cc  >> Hi, everyone, welcome to  Wednesday Nite at the Lab here  at the UW Madison Biotechnology  Center.  Tonight's speaker is Sue Lederer  who is the Robert Terrell  Professor and the chair of the  Department of Medical History  and Bioethics here  at UW-Madison.  She received her PhD in  the History of Science from  UW-Madison, and she's previously  had positions at the Penn State  College of Medicine, Georgetown  University and Yale University.  She's published many books and  articles including:  Subjected to Science,  Frankenstein, Penetrating the  Secrets of Nature, and  Flesh and Blood: A Cultural  History of Organ Transplantation  and Blood Transfusion.  So please join me in welcoming  her to Wednesday Nite at the Lab  today.  [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you.  There's no hands-on materials  tonight.  So I don't want to get your  hopes up, but so it goes.  In the 1831 preface to the  revised edition of her novel,  the English writer Mary Shelley  described the waking dream that  gave rise to the creature of  imperfect animation that she  authored in Frankenstein,  or The Modern Prometheus.  This is the frontispiece of the  1831 edition, sort of the first  picture of the creature in a  book. 

 And this is quoting  from the preface.  "I saw with shut eyes  but acute mental vision  the pale student  of unhallowed arts  kneeling beside the thing  he had put together.  I saw the hideous phantasm  of a man stretched out and then,  on the working of some  powerful machine  show signs of life.  Frightful must it be;  for supremely frightful  would be the effect  of any human endeavor  to mock the stupendous mechanism  of the creator of the world.  His success would terrify  the artist;  he would rush away  from his odious handiwork,  horrorstricken..."  Of course audiences have for  nearly two centuries now,  have not rushed away from  Mary Shelley and her novel, but  instead they've embraced at  least some version of it, of her  vision of a hideous phantasm,  of a man and a pale student of  unhallowed arts that was Victor  Frankenstein.  And it's the endurance of the  Frankenstein story and it's  versatility as a frame for  discussions of advances in  biomedical science, that's my  focus this evening.  That's the Franken-factor to  which I was referring to.  I hope that you're willing to  stipulate that the Frankenstein  myth, and that is separate, if  you will, from Mary Shelley's  novel, has two simple messages.  It's alive, and the equally  ominous, it's escaped.  And both of these articulate  ambivalence, sometimes outright  hostility, if you will, to  developments in the biomedical  sciences. 

 And I think one mark of the  endurance and the utility of  Frankenstein is the use of this  prefix Franken to denote the  transgressive nature of a  phenomenon.  Again, the first reference, if  you will, that I've discovered  to this, occurs in 1992 and it's  a reference to Frankenfood.  It appears in  the New York Times.  It says, "Ever since Mary  Shelley's baron rolled his  improved human out of the lab,  scientists have bringing us  such good things to life.  If they want to sell us  Frankenfood, perhaps it's time  to gather the villagers,  light the torches  and head to the castle."  But it's much more common for  it to be used as a negative  frame for developments in terms  of genetically modified foods.  As you can see this is  Green Peace's take,  "Frosted Fakes" of corn.  Frankenfood, bad.  Kids get your own gene splicer.  This is a variation on theirs.  It has Boris Karloff as a  Frankenstein scientist  down at the bottom. 

 It came from the grocery store,  and you can't avoid it because  it's not labeled.  And of course there are lots of  references to Frankenfoods  of various kinds that show  unusual pairings that are,  again, transgressive.  They violate our natural  expectations of food categories.  You can also see it in the  context of other things that  violate the natural order.  So Frankencow as the source  of Mad Cow Disease.  Some of you may have followed  the story a few years ago  of the Frankenfish.  That referred to the arrival  in the US of an Asian  snakehead fish.  The fish that walks on land,  dubbed Frankenfish.  New terrors, sort of in lakes.  And actually this is a story,  Frankenfish rears its ugly head  in Lake Michigan. 

 A voracious, non-native fish  strikes fear.  It's going to upset or threaten  the entire Great Lakes  ecosystem.  You also see sort of the use of  this Franken prefix to denote  things unnaturally born in the  lab.  Such as when scientists were  able to construct or create the  Polio pathogen in the  laboratory.  In the popular media it's  referred to as Frankenvirus.  And here's another sort of  illustration that I found.  Frankenfood has entered the  dictionary, if you will.  A derogatory term for  genetically modified--  >> Let's switch that out because  it's starting to die.  >> Oh, I'm sorry about that.  >> Oh, it's not your fault. 

 >> I hope you can hear me now.  But here you can obviously see  sort of peeling a banana and  getting a fish is an unnatural  act.  You could also see it in a  variety of other situations.  I'm particularly interested in  sort of the recent history of  the obesity epidemic and was  following a lawsuit that had  been brought by four overweight  teens against the McDonald's  Corporation.  And they were seeking to hold  the chain liable for their  obesity and the health problems  that resulted from that.  Now the judge threw out the  lawsuit, but in so doing, he was  able to, or he actually wrote a  64-page opinion to accompany the  fact that he wasn't going to  hear the lawsuit.  But he referred to, in this  lawsuit, Chicken McNuggets as a  McFrankenstein creation of  various elements not utilized by  the home cook, thereby leaving  the possibility of another  lawsuit.  And of course there has been  concern among fast food  companies about their liability  in the same way that tobacco  companies became liability.  But the point I'm trying to make  is that the judge used the  rubric Frankenstein, one that  would be immediately  recognizable, a cultural  shorthand for science out of  control, a science that was  transgressing the boundaries.  And you're going to get stem  cells next week here. 

 I like this because you don't  even need the word Frankenstein  to recognize the reference.  And I'll say a little bit more  about the film version of the  monster from the early 20th  century.  But here you don't need the  words because you know the image  so well.  And I would suggest you don't  even know that image because in  this Gary Larson cartoon, for  example, you recognize in this  artificial flower, sort of the  stigmata, if you will, of being  created in a laboratory.  The flower has bolts; it has  stitch marks; it's being held  down on the laboratory bench.  And you also see it sort of here  again, it's the elements that  are combined together that  create the message visually.  Now I would also like to suggest  that Frankenstein's not the only  rubric that would be available.  Some people have referred to  sort of use of the Greek legend  of Pandora, sort of her  insatiable curiosity.  She opens the box and looses all  those ills onto humankind,  except she managed to close it  while there's still hope inside.  But I think Pandora is sort of  much less appealing in lots of  ways than the Frankenstein  story. 

 This is another alternative.  I kind of have a softness for  this, for Pharmageddon.  [LAUGHTER]  Referring to the union, if you  will, of pharma and food,  and so forth.  But before approaching sort of  this, the power of the use  of the Frankenstein myth to  co-opt discussions of biomedical  advances, let me say a little  bit about the origins of  Frankenstein so that we may  stand and admire Mary Shelley's  creation as a very young woman  of both a man and a monster that  have remained so compelling for  almost two centuries.  It occurred during the  uncongenial summer of 1816.  A very rainy summer when Mary  Godwin was spending the summer  with her lover, Percy Shelley.  The two had run off to spend the  summer on Lake Geneva where they  were frequent visitors at the  Villa, the Villa that I showed  you earlier, of Lord Byron, and  he was accompanied by his  physician, William Polidori.  It was Byron's suggestion that  they have a ghost story  competition.  They'd been trying to pass away  the hours by reading aloud ghost  stories, and he offered the  suggestion that they could each  create their own story and then  it would be a contest to see  which would be the most  compelling.  And of these four writers,  two were actually published. 

 The Vampyre was published by  John William Polidori, shortly  after that he committed suicide.  And in 1818, Mary Shelley  published Frankenstein,  or The Modern Prometheus.  This is the title page of the  book.  You can see her name does not  appear on the title page.  There was much speculation about  its authorship.  But her name does not appear  until the 1831 edition  with which I began.  As I mentioned, the book was  published in 1818.  It received a great deal of  attention.  A lot of speculation about the  author.  It was universally known, at the  time; it was not universally  loved. 

 And there's a great deal of  criticism about the book and  about the writing.  And I would argue it was,  in fact, a strange story.  And at its heart were several of  these profound questions which  have kept us returning to this  story in the ensuing century.  Now you heard me say earlier  that in the popular culture,  the myth of Frankenstein  boils down to those two simple  statements about it's alive  and it's escaped.  And these, of course, are not  unrelated to the story  Mary Shelley sought to tell.  It's alive, of course,  represents the core of the  novel.  And "it" is no incidental  pronoun in her discussion.  What is it that Victor  Frankenstein animates in his  workshop of filthy creation?  And perhaps more importantly,  is it human?  That's one of the profound  questions with which the novel  struggles.  What is it that makes  the creature so repellent?  How many of you have read the  novel?  Okay, so for those of you who  haven't, let me remind you that  she uses a variety of words  to describe the creature  that is made in the laboratory.  A wretch, a miserable monster,  a thing such as Dante  could have conceived. 

 She calls him an abortion,  and even a demonical corpse.  The physical appearance  of the creature is hideous,  it is unhuman.  And at several times in the  novel she actually refers to him  as a living mummy.  And part of the horror that he  insights, of course, is the  violation of the categories of  living and dead.  But in the novel the creature is  not an it, the creature is a he.  It is a male.  He lacks a name.  He feels cast out  from humankind.  And when Victor Frankenstein  usurps the role of the creator,  the monster becomes his Adam.  And at least part of the rage  that the monster experiences  has to do with the fact that his  creator will not make an Eve  for him. 

 It's the profound alienation  loneliness that turns him  into a monstrous creature.  The second theme  of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel  is it's escaped.  And if the nightmare of creating  something unhuman was not  enough, the creature is not  subject to the will of the  creator.  And remember, the creator, sort  of Victor Frankenstein animates  this lifeless tissue, is  horrified and then runs out of  the laboratory.  The monster wakes up and sort of  makes his way in society.  And the Frankenstein story is  very much centered on sort of  the lack, it's centered on the  control of nature or the  abdication of responsibility  of control of nature.  In the novel, Mary Shelley has  Victor Frankenstein cast off the  alchemical roots of earlier  science.  Sort of, he abandons the  renaissance magic paracelsus  and Cornelius Agrippa and their  search for the philosopher's  stone.  And instead, Mary Shelley drew,  very compellingly, on the  scientific achievements of the  early 19th century to make this  story.  She was a very well-read  young woman. 

 She was personally acquainted  with many of the scientific and  medical luminaries of the day.  And in the novel, Victor  Frankenstein's professor at the  University of Ingolstadt where  Victor goes off to school, says  the following, and this is,  I think, an evocative painting.  It's Joseph Derby's experiments  with an air pump, illustrating  the popular interest in the  scientific developments of the  day, which was  an interest that Mary Shelley  and Percy Shelley shared.  So this comes from the  Frankenstein novel.  The philosophers,  the current day scientists...  "have indeed performed miracles.  They've 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  heavens, mimic the earthquake  and even mock the invisible  world with its own shadows."  So what's the problem?  Well the problem here is the  failure to use these powers with  both wisdom and responsibility.  And again, at its heart the  novel is a story about the  abdication of responsibility  for creation.  Not the act of creation itself. 

 And it's this profound failure  on the part of Victor  Frankenstein which produces the  inescapable tragedy that ensues.  That includes the murderous  rampage of the creature, the  death of Victor Frankenstein and  the self-emulation of the  monster at the end of the novel.  Now you may very well be asking  how do we get to Frankentomatoes  and Frankenfish from this.  And if you were like me, and I  am essentially an Americanist  that is interested in the  history of 20th century American  medicine, public health  and science, you would have  suspected, as I did, that it was  the Frankenstein movies that  made this such a compelling  story.  And ever since film was  available as a medium, certainly  the Frankenstein story has been  frequently portrayed.  It was first portrayed in 1910  by Thomas Edison's film company.  It was a dismal failure and  so the 1931 Universal film  is the one that becomes  the most well known  and compelling after this.  Already in 1831, however,  by 1831 when Mary Shelley wrote  that revised preface for the new  issue of her book, she realized  that her monster had escaped the  page.  And again in the preface  she bids what she calls her  hideous progeny to go forth  into the world.  And in fact it's an  acknowledgement that authors  cannot control their creations  in the same way perhaps that  scientists do not control,  necessarily, what they create in  the laboratory. 

 And I think that this is  actually the first sort of  appropriation, if you will, of  the Frankenstein story after the  publication of the novel in  1818.  This is an engraving by George  Cruikshank, very popular  engraver of the day, and it's  called Tugging at an Eye Tooth.  And it's a subtle thing, and  unfortunately in this print you  can't really see it, but the  book titles are like Pain,  Suffering, Death and  Frankenstein is also sort of up  there illustrating sort of what  it was like to visit the dentist  to have a tooth pulled in 1822.  One year later, Mary Shelley  received a letter from her  father that a version of  Frankenstein was going to be  performed at the English Opera  House, an unauthorized version,  I should say.  This was in fact the first stage  version of the novel.  It was a play called Presumption  which set the pattern for almost  all future adaptations of the  play.  This is a published version of  the play.  The playbill emphasized the  fatal consequences of the  presumption which attempts to  penetrate beyond the prescribed  depths into the very mysteries  of nature.  Mary Shelley actually attended a  performance.  She was very amused by how,  in the cast, the person who  played the monster was  identified by a question mark  because of course,  he doesn't have a name. 

 The person who played him was  a very popular English actor,  TP Cooke.  For the role, he wore blue  body paint, green face paint,  he painted his lips black.  My point would be that in the  19th century this was the vision  of the creature.  In the same way that Boris  Karloff, as the monster or the  creature, would become  the 20th century version.  And by the 1840s, the word  Frankenstein had entered the  popular and political  vocabulary.  A political cartoonist in  England and in the United States  used Frankenstein and images  associated with Frankenstein  to characterize things and  populations out of control.  In the British popular magazine  Punch, for example, there are  lots of references or  invocations, if you will,  of Frankenstein.  So this is the Irish  Frankenstein sort of showing  kind of a monstrous Irishman  afflicting, threatening this  stayed respectable young British  or English person.  Here's another cartoonist's  rendering of the Irish and their  lack of cooperation with English  authorities.  And again sort of monstrous,  bestial, murderous, a threat to  the well-being of the society. 

 And I was just going to point  out they're lots of way in which  sort of the English regarded  the Irish as only half evolved,  as simian.  I like this sort of comparison  between the rose of English  womanhood, Florence Nightingale,  and Bridget McBruiser.  So biology is really destiny  in this representation.  Here's another cartoon that's  showing the working-class in  England as a threat  to the middle-class  and to the ruling-class.  And again sort of the emphasis  on their monstrosity, their  ugliness, their inability to  submit to appropriate controls.  Now I wanted to make the point  here that Frankenstein, that  political uses of Frankenstein  did not end in the 19th century.  And I could have shown you a  variety of representations using  Frankenstein sort of in  political commentary.  But I'll let this one suffice  here.  Because what I want to focus on  for this evening is the uses of  Frankenstein imagery when it  comes to talking about  developments in the biomedical  sciences.  So when Mary Shelley bid her  hideous progeny, her novel  farewell, she could not have  anticipated just how often  and how, in so many ways,  the monster would be adapted  for the cinema. 

 In the 20th century this  celluloid representation of the  mad doctor and his creature were  tremendous contributors to the  vibrancy of the Frankenstein  myth.  But even before that, I would  suggest even before there was  a film version, it was broadly  conceived among American  commentators, for example, that  Frankenstein could be invoked  to characterize sort of the  responses to new developments  in medicine and surgery.  This is the earliest example  that I've found at least in the  United States.  It comes from the California  newspaper, the Daily Alta  California, in 1871.  The headline, you can see is  Nice Surgical Operation, but  actually the first sentence is  "Mary Shelley's fearful creation  Frankenstein will presently take  its place among possibilities  if science and surgery continue  to advance."  And it goes on to say it's  actually describing a woman who  had a really large ulcer on her  head and how her doctor was  taking advantage of the very  recent developments in skin  grafting to successfully cover  the ulcer's surface and to  restore her to a semblance of  humanity.  And again sort of these uses  of Frankenstein in science,  pre-date sort of the popularity  in the 20th century of film.  But of course, the monster  reached new heights with the  1931 film Frankenstein  by Universal Studios.  The film featured a man who was  a then unknown actor,  Boris Karloff.  And there's no doubt that the  film deeply affected American  audiences and actually film  audiences around the world.  Advertisements for the film  warned people with weak hearts  not to attend the theatre. 

 They arranged to have nurses on  duty in the theatre armed with  smelling salts and tonics to  revive people who succumbed to  fainting.  Of course at the same time, they  arranged to have guns go off in  various theatres to enhance the  viewing experience.  And there's certainly sort of a  discussion about whether or not  the film was too gruesome.  And actually right after the  release of Frankenstein,  the rules regarding depictions  of medicine and surgery become  much tighter under the motion  picture production code.  And especially there's concern  about the gruesomeness in the  film of how Frankenstein's  assistant goes and salvages body  parts off a hanged man.  And in fact, I should say a  number of countries actually  banned the film from being shown  as being too disturbing to  their citizens.  Undoubtedly, part of the appeal  of the film was its visual  impact.  And in particular, the  construction of the creature a  great deal to the makeup artist  Jack Pierce who introduced the  electrical prongs.  He studied contemporary design  of robots circa the 1920s.  He designed the 5-foot metal  spine that Karloff wore to have  the appropriate walk,  stilted walk of the creature. 

 Now what I'm going to say may  shock you, but Hollywood did  take liberties with the novel.  [LAUGHTER]  They made a number of changes,  some were minor.  For reasons I don't really know  and I have not seen, I just  don't understand, they altered  the name of Mary Shelley's  pale student of unhallowed arts  from Victor Frankenstein  to Henry Frankenstein.  I don't know why they did that.  But other changes were certainly  more substantial.  The 1931 film, for example,  introduced the idea of the  substitution of a criminal brain  for the normal brain  of an eminent scientist.  And that explains why  the monster becomes so--  He's evil because he gets  a criminal brain.  Not because of his alienation  and mistreatment at the hands  of human society.  I think this was brilliantly  parodied in the film young  Frankenstein in which Igor,  played by Marty Feldman, drops  the brain of the eminent  scientist but finds the brain of  "ABnormal," which of course is  then implanted in the creature  to great distress.  Now again Mary Shelley ascribed  the creature's murderous rampage  to his profound alienation to  human society to his abandonment  by his creator and the suffering  that he endured. 

 And she would have been  surprised, I think, to see that  the monster here in this 1931  film was evil because he  received a criminal brain.  But of course such biological  determinism was very popular at  the time in the United States.  This was the heyday of eugenics,  not only here but in western  Europe and elsewhere, and the  idea that, again, biology is  destiny.  We have to prevent the breeding  of people who are marked by  their biology to be criminals  and poor and insane, and we have  to advance the breeding of  people who have the right  genetic material.  Now in making this 1931 film,  the choices by the filmmakers  also reflected sort of an  intense interest at the time  again in this boundary between  life and death.  Just as Mary Shelley, in writing  the novel early in the  19th century, had drawn on  contemporary developments and  galvanism, the discovery of  animal electricity, for example,  and blood transfusion, which was  a very powerful new technology  in the early 19th century,  the universal filmmakers drew  heavily on developments that  were occurring in the '20s and  in the 1930s that were hinting  at the possibility of organ  transplantation,  of revivification itself,  reanimation, artificial organs.  One scientist who gained a great  deal of notoriety in the early  1930s was a chemist at the  University of California at  Berkeley named Robert Cornish  who is featured in this story  from Popular Science Monthly,  Can Science Raise the Dead?  Is it possible to bring people  back from death itself?  In 1934 Cornish made newspapers  all around the country when he  reanimated a dog, a fox terrier  named Lazarus IV.  He doesn't say much about what  happened to Lazarus I to III.  [LAUGHTER]  But there was again,  intense interest.  These are dogs that were gassed,  but then through variety of  manipulations and chemicals  were brought back to life. 

 But the successful revival of  dogs like Lazarus was marred  by a fear or concern that  reanimation had profoundly  altered the mental state.  And to me one of the fascinating  things about this episode is  that Cornish received hundreds  of offers from people around the  country who volunteered to be  killed and then brought back to  life.  Now some people volunteered,  well they didn't really  volunteer, they expected there  to be a payment involved,  but they were willing to try  the experiment.  And he received, again, sort of  hundreds of offers from people  willing to attempt the  experiment.  Now Cornish did not accept  any of these offers.  We know that he did try to  revive people found drowned,  or electrocuted, or gassed  in a San Francisco hospital.  And we know that he also  petitioned the governors of  several western states for  permission to perform his  reanimation experiments  on newly executed criminals.  But as you might imagine that's  created all kinds of legal  questions about what happens if  you're brought back after you've  already been executed.  Do you have to be re-executed?  And it did not go anywhere.  But Cornish's experiments  became the basis of at least two  Hollywood films. 

 A very bad film from 1934 called  Life Returns, which did have the  notoriety of actually  incorporating laboratory footage  from Cornish's lab that showed  sort of the dog being dead,  being manipulated and then  coming back to life.  And a 1939 film featuring  Boris Karloff as a scientist.  The film is called  The Man They Could Not Hang.  In the film he invents a device  to revive the dead and a  dedicated medical student agrees  to be killed and then revived.  But the girlfriend of the  medical student intervenes.  The student dies.  They have to prosecute  the doctor and he's killed.  But his laboratory assistant  secretly conveys his body,  brings him back to life, but  you're different after you've  been brought back from the dead  and he tries to kill all the  members of the jury.  Now this is a very silly plot,  I guess, but full of incident.  But one of the things that's  interesting is how it  incorporated some of the recent  scientific developments  of the day, the same kind that  influenced thinking and the  response, reception and use of  Frankenstein. 

 One of the things that  The Man They Could Not Hang used  was the glass heart that had  been developed by the great  American aviator Charles  Lindbergh and the Nobel prize  winning Rockefeller surgeon  Alexis Carrel.  Now the glass heart, as it was  dubbed by the press, was really  not a heart, it was actually a  perfusion pump.  It was intended to maintain  organs in kind of appropriate  liquids and temperature state  until there could be repair of  internal organs with the idea  that they then could be replaced  into the body.  By 1935, Carrel and Lindbergh,  who you see on the cover  of Time Magazine, claim  that they had been able to  successfully maintain a variety  of animal organs including  hearts, kidneys, ovaries,  spleens, adrenal glands,  connected to the pump  in this germ-free environment.  And this sparked great  speculation about the  possibilities here including the  idea that they could, sort of,  with that life itself  could be generated from it.  There was remarkable enthusiasm  and interest in the  possibilities of the perfusion  pump and Alexis Carrel, in his  book The Culture of Organs,  speculated on the vast potential  of this new device.  From this moment, we are opening  to experiment a forbidden field,  the living human body.  Organs removed from the body,  in the course of a operation  or soon after death, could be  revived in the Lindbergh pump  and made to function again  and reimplanted in the body.  And actually as early as 1908,  Carrel had been removing organs  from the dead, attempting to  freeze them and reimplant them  into living people.  So he was very much alive to the  idea and potential of organ  transplantation. 

 Now the 1930s also saw the  development of the first  artificial heart pacemakers and  other electrical devices that  were intended to stabilize heart  rhythm.  The New York cardiologist Albert  Hyman for example, constructed a  device, not the small ones we  know today but a much larger  one, but that could be used to  resuscitate a heart that had  stopped beating and to treat  various dysrhythmias  or arrhythmias of the heart.  And this, too, received  sensational reporting in the  popular press and in popular  magazines, so much so that Hyman  received lots of letters from  people threatening lawsuits  because his device threatened  God's will.  Now I mention the pacemaker  because like the glass heart  and its use in horror films,  essentially, The Bride of  Frankenstein, as far as I can  tell, the 1935 sequel to the  1931 film Frankenstein, not only  featured Elsa Lanchester as the  bride of Frankenstein, but it is  the first motion picture to  feature a cardiac pacemaker.  It's used in this to sort of  stabilize the heart rhythm of  the heart that is then implanted  into the potential bride of  Frankenstein.  And some people have actually  argued or speculated that  the appearance of a cardiac  pacemaker in a gruesome film  like this actually derailed  public acceptance of these  devices.  We need more evidence  to support that.  And other Frankenstein films,  and there were lots of sequels  because the films were very  popular, also incorporated other  medical technologies, whether  it's fluoroscopy, x-ray, a range  of medical technologies sort of    bordering, excuse me, if you  will, muddying the border  between what was medical  science, real medical science,  and celluloid science.  Now I would say that much of the  durability of the Frankenstein  story as it exists in the 20th  century, reflects the power of  our screen culture to create  collective memory and images.  And of course Frankenstein lived  on not just in this Universal  series, in the 1930s, but also  in perhaps more forgettable  films like,  I Was a Teenage Frankenstein,  in the Munsters,  in the kinds of conventions  I think so effectively parodied  in Young Frankenstein  and in the Gary Larson cartoons. 

 But again I want to come back to  how Frankenstein, as a myth and  as a metaphor, was an especially  versatile framework for talking  about advances in biomedicine.  And although a lot of the  literature on Frankenstein  focuses on, not surprisingly,  recombinant DNA research, I want  to argue, based on sort of my  interest in the history of organ  transplants, that the heart  transplant also became an  extraordinary fertile ground for  reinventing Frankenstein,  even before the recombinant DNA  controversy in the 1970s.  So let me go now, not to the US,  actually, but to the apartheid  government in South Africa,  which in 1955 banned Mary  Shelley's novel Frankenstein as  both obscene and objectionable.  Now they did not need a lot of  encouragement to ban books,  because that same year they  banned some 2,000 other books  including the book Black Beauty,  which is the story of a horse.  But also, I think, people,  even though the book was banned,  the story of Frankenstein  and its utility as a means  to characterize things out of  control was certainly evident  in South Africa.  In 1961, when Chief Albert  Luthuli, a member of the African  National Congress, which is what  Nelson Mandela would come to  stand for, he accepted the Nobel  Peace Prize, and in his speech  he described the cult of racial  superiority and white supremacy  that fostered apartheid in South  Africa as a monster created  by Frankenstein.  That is the tragedy  of the South African scene.  So to me it's very interesting  how sort of this banned book  sort of recurs in 1961.  Then in 1967, in one of the most  sensational biomedical advances  of the 20th century, the  successful transplantation of a  human heart, which occurred in a  very small hospital in Capetown,  South Africa, in which the first  recipient of this, of another  person's heart, Louis  Washkansky, sort of internalizes  the Frankenstein story so much  so that when he recovers from  the anesthesia one of the first  things he tells the nurses in  the hospital is, "I am the new  Frankenstein."  Washkansky lived 18 days with  this new heart and started a  frenzy of heart transplantation  that occurred in countries  around the world  including the US.  Christiaan Barnard, the  extraordinarily photogenic young  surgeon was hailed by some  people as sort of the  Frankenstein of South Africa. 

 In this case, in the Saturday  Evening Post, commentators are  comparing him to the very  handsome actor Colin Clive, who  played Henry Frankenstein in the  film, and again sort of this  pushing the notion about the  appropriate boundaries  between life and death.  I have just a few more examples  for you that, again, that show  sort of how the Frankenstein  myth continued and grew in  intensity long before  sort of Frankenfoods.  I think, again, sort of an early  example occurs in the discussion  about the possibility of human  cloning as early as 1972 when  the psychiatrist Willard Gaylin  publishes a story in the New  York Times Sunday Magazine about  how the Frankenstein myth had  become a reality.  About sort of farms  where organs were being grown.  That they were going to clone  parts of human beings and create  bodies which had not been there  before.  And Gaylin was influential.  He was one of the cofounders  of the Hastings Center which was  one of the earliest bioethics  institutions  in the United States.  But sort of the Frankenstein  story also gained tremendous  currency with one of the great  scientific controversies of the  1970s, namely sort of whether  she should permit recombinant  DNA research to occur.  This is actually an editorial  cartoon that appeared  after the city of Cambridge,  Massachusetts, actually had  a referendum about whether they  would permit recombinant DNA  research to occur in  laboratories in the city  because of the potential threat.  You see Frankenstein  lurking in the corner here. 

 I don't know if you can see sort  of one of the things coming out  of the bottle is Richard Nixon.  [LAUGHTER]  And there are other monsters,  as well, and unnatural  creations.  But again sort of to think back  to the, I don't want to say  hysteria, but to the concern  that the potential of this  research created.  This is from  the Mayor of Cambridge.  "We want to be damn sure  that the people of Cambridge  won't be affected by anything  that could crawl out of the  laboratory...  They may come up with a disease  that cannot be cured.  Is this the answer to  Dr. Frankenstein's dream?"  Now they were happy in that  because the Cambridge populous  actually supported the ongoing  investment, if you will,  in recombinant DNA research.  Now the Frankenstein, I was  going to say, this is actually  one of my favorite stories that  combines sort of the world, the  commercial world, if you will,  and the Frankenstein story.  When the Monsanto Corporation  engineers a potato that  incorporates a toxin that will  ward off the Colorado potato  beetle.  The headline is Dr. Frankenstein  Meets Mr. Potato Head. 

 Now I'm going to skip ahead to  the more recent past in 1997,  when the Scottish researcher  Ian Wilmut announced  the successful cloning of Dolly.  Now deceased, of course.  The Frankenstein myth received  sort of great attention.  The most immediate consequence  of the cloning of the Scottish  sheep Dolly, wrote one  commentator, has been this major  outbreak of the Frankenstein  syndrome.  You see it everywhere in the  discussions.  And again meaning sort of  invoking this fear of science  out of control and the foisting  of the implications of such  research on an unsuspecting  public.  Now I began my talk this evening  with the ways in which  Frankenstein permeates some of  the debates over genetically  modified foods, plants and so  forth.  In a recent book  on the Frankenstein story,  Frankenstein's Footsteps, John  Tierney writes we're never going  be rid of Frankenstein even if  we want to be.  However he's greatly concerned  that the Frankenstein  myth/metaphor actually  so constrains our discussions  of biomedical advance that  scientists have to come up  with new stories.  They have to find something that  will eclipse the Frankenstein  story because it's so powerful,  and when it's injected into the  story it takes over the  narrative. 

 Unlike Tierney, I'm far less  sort of optimistic that we can  invent something to replace  Frankenstein.  And I think it's an enduring  testament to Mary Shelley's  story that it continues to be  known to people throughout the  world, is continuously in print  and continues to have this  imprint on our culture.  But I hope, I guess it's my  modest hope, that we can perhaps  nuance sort of this popular  culture representation  of Mary Shelley's story.  Which, from the very earliest,  from 1823, had undergone this  narrowing and distortion from  the much more complex, rich and  nuanced story that she told  as early as 1818.  And as a remarkable thing as an  18-year-old girl, to be sure  of a remarkable family.  And I guess what I would like to  do is to call your attention to  something that I haven't  mentioned this evening which is  the subtitle of Mary Shelley's  novel, Frankenstein,  or The Modern Prometheus.  And I think, to me, that is sort  of, if you will, an ambiguously  optimistic subtitle in the book.  Let me remind you that in the  novel the story ends in the  icy waters of the frozen north.  Victor Frankenstein has been  searching for the monster  all over.  He lies on board a ship of  another explorer who is seeking  to push the borders of knowledge  to extend light into the dark  world. 

 The Arctic explorer  Robert Walton.  And after telling Walton his  strange and tragic story about  the creation of the monster,  its escape, its rampage and so  forth, Victor Frankenstein bids  his explorer friend farewell  and offers this final advice:  "Seek happiness in tranquility  and avoid ambition, even if it  be only the apparently innocent  one of distinguishing yourself  in science and discoveries.  Yet why do I say this?  I myself have been blasted in my  hopes yet another may succeed."  And I guess I would like to  remind you that another may  succeed in this Promethean  possibility of bringing light,  wisdom and knowledge  to humankind.  So if you recall the story from  Greek mythology, Prometheus  creates humans out of mud  and water.  And he angers Zeus and the other  gods of the Greek Pantheon by  stealing fire from the heavens  and bringing it down  to his creation.  As a punishment, Prometheus is  sentenced for eternity to be  chained to a rock where an eagle  or a raven sort of takes out  his liver, so for eternity.  But for Mary Shelley and for the  circle in which she moved,  the Prometheus myth was  extraordinarily influential.  And Percy Shelley, for example,  composed an epic poem,  Prometheus Unbound,  shortly before his death.  And Mary Shelley, as she  prepared this lengthy poem  for publication after his death  wrote this about Prometheus:  "Prometheus used knowledge  as a weapon to defeat evil,  by leading mankind beyond the  state wherein they are sinless  through ignorance,  to that in which they are  virtuous through wisdom."  Which I think is a profound  statement.  Let me just say in concluding  that Victor Frankenstein desired  to renew life where death had  apparently devoted the body to  corruption. 

 And this was, of course, no mean  desire but a vision shared by  many of the medical Prometheans  of Mary Shelley's day.  And it's the Promethean  possibility, I'd suggest,  that ignites our collective  investment in the Frankenstein  myth.  It's both its possibility and  also its problems that occur  with it.  I would suggest we share Victor  Frankenstein's dream to pour a  torrent of light into this dark  world.  We, too, seek the renewal  of life, the reversal of the  processes of disease, and that  prospect is at once appealing  and also appalling because of  the risks that it entails.  And I can only hope that we will  have the ability to be virtuous  through wisdom.  Thank you.  [APPLAUSE]