observer article that described the man’s fantastic recovery from hydrophobia
also reflected that galvanism could “do much harm by misapplication”
(“Hydrophobia Cured”). If the technology was “judiciously regulated,”
however, it could do a great deal of good; “at the moment when any accidental
cause has suspended the functions of the vital organs, [it] may preserve the lives
of thousands” (“Hydrophobia Cured”). Other accounts surfaced of ill
individuals who were “indebted … to the successful application of Galvanism,”
such as Francis Cooke, a “poor blind sailor” whose sight was restored.
Following examination by medical experts at Bath, it was declared that “the
sight of one eye was perfectly recovered” (“Editorial Article 1”).
Credible Science versus Swindle: Humphry Davy Calls for Debate and
Educated Citizens. As galvanism became popular, so too did conversations

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248 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES VOLUME 45 (2018)

regarding what comprised credible scientific work. The debate around legitimate
versus illegitimate scientific practice was headed by renowned chemist Sir
Humphry Davy, a friend of Mary Shelley. Davy was known for lecturing on
galvanism and was an outspoken critic of many of its practi-tioners, arguing that
many were pretenders masquerading as scientists. In one lecture, detailed in the
Observer, Davy emphasized the importance of the history undergirding
electrical experimentation, remarking on the work of “illustrious characters”
such as Benjamin Franklin in providing foundational knowledge of electricity
(“Royal Institution”). Davy also discussed the dangers of an uninformed public;
members of the public who could not understand the principles behind the
science were setting themselves up to be swindled. It was the duty of scientists,
argued Davy, to “pursue and disclose the truth,” and that he would prefer to
“be persecuted and die a martyr to its sacred cause, than live the slave of error,
and be the parasite of false opinions” (“Royal Institution”).
Davy maintained that science is best cultivated in environments that value
free and open discussion, rather than those where freedom is stifled (“Royal
Institution”). Although Mary Shelley was only a young girl at the time of
Aldini’s famous demonstration at the Royal College of Surgeons, Davy
recounted the experiments in vivid detail to her over a decade later.
Widely considered to be the first modern work of sf, Frankenstein sparked
the imaginative capacities of the British consciousness in grappling with the
evolving relationships between human beings and technology and the increasing
power of scientific endeavors to control and manipulate human and animal life.
Frankenstein has been called the “foundation-stone of the modern genre of
science fiction” (Stableford 11) and the “first myth of modern times” (Hitchcock
4). The mad scientist archetype developed in the novel became a cultural
metaphor for “the ever present possibility that scientists, by the very nature of
their activities, may get things disastrously wrong and that ordinary people may
suffer as a result” (Mulkay 159). As Aldini’s deceased human bodies moved and
decapitated kittens “bounded about,” it appeared in Shelley’s lifetime that
reanimation would be a real possibility in the near future. The novel highlighted
questions about the boundaries and limits of scientific practice and illuminated
the value conflicts created by the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution,
Enlightenment ideas, and the immense potential and peril of science pushing the
boundaries of convention.
Frankenstein as a “Birth Myth.” Frankenstein is a reflection on birth, death,
technology, and parthenogenesis. As she carefully studied Milton’s Paradise
Lost (1667), with its glorification of heavenly, angelic maleness, and grotesque,
hellish femaleness, the teenage Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was forced to
confront the monstrous nature of her own birth, an event that caused her
mother’s death eleven days later. She would often go to her mother’s grave at
St. Pancras church yard, where she would read with Percy Shelley (including
the famous writings of her own parents), write, or have sex with him (Gilbert
and Gubar 330). Her teenage years were a complex time in which she had to
come to terms with her father’s rejection of her (due to her relationship with

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 AN AGE OF FRANKENSTEIN: REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES 249

Percy), to grapple with the tragic circumstances of her own birth, to develop as
a sexual being herself, and to mourn her own failed pregnancies (Badalamenti
420, Gilbert and Gubar 330-31).
She was “barely pregnant but aware of the fact” when she ran away with
Percy in July 1814 (Moers 323). At the same time, Percy’s wife, Harriet, was
pregnant with his legitimate “son and heir” (qtd. in Moers 323). In November
1814, Harriet gave birth to a healthy son; the following February, Mary’s
daughter was born, “illegitimate, premature, and sickly” (Moers 323); and in
March 1815, Mary recorded the tragic death of her daughter, who died before
she was even given a name (Moers 323-24). When she began work on
Frankenstein in the summer and fall of 1816, Mary was still “unmarried, [and]
illegitimately pregnant” for the third time, having also had a son by Percy in
January 1816 (Gilbert and Gubar 344). The themes of birth and death were
therefore as salient and “hideously mixed” in Mary’s own life as they were in
Victor Frankenstein’s “workshop of filthy creation” where the unnamed creature
was born (Moers 324).
According to Ellen Moers, the novel itself can be considered a “birth myth,”
encompassing Mary’s ruminations on birth and death, love and responsibility
(319). It was written immediately preceding and during a time when the teenage
Mary was almost constantly pregnant or nursing (Gilbert and Gubar 331). She
endured multiple miscarriages, and only one of her children survived into
adulthood. These experiences had an indelible impact on her. She encoded her
feelings into the novel, and it was out of this painful context of birth and death
that Frankenstein was born. Frankenstein, as well as the context it emerged
from, is a story about parenthood—about the care parents must take for their
creations, lest they unleash something truly monstrous upon the world. The
novel served as a “substitute expression of deeply troubling feelings” regarding
Mary’s own painful experiences with childbirth, miscarriage, and her complex
relationships with Percy Shelley, her estranged father, and her dead mother
(Badalamenti 420). These chaotic early experiences, particularly her painful
experiences of maternity, set her apart from the other writers of the time. It is
from such trauma that “monsters [are] born” (Moers 318).
Like Mary Shelley, Gilbert and Gubar observe, “Victor Frankenstein has a
baby” (336). He is like the biblical Eve, who “fall[s] into guilty knowledge and
painful maternity,” and enters the “realm of generation,” ultimately giving birth
“by intellectual parturition to a giant monster” (337). He, too, experiences
“‘pregnancy’ and childbirth,” as indicated by the terms he uses to frame his
“creation myth,” including such terms as:
‘incredible labours,’ ‘emaciated with confinement,’ ‘a passing trance,’
‘oppressed by a slow fever,’ ‘nervous to a painful degree,’ ‘exercise and
amusement … would drive away incipient disease,’ ‘the instruments of life.’...
(337)
Given Shelley’s context, that she was both a woman and a young mother,
Frankenstein is “an original twist to an old myth” (Moers 323). Unlike the
stories in which a protagonist seeks immortality, pushing the bounds of life and

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250 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES VOLUME 45 (2018)

death for his own life-extension, Victor Frankenstein defies this, not by seeking
immortality for himself through new science and technology, but “by giving
birth” and facilitating the “creation of a new [life]” (323). As she gave birth to
her “hideous progeny” of a novel, and as Victor parthenogenetically birthed a
nameless creature in his womb-like workshop, Shelley transformed the typical
paradigm of a Romantic novel into “a phantasmagoria of the nursery” (324).
The novel serves as an anxious rumination on the role of women in
reproduction and the potentially disastrous implications of a world in which
women are excommunicated from the reproductive process. Mellor describes
this as a “rape of nature,” a “stealing of the female’s control over
reproduction,” and an “elimination of the necessity to have females at all” (363,
355).
To sum up, at every level Victor Frankenstein is engaged in a rape of nature,
a violent penetration and usurpation of the female’s “hiding places” of the
womb. Terrified of female sexuality and the power of human reproduction it
enables, both he and the patriarchal society he represents use the technologies
of science and the laws of the polis to manipulate, control, and repress women
(363). The role of the female is destroyed in Victor’s “usurpation of the natural
mode of human reproduction”—this manifests in a nightmare he has after he
gives birth to the creature, “in which his bride-to-be is transformed in his arms
into the corpse of his dead mother” (Mellor 355).
The theme of “unnatural reproduction” as an endeavor that can lead to
disastrous consequences resonates from the novel through debates around new
reproductive and genetic technologies in the present day. In the case of
Frankenstein, Mellor notes that “Appropriately, Nature prevents Frankenstein
from constructing a normal human being: an unnatural method of reproduction
produces an unnatural being” (364). This leads to Victor’s immediate
“instinctive withdrawal from his child,” an action that “sets in motion the series
of events that produces the monster who destroys Frankenstein’s family, friends,
and self” (364). Victor is punished by being denied his own chance at “natural
procreation” when Elizabeth, his bride, is killed the same day they are wed,
preventing him from having his own biological children, “leaving Frankenstein
entirely without progeny” (365). The revenge of Nature is “absolute,” writes
Mellor: “he who violates her sacred hiding places is destroyed” (365). The
novel, without knowledge of the reproductive technologies that would emerge
over a 150 years later, provides an early reflection on the potential implications
of tampering with nature, describing the undesirable, tragic outcomes that
emerged due to Frankenstein’s lack of foresight and rejection of his child. It
anticipated the tensions and debates around “natural” versus “unnatural” modes
of creation, and the responsibility of creators towards their creations, long
before the advent of new reproductive technologies.
The Wings of Daedalus: The Brave New World of the 1930s. While
Frankenstein’s monster was making its way into popular discourse, the British
state was beginning to focus increasingly on knowing and growing its
population. In 1911 the British conducted a census that for the first time

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 AN AGE OF FRANKENSTEIN: REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES 251

included a fertility component. In this year, the falling fertility rate was “placed
on an entirely new footing of observational rigor,” with the British government,
for the first time, seeking to compile a full overview of “fertility patterns” for
the entire nation (including England and Wales, but excluding Scotland) (Szreter
2). The results of the census were published in two reports, one in 1917 and one
in 1923. In part, the explanation for the decline became one of birth control
technologies—that the wealthier classes were utilizing new methods of birth
control in order to limit pregnancies, and the lower classes were following suit.
It is against this backdrop of a state obsession with fertility that Aldous Huxley’s
novel Brave New World (1932) was published.
Forty-six years prior to the birth of Louise Brown—the world’s first baby
born via in vitro fertilization—writers, journalists, scientists, and citizens were
debating the consequences of reproductive technologies that had not yet come
into existence. Brave New World provided citizens with a glimpse into a future
in which reproduction extends beyond all current scientific and social
conventions, where reproduction begins outside of the womb, and human
embryos are selected based on their genetic characteristics.
Some of the foundational ideas in Huxley’s novel were likely influenced by
his intellectual relationship with biochemist John Burdon Sanderson (J.B.S.)
Haldane, a prominent biologist who co-founded the Journal of Experimental
Biology with Aldous’s brother Julian Huxley. Haldane was one of the first
scientists to argue that ectogenesis, reproduction outside of the human body, was
a distinct possibility in society’s near-future, and he was the first to use the term
in describing human reproduction outside of the body (Nicol). In his book
Daedalus; or, Science and the Future, which was the text of a 1923 lecture that
he gave at the Cambridge Heretics Society, Haldane made a number of
predictions about scientific advances, particularly in the realm of biology. He
predicted that ectogenesis would become universal, and he painted a future
Earth that was as compelling as it was horrifying. Haldane closed the lecture
with a haunting description of a scientist, working towards the new biological
revolution, fully cognizant of its terrible beauty: “The scientific worker of the
future will more and more resemble the lonely figure of Daedalus as he becomes
conscious of his ghastly mission, and proud of it” (49). While neither Julian
Huxley nor J.B.S. Haldane claimed credit for the scientific underpinnings of
Brave New World (Nicol), the parallels between Haldane’s visions of the
impending biological revolution and Aldous Huxley’s dystopian World State are
evident.
Brave New World Enters the Public Lexicon: The Social Significance of
Infertility in Britain. “Mr. Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ is going to
be fearfully and wonderingly read by everyone,” declared the Observer (“This
Week’s Diary”). “Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ stands out as one of the novels
of the year which linger persistently in the reader’s memory,” stated another
reviewer (Linford). The novel was praised by the Observer as being one of the
top four novels of 1932 (“The Albatross”). And a number of British reviews of
the book praised it for its prophetic qualities. One reviewer commented that the

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252 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES VOLUME 45 (2018)

“metabiological nightmare” that Huxley brought to life “might well be more

prophetic than he imagined” and that the novel served as a provocative
“deterrent [rather] than a summons to salvation by science” (Brown). Another
reviewer noted that Huxley’s “fanciful but compelling ingenuity” illustrated the
world as it might be “if our present scientific control of nature were carried to
its logical extreme” (Marriott).
The period between the publication of Huxley and Haldane’s work and the
1978 birth of Louise Brown was a time of transition. The pre-World War II
conversation, with its focus on fertility and the declining population, was
different from the conversation that evolved after the war. There was a line
being drawn between the concerns raised by Haldane and Huxley (babies being
born without mothers) and the evolving post-WWII framing of research on
human reproduction. In the 1960s, with news that researchers were attempting
to grow humans outside of the womb, it seemed as if Haldane’s and Huxley’s
fears could soon become reality—that modern scientists might become real-life
Victor Frankensteins and create monstrosities born through ectogenesis.
Frankenstein and Brave New World would continue to shape the debates around
human reproduction, but the dominant societal framing around research on
human reproduction would evolve again to focus on the tensions between
helping infertile couples to have children and the responsible limitations of
research on human reproduction. It was into this social context that the work of
Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards took center stage, accompanied by a rabbit
in the passenger seat.
An Unconventional Passenger. In 1970s England, it was not uncommon for
gynecologist Patrick Steptoe to be seen driving from Oldham to Cambridge with
a rabbit in the passenger seat of his car (Doyle). Steptoe’s unconventional
driving companion served as an ideal incubator for human eggs, which he would
remove from women during gynecological surgery and house in the womb of
the rabbit for the road trip. Once the eggs successfully arrived in Cambridge,
physiologist Robert Edwards would mix human sperm with the eggs in an
attempt to create in vitro embryos, or embryos conceived outside of the human
body. Fertilization had been successfully achieved with hamster and mouse
eggs, but consistent, successful in vitro fertilization of human eggs was proving
to be a greater challenge, both technically and ethically (Tucker).
Societal hackles were raised early on when in 1961 Italian embryologist
Daniele Petrucci claimed to have achieved successful fertilization of a human
egg in a “test tube,” destroying the embryo after 29 days of development,
“because it had become monstrous and was about to outgrow its glass cell”
(“Italian Charges Test Tube Prof”). The Vatican condemned the activity, stating
that creating human life outside of its “natural conditions” would have
“monstrous consequences” (“Embryo Experiments Condemned”). A few years
later, Petrucci claimed to have created forty embryos through IVF in a device
he called a “biological cradle” (“Italian Claims Success”), but again, rather than
publishing his results in a scientific journal, he made his announcements through
the popular press. Lacking support from Italy, most of Western Europe, and the

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 AN AGE OF FRANKENSTEIN: REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES 253

United States, Petrucci moved to the Soviet Union, where he and Moscow
scientists claimed to have developed artificial wombs to keep embryos alive and
growing. They even claimed to have kept a fetus alive for six months outside of
the womb before it died (Henig 32-33). Petrucci’s claims stirred up dystopian
images of cheapened human life and mechanized baby factories and read “like
something out of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World” (“Italian Claims
Success”). Unlike Petrucci, Edwards was not interested in keeping embryos
alive outside of the womb for an extended period of time.
Steptoe and Edwards began collaborating after they met at the 1968 meeting
of the Endocrinological and Gynaecological section of the Royal Society of
Medicine. Edwards was impressed with Steptoe’s use of laparoscopy in order
to diagnose gynecological conditions. Edwards and Steptoe discussed the safety
of their methods, as well as the potential ethical ramifications: “We agreed to
work together as equals, pursue our work carefully, and stop if any danger
emerged to patients or children, but not for vague religious or political reasons”
(Edwards 1092). For Steptoe, the collaboration presented a “unique
opportunity” to help people: “He was a scientist, I was a doctor. We both
wanted to help people who had seemingly insoluble infertility problems. So why
not?” (Edwards and Steptoe 99).
New Hope for the Childless. In 1969, The Guardian announced a “startling
discovery” in Cambridge. Patrick Steptoe and his team had been successful in
fertilizing a human egg with human sperm outside of the human body. They had
produced a fertilized embryo, but destroyed it over the course of experimenting
on it. The nightly news piece that originally covered the story reported that the
nascent technology could go “even further,” by “continu[ing] to develop the
fertilised egg artificially and perhaps even produce a human baby without using
the mother’s body again at all” (“New Hope for Childless”). The Guardian also
quoted a Nature commentary, praising the potentialities of the emerging
technology:
The day of the test-tube baby is not here yet, and the advantages of this work are
clear. These are not perverted men in white coats doing nasty experiments on
human beings, but reasonable scientists carrying out perfectly justifiable
research. (“New Hope for Childless”)
In this account, the author is arguing that Steptoe and Edwards are very different
from the “perverted” Frankenstein-esque Dr. Petrucci, who was trying to create
monsters in test tubes. Rather, these “reasonable scientists” are working for the
betterment of society, helping families suffering from infertility. The Nature and
Guardian commentaries signify a shift in societal conversations around the
nature of research in human reproduction. Despite the shift indicated in these
commentaries, the tensions between the solving of health/infertility issues and
scientists “playing god” would continue to permeate and shape social debates.
Out of Control Monsters. The 15 February 1969 issue of the Guardian
featured a cartoon of a scientist clad in a white laboratory coat, placing sperm
into a test tube containing an egg (Tucker, “Conception in the Lab”). As the

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254 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES VOLUME 45 (2018)

cartoon progresses, the scientist watches the test tube in happy anticipation, as
a baby emerges from it. The next frame shows the scientist standing next to it,
patting it on the head. The baby then begins to grow quickly … very quickly.
Before the scientist knows it, the baby is taller than he is and begins
transforming into a grotesque monster. Now much larger than the scientist, the
baby-monster pats the scientist on the head. The last two frames illustrate the
out-of-control monster stuffing the scientist into a test tube, and the final frames
show the scientist, squished inside the tube, shouting “Son! Let me out son.
Listen to me son. Son!!!”
The article accompanying the comic, authored by Guardian Science
Correspondent Anthony Tucker, advised readers not to jump to conclusions. He
explained that, while it might be a distant possibility that an embryo could be
developed to full term within a laboratory—as the Italian scientist Petrucci
claimed to have achieved, a feat that was “tinged with horror and hedged round
with all manner of moral, ethical and legal problems”—the “potential human
value of being able to manipulate fertilisation outside of the body” should not
be disregarded. Hereditary diseases and genetic conditions could be avoided
using the technique. Tucker wrote that while dystopian human selective breeding
programs were likely not right around the corner, the responsibility would rest
on society to ensure that such a future would not come into existence
(“Conception in the Lab”).
A Cross Between a Virgin Birth and a Frankenstein? Anticipatory Activity
Four Years Prior to the Birth of Louise Brown. A mythology exists around
the birth of Louise Brown, the first baby conceived via in-vitro fertilization: that
her 1978 birth suddenly shocked society out of its technological somnambulism.
It has been observed that the 1982 convening of Britain’s Committee of Inquiry
into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, chaired by Mary Warnock, and the
passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act in 1990 were the first
significant nodes of anticipatory activity around assisted reproductive
technologies. While it can be argued that the establishment of horizon-scanning,
forward-looking regulatory entities such as Britain’s Human Fertilisation and
Embryology Authority (HFEA) in 1991 is a clear example of institutional
anticipatory governance (documented in Conley), focusing exclusively on the
HFEA leaves out a rich history of governmental and non-governmental
anticipatory activity leading up to its establishment. For example, in 1971, the
British Association for the Advancement of Science formed an interdisciplinary
study group to examine emerging issues associated with new reproductive
technologies, such as laboratory fertilization, sperm banks, and artificial
insemination. The British Association viewed itself as playing the “special role”
of an “intermediary body” by providing links between scientists and society,
“educating the public on the one hand and ensuring consideration for the state
of science and its social implications by leaders in all walks of life on the other”
(Social Concern and Biological Advances 3). The work of this body serves as
an example of how imaginative capacities, cultivated through sf, make possible
the anticipatory governance illustrated in the final report of the study group,

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 AN AGE OF FRANKENSTEIN: REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES 255

entitled Social Concern and Biological Advances. This report stated that social
issues were increasingly being seen as involving issues of science. Additionally,
the report noted, “scientific advances themselves often cause difficulties for
society” (3). The study group, comprised of scientists including Robert
Edwards, church representatives, politicians, journalists, and legal professionals,
called for urgent overhauls of existing law and “entirely new measures for
control” (Tucker, “‘Test-Tube Baby’ Laws”).
The media quickly picked up the report, with Anthony Tucker writing that
such changes were necessary and “urgently needed” if British society was to
“cope successfully with the problems posed by sperm banks, artificial
insemination, and laboratory fertilisation of human eggs” (“‘Test-Tube Baby’
Laws”). The recommendations put forth by the report to grapple proactively
with the emerging issues included special “specifically targeted meetings”
between stakeholders (community leaders, politicians, and scientists) to address
problems, “public dangers,” and a course of action. Other recommendations
included legally defining the status of children born through donor conception,
regulating sperm banks, and creating a framework that outlines procedures for
the procuring of sperm.
While the report recommended that research on laboratory fertilization
techniques should move forward, it also said the government and scientists
“must be prepared to act quickly to ‘prevent abuse,’ and that there must be a
continuing review of advances in research on genetic engineering so as to
foresee ‘implications and social consequences’” (Tucker, “‘Test-Tube Baby’
Laws”). While caution was urged by the study group, researchers such as Anne
McLaren, an Edinburgh scientist, argued that an IVF birth would have greater
chances for “normality” than a regular birth: “There will be a public tendency
to regard the unfortunate child born in this way as a cross between the virgin
birth and Frankenstein.... [However] the chances would actually be lower with
an egg transfer than with a normal conception because the baby is going to be
monitored the whole time” (“Normality Chance”).
Imaginative Capacities in an Age of Frankenstein. Steptoe and Edwards were
ultimately successful with their work, resulting in the birth of Louise Brown in
1978. In the years following the birth, Britain established the Human
Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, a regulatory body specifically tasked
with exploring the future of new reproductive technologies and providing
guidance regarding their governance. At the time of Brown’s birth, newspaper
articles with headlines recalling images from Frankenstein and Brave New World
populated the newsstands in Britain and abroad. In the New York Times (1978),
for example, letters to the editor debated the ethics of the technique, invoking
the name of Frankenstein and making note of “Brave New World Syndrome”
(“Letters on the ‘Threat’”). Today, in the months leading up to the 200th
anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein and Louise Brown’s 40th
birthday, we live in an age of Frankenstein. Themes from Shelley’s and
Huxley’s works continue to remain relevant as society grapples with the new
capacities presented by emerging technologies, such as the Crispr-Cas9 gene-

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256 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES VOLUME 45 (2018)

editing technique. Headlines herald an age of “Frankenflies” sent to destroy the

Zika virus (Staletovich) and to protect crops (Poulter), and debate “Regulating
the Brave New World of Human Gene Editing” (Smaglik).
The cases discussed above are relevant to an understanding of anticipatory
governance because they represent evolving capacities for thinking about and
engaging in the governance of emerging technologies—reflections on what
society ought to look like, or not look like. They illustrate the capacity of
society to participate in anticipatory negotiations of socio-technical contracts
long before the technologies themselves come into existence. I use the term
“socio-technical contracts” to signify the coupled configurations of social and
technological arrangements through which societies envision and organize the
construction and application of new and emerging technologies. In each case,
socio-technical reconfiguration is ongoing, and each reconfiguration is
accompanied by debates about how that reconfiguration should happen. As I
have discussed, the capacities for negotiating socio-technical contracts are
reflected in the ongoing stories, metaphors, and motifs that shape and engage
societal perceptions and debates around new technologies, specifically in this
case, those in the biological sciences. In developing the anticipatory governance
concept, Barben et al. posit that “futuristic discourse” around technologies, and
the accompanying societal considerations and uncertainties, calls for “the
cultivation of a societal capacity for foresight” and “more generalized abilities
to bridge the cognitive gap between present and future” (991). What are those
“generalized abilities” for connecting the present with the future, and what are
the modes by which societies cultivate their capacity for foresight? Examining
historic cases such as those discussed in this paper provides some insights.
Could we think of Humphry Davy’s critique of the practice of galvanism as an
early call for responsible innovation? Might we consider the publication of
Frankenstein as an informal exercise in capacity building for anticipatory
governance, as an exercise in foresight around human reproduction by Mary
Shelley? Narratives such as Frankenstein and Brave New World can illustrate
what are both attainable and desirable futures for a society, but they can also
provide visions of what is not desirable and can play an important role in setting
a framework for a robust deliberative capacity for creatively grappling with
present and future socio-technical contracts.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Special thanks to Emily York, Monamie Bhadra, Brenda
Trinidad, Clark Miller, and David Guston for their feedback on this paper.
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ABSTRACT
Using approaches from Science and Technology Studies (STS), political theory, and
literary criticism, this paper investigates the use of monstrous motifs in British
approaches to the governance of reproductive technologies and the role of the literary
imagination as an “anticipatory” governance capacity in thinking through new and
emerging technologies. The analysis is divided into three cases. The first case discusses
the social and scientific context from which Frankenstein (1818) emerged. It draws from
insights in literary criticism to explore motifs related to reproduction, birth, and
monstrosity within the text and Mary Shelley’s own life. The second case discusses the
context surrounding the publication of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). It
serves as a transition, linking Shelley and Frankenstein to modern considerations of
reproduction and technology. The third case examines the context leading up to the birth

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 AN AGE OF FRANKENSTEIN: REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGIES 259

of “test-tube baby” Louise Brown in 1978 and the how the stories, metaphors, and
themes generated by Frankenstein and Brave New World permeated the debates around
the innovation of reproductive technologies in Britain.

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