Science Friday - Frankenstein Goodbye, Chocolate And Bugs, Ozone Problems. Feb 9, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: February 9, 2018

The Science Friday Book Club nerds out about ‘Frankenstein’ one last time. A menagerie of insects thrive among cacao trees—and that biodiversity might help boost yields. While the ozone layer above the poles is on the mend, the health of the layer in middle latitudes is less clear. SpaceX successfully launched the Heavy Falcon rocket with two of the three boosters safely landing back onto the launch pad.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. SpaceX has been testing all sorts of rockets since it was founded over 15 years ago. And this week, the company launched a car, Tesla, into space with its Falcon Heavy Rocket. Is this the most expensive cross-marketing campaign or what? Sophie Bushwick, senior editor at Popular Science is here to tell us what this means for Space X's future, all part of a bunch of selected short subjects in science. Good to have you back, Sophie. Thanks for having me.

A car in space. The pictures of it are amazing. This car with the earth behind it. I mean, the best advertising in the world. And where is it headed? It actually launched it toward Mars. Is that where the car? The goal was to put it in orbit around Mars, but they overshot a little bit.

So now, instead of going to Mars, the car and its passenger, it's this mannequin in a space suit they call Starman, it'll be going to the asteroid belt instead. You know, one of the things that struck me as someone who's grown up, but the whole space race is the return of the boosters. I think this is a first in all of history to have two boosters returning landing virtually at the same time. It was amazing. There was something almost balletic about it, these two enormous, absolutely massive boosters just slowly landing in sync. And unfortunately, the third booster was supposed to also land on a drone ship and that one missed. But just the two that did land together was incredibly impressive. It's just amazing.

You know, one wonder is it because we know Tesla is having trouble getting its cars built and, you know, made cheaply enough. and having them sold. Maybe there's something that will leak over from the rocket factory. I mean... That will make them faster. Maybe if they make more parts of them reusable. I don't know. I don't know.

Maybe if they start, you know, trying to launch them into space more. That's the delivery thing. You got it. I think we figured that out. Delivery from low Earth orbit. That would be terribly dangerous. All right. Let's move on to something a little more serious.

And that is the Arctic permafrost is melting, right? Right. So researchers have known for a while that this frozen soil in the Arctic, it covers about 25% of the land in the northern hemisphere, that it's melting and that as it melts, a lot of things that have been trapped in it will be released. So one of the things trapped in the soil are dead plants. When they're frozen solid, instead of decomposing, all these plants basically stay together. And it's only now when the permafrost is melting that they're starting to release the things that they hold, which is in the case of the most recent study they found is about 32 million gallons of mercury. That's twice as much mercury as all the mercury in all the rest of the soil and the oceans and the atmosphere of earth combined. And that's pretty toxic stuff, mercury, is it? Yeah, mercury is a neurotoxin and it can get into the atmosphere when, for example, when humans burn coal and it can get in, from there, it can get into the food chain, which is why we see mercury in fish like tuna. So it could actually travel from its source where it's leaking in the permafrost to get into fish and into people's diets.

Absolutely, right. If the mercury leaks into the water of the Arctic Ocean, for example, then ocean life could very easily take that up. Wow. That is something, you know, unexpected consequences. Right. I mean, it's terrible. It's not the only terrible thing happening with permafrost melting. Another thing that can happen is that you might release long-frozen microbes, for example. In 2016, there was an anthrax outbreak that they think was caused when reindeer carcasses thawed. And in addition to microbes, there's greenhouse gases. Methane and stuff like that. Exactly. When these plants start thawing, then microbes start eating them, and they release carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

Let's move on to baseball, one of my favorite subjects. As my listeners know, I'm a giant baseball fan, but I found out that Babe Ruth, the Bambino's birthday, was Tuesday. We knew that. But we all know this from what a big home run hit, he was. But, We didn't know about his cancer treatments. We know he died of cancer, but do you have some information about those treatments he was taking? Right. So Eleanor Cummins, one of the writers on staff, did this amazing story about how Babe Ruth was one of the first humans to receive a treatment that's standard today, which is the combination of chemotherapy and radiation. So at the time, the chemotherapy drug he received had only been tested in mice.

It essentially went straight from mice into Babe Ruth. And it turns out, so the type of tumor that Babe Ruth had was nasopharyngeal cancer. It started growing behind his nose. And by the time he started feeling pain and seeking treatment, it had grown all the way into the back of his neck. So it was at a very advanced stage. But with radiation therapy and this sort of cutting edge chemotherapy treatment, he lived for two more years. He lived long enough to go back to Yankee Stadium and attended dedication ceremony. He retired his jersey.

He had to lean on his bat for support. but he received a standing ovation from the crowd. I've seen the film, and it was a big bat. And, of course, it could happen to the babe because he was the babe. He got the cutting-edge treatment of his day. Exactly. Every advanced technique they had, they were going to use to try to help him. Your last story is about, well, how shall I put it at it?

It's a beetle that sprays hot chemical out of its butt. That's correct. So this Bombadier beetle has, it sprays hot chemicals out of the tip of its abdomen, to ward off predators. And researchers knew that, but they've just found out that one species of beetle can do this inside a frog's stomach and make the frog vomit it back up. And the beetle can survive. So some of these beetles survived after an hour and a half in a frog's stomach, they survived

being vomited back up. You think this is a meme now? People are going to try this with other toads and frogs? They're actually planning to. They want to see if other animals could eat these beetles and see if the beetles could survive a trip into that digestive tract as well. And do we know, is there a follow-up? I mean, besides trying it with other beetles?

I mean, is there something to be learned about how you can survive inside a frog's stomach so long? That's actually a really interesting thought. I'm not sure. I think that the trick is that if you make a nuisance of yourself before an animal tries to eat you and after an animal tries to eat you, maybe you're still going to make it out of there alive. I guess the beetle has evolved to do this, right? Oh, absolutely. So we're not sure if every species of beetle can do this.

This is a particular species. But they probably evolved this technique to deter predators outside. And then the fact that they could also use it to survive inside the belly of these animals. I've seen the video. It's just a real. It's crazy. The researchers can hear a popping noise when the beetle is inside the frog. And they're like, okay, that's the spray.

It's about to be vomited up. Well, you have to see it. And thank you, Sophie, for giving us something. this weekend to look at. You're very welcome. Sophie Bushwick Senior Editor at Popular Science. Now it's time to play, good thing, bad thing. Because every story has a flip side.

Now, back in the 1980s, one of our planet's pressing problems was the health of the ozone layer. It turned out that the chlorofluorocarbons, the CFCs, that we were working to destroy the ozone molecules and the Earth's atmosphere, especially over the polls, well, they were doing a good job, so we had to find a way of not putting up more CFCs into the atmosphere, because the ozone plays a crucial role as sort of a planetary sunscreen, helping to block UV radiation from the sun. So they came up with a global agreement that restricted the use of these CFC chemicals, and great, slowly the polar ozone hole began to repair itself. But now the repair doesn't look so

complete. Joe Haig is an atmospheric physicist and co-director of the Grantham Institute and Imperial College London. She and her colleagues discovered there is more to the whole story. Their work looking at the ozone layer over the entire planet was published in the Journal of the Amistphoric Chemistry and Physics this week. Welcome to the program, Dr. Hayg. Hello, Charlie. Hi. You, you, so there's good news and bad news about the ozone hole. Give us the good news first. Yes. Well, the good news is that the international agreement, which was called the Montreal Protocol, has been doing its job. And the ozone, hole over the Antarctic is gradually filling up, so each year it's getting a little bit less

severe. So that's the good news, and the atmospheres responded as we expected when the chlorofluorocarbons were banned. And now for the bad news? Well, the bad news is that what we've been doing is looking at ozone in other parts of the globe, so not in the high latitudes, not at the poles, but near the equator and in middle latitudes. And what we found that in certainly, in certain layers of the atmosphere, the lower stratosphere where most of the ozone is, it hasn't recovered. In fact, it's continuing to decline. It's still going down and down. And we're not quite sure why that is. Is there any way to replace that ozone? Or is it filling up the void itself? It's difficult to think about how you might replace it. We've got to think about why it's

going away and if we can stop doing whatever we're doing to make it go away. And we don't really understand what that is. There's two sort of ideas around this. One is that it's actually to do with climate change. So I've been going on about CFCs and ozone. Of course the climate change thing is all to do with greenhouse gases in particular carbon

dioxide. And that as we all know is warming the lower atmosphere but in the stratosphere it's cooling it and it's also changing the circulation of the air. So the air natural looks in latitude so there's a big

circulation. And we think that with climate change that is getting stronger. That flow is going faster. And so the low ozone air is coming up and being transported from the equator to middle latitudes. So that's one explanation of why it might take place, but we haven't actually proven that. The second idea is another chemical one, and this is to do with things that are called very short-lived substances, and there are more things that contain chlorine and bromine, and they come from various chemicals and paint strippers and things like that that we're using. And they're probably, or possibly getting up there and destroying the ozone in these equatorial regions. Does that mean that the UV, the harmful UV radiation, is affecting we who live on the surface of the Earth?

Yeah, so that's the big question. And, of course, in the Antarctic, the ozone depletion was very marked, but the sun's not so intense there. If you go down to, you know, near the equator, where we all live around sort of 50 degrees north, then the radiation from the sun is much more intense. And so if you weaken the ozone layer, then there's a scope for more effect from the sun.

And in particular, the UV is affecting DNA in anything that's living, and particularly especially white people who go around with not many clothes on, they'll get more skin cancer. So this is something to watch for then? I think so. I mean, at the moment, as I say, we haven't really got an explanation, and we'll carry on monitoring these measurements of ozone and see what happens. Perhaps it'll just mend itself, which would be nice.

But if it doesn't, then we've got to try and think why it's happening and try and stop it. She'll be wearing our longer clothes then during the summertime. That's right, and hat. All right, Dr. Hague, thank you. I'm sorry. Okay, you're very welcome. Joe Hague is an atmospheric physicist and co-director of the Grantham Institute

at Imperial College London. We're going to take a break when we come back. Put on a pot of coffee for our next meeting of the Sci-Fright Book Club. We're going to talk about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with our panel of super nerds, everything from bioethics to the novel's influence on modern science fiction.

It's all coming up after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Find your seats, everybody. The Science Friday Book Club is now convening. We can't promise your coffee and cake. You can supply that on your own, but we've got some great conversation. Because if you've been following along, even if you've not been following, we've been reading Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein for the past five weeks. It's the heartwarming tale of a young scientist who digs up body parts to create a new kind of life. which he abandons and which eventually destroys everything he loves. Very heartwarming. And here to take us the rest of the way is Christy Taylor, our book club captain and office Franken Maven. Take it away, Christy. Hey there, Ira.

So thanks for finishing your reading. First of all, this has been a wonderful five-week adventure, and we have done a lot with Frankenstein in that time. We've talked about Silicon Valley Frankensteins. We met a classroom that's reading Frankenstein, and thinking about how the book relates to their modern lives. We invited our listeners to chime in on whether Frankenstein is a good scientist, what modern equivalents we might have to Frankenstein's monster, and just a hint, gene editing is just one. So today we're bringing all of Frankenstein to a conclusion, as we've said, there are a lot of big questions to explore, and we're going to spend some time chewing on this.

And to help us out, Ira, we have a couple of other guests as well. With us in New York, we have Josephine Johnston, Director of Research and Bioethicist at the Hastings Center in Garrison, New York. Hey, Josephine. Hi, thanks to having me. And in Massachusetts, we have Elizabeth Baer, author of numerous works of science fiction and fantasy. She has a book forthcoming in July called Incestral Night that is tackling some of these issues of AI and ethics. Hey, Elizabeth. Hi, how are you?

Doing all right. And we want to hear from our listeners, too. What was your favorite insight from reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? Or what do you have as a question about it? Give us a call. Our number is 844-724-8255. 844 SciTalk, or you can tweet us at Science at SciFry. So since we have all heard a lot of pop culture versions of Frankenstein,

heard seen the Herman Munster version maybe in the Munsters. Or the Gene Wilder version. Or the Gene Wilder version. I think that's actually maybe the version I best know. I think it's very prudent that we maybe summarize Mary Shelley's version first, which, as Ira said, it's quite heartwarming. We have a passionate young scientist who decides to find out how to instill life in dead body parts, dig some up, puts them together, creates a monster, it's ugly, so he's horrified and surprised.

So he abandons his monster. The monster has to make its way in the world figure out what reading and writing and thinking and loving all are, which he does, to his credit. And then he's rejected by humanity for being ugly, basically. So he goes back to Victor. He says, hey, make me a friend, make me a bride. then will at least be ugly together. And Victor at first starts to, and then he changes his mind and doesn't, and the monster

kills everyone he loves. And it ends with this sort of face-off in the Arctic where Frankenstein dies and the monster, sated at last, goes off to set himself on fire and destroy the evidence that he ever lived. Spoiler alert. So for me, I think the biggest surprise in reading this was just how relatable the monster is. And I think we should start there in terms of what we really take away from the story. Josie, I think this is a monster that actually seems to be more sympathetic than Frankenstein himself, right? I think that's where many of us end up as we go through the book.

Although at the beginning, you know, we're all probably sympathizing or empathizing with the creator and then are so disappointed in his actions and abandoning his monster and really just he's sort of hopeless. He reminds me a little bit of Hamlet. He just floating around at some point in a lake and a sort of fever of despair, but unable to actually do anything to remedy the situation. So we become, I think, frustrated with him and much more on the side of the monster, which is an interesting flip. Elizabeth?

I absolutely agree. One of the things that I find very interesting about Victor Frankenstein is that he is a complete narcissist. And I think there's a little feminist subtext in there in some of the things we see, especially the female characters he encounters. And I'm particularly annoyed by his relationship with his fiancé. And the way she becomes profoundly depressed as people around her start dying. And he likes her better because she has less agency. Yeah, which is a little messed up, that's for sure. Yeah.

Yeah, I like you much better now that you're emotionally crushed is not a healthy relationship. Ira, what surprise, you were reading this book for the first time in a long time or ever even. Yeah, it's actually the first time because I saw all the movies, right? And what surprised me right at the beginning is that it's nothing like. The real book is nothing like the movies. I mean, this is a really intelligent creature. He goes on page after page talking about his life. They agree he's absolutely articulate, well-spoken.

And that, to me, was the most surprising thing. You know, we just see the movies. He just grunts and groans and attacks people. And that's not, the attacking people, okay, that happens, but we understand what's going on. We understand the deeper plot. And we understand how intelligent he was built to be. One of the things I think that maybe to, at least to our eyes and he is so disappointing,

is that the way he looks is such a focus of why people spur in him. And, you know, I don't know what people were thinking about in the early 1800s, but I think today we're conscious of just how misleading that kind of thing can be and that we're very conscious of not trying to judge people on the way they look and not being repulsed by people who are different or have some sort of physical difference. And so I think that's extremely disappointing, at least to me, when I was reading. I really had my heart broke for him. Do you think Mary Shelley was trying to tell us something about the way people,

people are or the way people should be when she was making the whole problem with this monster, his appearance? It's got to be that she was. Yeah, go for it. Okay. I think it's specifically called out in the text because Frankenstein himself is described as beautiful and is a horrible human being and gets basically a certain amount of latitude from the people. around him because he is attractive, despite his self-absorption and the terrible things he does, whereas the monster who starts off trying to find a way to educate himself and become a part of society and find a... Family's not quite the right word, but find a community,

is rejected over and over again, first by Frankenstein and then by everybody else he meets just because he's a walking mummy stitched together out of dead people. Which is such a surprise that something you make out of dead people doesn't look so great. Yeah. An argument for why would... I wonder about the preservation techniques. It's almost an argument for why he should have done. He just needed more funding for his science.

If he had more funding, he would have been able to create a more attractive monster. Well, and going back to that science, another surprise I had from the book is just that we don't actually see the secret of how he reanimates the dead in the first place. there's like a slight allusion to electricity, but a lot of what we see in the movies seems to have been spun out of thin air. He just, he eludes to this spark of life. Yeah, I wonder if we're more interested in the intricacies of how that, and how exactly would you have done it than she was.

I mean, she's interested in electricity. She's certainly influenced by the science of the time, but she's not so obsessed with how exactly it happened, but with everything that it meant for him. and everyone around him. I don't know if that's a more modern way of thinking that we're so interested in how he might have done it. I'm reading the great annotated version, and they go into this about the science of the times, was the galvanic response that she talks about in the book.

And it was a time where batteries were being invented in the experiments with twitching frogs legs. And she naturally came up with that idea, having been exposed to all of this research. And we actually have a really good layout of that science on our website right now. Lauren Young, one of our producers, did a great piece on that. It's up at ScienceFriiday.com slash electricity. If you want to go take a look, she has some really great photos from a historic book, medical book collection. There's a terrible writer's secret here, too, by the way. Tricks of the Trade, if you don't know how to do something, be vague about it.

It's much harder to Google in 1816 than it is today. Speaking of Tricks of the Trade, we have our phone numbers. 844-8255. if you would like to join us, and you can tweet us at SciFri. The phones are busy. Let's go to our first phone call from Florida in Naples. Andrew, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, all right, it's good to be here.

Thanks. What's on your mind? Well, as you were talking about the themes and the plot of the novel, I remember from my own reading of it in high school, how the reason that Victor Frankenstein discontinued the construction of his monster's companion was because of paranoia that mankind would be overwhelmed and replaced by these monsters as they multiplied. And I thought that that's very interesting because it sort of practices a lot of the fears

that 20th century literature has about the creation of new forms of life, that when mankind creates successor race, if you will, that we will ultimately be replaced by it, that we won't be able to live side by side with our metaphysical children, if you will, that we will be locked in a zero-sum game with them. And I thought that that's a very interesting point worth talking about, especially as we enter an age where artificial intelligence's role in our society

is something that serious academics are talking about very seriously. Josie, I know you have a lot of thoughts on pretty much everything that Andrew just covered. So do you want to start with, he alluded to gene editing and replacing ourselves? Right. he's absolutely right that modern science, gene editing

and artificial intelligence is sort of being the most obvious examples right now are raising this fear of not just that we might lose control of the science but that it actually might turn on us specifically and some people refer to this as existential risk the idea that these technologies could actually not wipe out the planet necessarily

but get rid of us especially if they came to see us as a threat or as a resource that they would want to use up rather than preserve. So that's a very far-off concern. I mean, it's sort of the ultimate concern, I guess, that people who are talking about AI will refer to. And then there are these much narrower versions of that, like if we're going to design a driverless car,

what kind of moral system do we give it so that if it has a choice between harming, us and harming one of us and harming three of us, does it choose the owner of the car, or does it respond to the group? And so those are not, those are like those sort of intermediate versions of that larger existential concern. And Elizabeth, I know you've talked about how this book plugs into maybe the anxieties of Shelley's time, but also what modern science fiction takes away from the story of Frankenstein. Oh, absolutely. And I agree very much with Jody that, Josie, I'm sorry. Some of what we're doing in modern science fiction

when we talk about our fears of our created descendants, for lack of a better term, one of the things I've often, there's this idea in science fiction of the singularity, which is the idea that we will reach a point where computers will become so much faster and smarter than human beings that they will create even faster and smarter computers, which will create even faster and smarter computers, and then we will have a sort of logarithmic, rampant artificial intelligence that will use up all the resources in the galaxy and eat us, or use us as batteries, which is a terrible idea. We're awful batteries.

So I think that is an anxiety, because I find myself sort of asking, why are we assuming that an artificial intelligence, which theoretically we can design to have ethical parameters, is even going to want the same sort of resources that we want as meat organisms who need groceries and a place to sleep. This is Science Friday from PRI Public Radio International. We're talking about Frankenstein this hour with Josephine Johnson, Elizabeth Bear, and Christy Taylor. Chris, mind if I go to the phones? Go ahead. We want to hear from you. Let's go to Jacob and Selden, New York. Hi, Jacob.

Hi, how's he going? Hi there. Go ahead. So I kind of enjoyed Frankenstein, however, I don't think it's fair to call it a science fiction novel, because any relative science that kind of deals with the Frankenstein monster itself is kind of skipped over. And it's more just a story about someone who has a personal, like self-conscious problems and he's tapping to society. It has inspired a lot of science fiction in our modern day, but I think if you take away any science fiction from the novel, It's really nothing special. I mean, you could say, I think it's much more a gothic horror, actually. There's a whole lot of lightning and rain and, you know, go in the mountains and everything's too.

And so, yeah, genre-wise, you know, you might be right on about that. I really want to actually bring in. We had a listener who called into our voicemail. We set of a special After Hours voicemail to let people call in when we weren't on the show. and a little bit of a positive spin on this story. This is a listener named Margarita, who had a really beautiful poem about her heart transplant. I am the monster.

I died and I was brought back to life. My life supported my machines that require complex upkeep. And I went on leaving until they found someone else's organ, a heart that today makes me who I am, this kind, resilient monster. So Margarita is identifying with the monster, but she's also, I think, making a pretty good point about not all the consequences of innovation are necessarily scary, right? We still have all these good things happening.

And so we're not, we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater maybe. Josie, do you have any thoughts on that? I do think that there's like that one immediate reading of the book where it's like, oh, no, you know, we could create through science some really scary things that would be terrible. We've got to stop and think about this. Maybe we shouldn't even do it. And then there's another reading of the book that says it's just that we have to do it well. And there are better and worse ways to do it. And at the end of the book, actually, Victor Frankenstein, as he's dying,

says to the explorer on whose ship he was sort of rescued that maybe someone else can do a better job than he did. And so, and I definitely think Mary Shell was fascinated by science. She was not anti-science. So, you know, it's funny. I think we're so trained to think that something is like, either for or against, that we're immediately like, this is an anti-science book or something. But actually, if you think about it a bit more,

you can see this fascination. And I think it's actually a book that makes an argument for a kind of good science that's thoughtful and certainly not done in secret by some young kid who doesn't have any responsibilities or ways to think through problems. Yeah, it's certainly one about taking responsibility as a scientist for the things that you create. And the listener was right in the sense that everything is just window dressing

on that theme. you know, take away all that science fiction, and that's what you're left with. Yeah, the problem here is not a problem of science. It's not a failure of science. It's a failure of responsibility. It's bad parenting, essentially. I'm going to leave it there because we have to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk more with author Elizabeth Bear, bioethicist,

Josephine Johnson, and our sci-fry bookmaven, Christy Taylor, about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. When we come back more, we just started to talk, and the lessons this story holds for modern scientists and everyone else. Please join us 844-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFRI, a CIFRI. We'll be back with the SciFRI book club after this break for milk and cookies. Stay with it. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato here with producer Christy Taylor, who's been running our Frankenstein Book Club this winter and has gathered us to talk about Mary Shelley's work one last time. Let's have one tweet I want to get to before we go right back to our guests. And it's from Priscilla who writes Mary's Monster by Elita Judge came out last week. It's a remarkable graphic novel that is filled with Mary's stories and how and why she wrote the book. Yeah, this is, so one of the things we didn't talk about when we got started is this is the 200th anniversary of the year that Mary Shelley published Frankenstein. She wrote it when she was just 18, published it a couple years later.

and this is a year where a lot of people are celebrating Frankenstein's influence or contemplating it, using it as a time to think more deeply on the issues that it presents. And Elizabeth, one of the things that I, again, let's go back to Mary was 18 when she wrote this book. What possibly possessed her? Well, there's a funny story about that involving being reined in with her husband, George Gordon, and a certain Dr. Polidori in a vacation house where they were trapped apparently by basically monsoon rains. So they all decided to write ghost stories to entertain each other. And Mary and Polidori were actually the only ones who finished their novels.

The two professional writers buggered off. So that's how it came to be. It was a dare. Yeah, we had a couple tweets and people reminding us, too, this was kind of a strange year in the world. It was the year without a summer, and it was very dreary. They had gone on vacation, and without a summer, meaning it was raining and not very warm. And later people figured out it was because of this volcano that had gone off, I think, in Indonesia. And so it wasn't really a great time to have any kind of outdoor activity.

so instead they were sort of cooped up writing. She was also, she was really young, but she had already had a child and had that child die in infancy at 11 days. A child was born fairly premature and she lived only for 11 days. So her first child had already died. She had already had a second child.

She'd run away with the writer Percy Shaleigh's very famous. When she wrote the story, I don't think she was actually married to him yet, so she was still, that was sort of scandalous he was already married she was really living a very tumultuous life of her own

and had had this terrible tragedy and ultimately you would have four children three of whom died so she herself lived suffered a lot and had a lot of and her own mother Mary Wollstonecraft was an extremely influential and important

feminist writer in the late 1700s who died right after Mary Shelley was born, so she never knew her own mother, but she read her works often on her mother's grave. So this is someone who's just really quite an extraordinary person who had already at this point in her life gone through rather a lot. Well, you make a point about parenthood here, and one of the big critiques we have ethically for Victor is that he just sort of leaves his creation alone to fend for itself. Is there a parallel between, you know, she reproaching Victor for making a choice that she

clearly would not have had she been privileged to keep that child that she lost. Yeah, and her own mother published a book called Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in which she made a really strong case for a moral imperative for us to really look after and attend to the welfare of our offspring, and that would be why you would educate your daughters and not just your sons. So I think she's definitely influenced, you know, she has strong views, I think, about our responsibilities to our children, and therefore you can kind of read that into this character that she sets up who is just the opposite of responsible.

One of the things, going back to the very specific ethical quandaries we have with Victor Frankenstein, we've talked about how he didn't really consider the consequences of what he's doing, his abandonment of his creation, but what would it have looked like if he had done this experiment maybe by modern standards correctly? Would he have had peer review? Would he have had an IRB? What would he have done differently? So the first thing is that he would not have done.

it alone. So he acts alone and that is really I think so different from how modern science really goes forward. I mean, yeah, we know people get Nobel prizes. Often individual scientists can become very well known but science is a collaborative undertaking primarily. So that's a huge difference and also he does it in secret. Again, not something that we see a lot of in modern science hopefully and he does it without very much knowledge. There's a little part at the beginning of the book where he sort of talks about how boring his classes are and he's not really that interested and he finds some, an older scientist's work who he finds interesting. So, you know, you don't get the feeling that he's done a whole lot of research and really

knows what he's doing. He's just like, so it's, and then, of course, I was saying before he doesn't have any funding so he steals body parts. So he's just pretty different from, I think, how science is done today, not to mention the lack of ethics review. A couple of good tweets coming in lab before we run out of time to get to them. A tweet from Mark who says, I mentioned, myself that science is often window dressing

and Mark says of course it is a lot of great science fiction from Asimov to Bradbury to Sagan are more often commenting on us than about the science. Richard says will you address the Promethean aspects of Frankenstein? I'm so glad he asked. And implications that has for doing science in our present-day secular society.

Yeah, I know Elizabeth, you're all about the Promethean connection. Just to remind people, the subtitle of Frankenstein is the modern Prometheus, which I don't know, Elizabeth, I start out, assuming she's trying to say this about Victor, and then I end a little bit more confused. But what's your take on Prometheus and Frankenstein? I wonder if, speaking from writer inside baseball, I wonder if she kind of got hooked on a clever title and then never quite let it go when she thematically diverged from her original intent. The difference between Prometheus and Frankenstein is that Prometheus steals something from the gods that is of unequivocal benefit to humankind and then is punished by the gods for it.

Victor Frankenstein does sort of irrigate something for himself without peer review, as Josie mentioned. and it is easier to ethically legally get cadavers these days, though, so there is that. And he punishes himself for it through what, if I were reading this as a Greek tragedy, I would call his Hamarsha, his tragic flaw in that he consistently refuses to step up and take responsibility. and I've compared him in conversation to a hit-and-run driver. The problem is not the accident. The problem is that he drives away from it. And to sort of return to your original question,

I think the ending would have been different if he'd taken responsibility for the monster and protected it. It would have been involved some certainly public shaming for him, but he would have been protecting his offspring and the offspring would have not felt entirely abandoned in the world. I also, I noticed, too, that even though Victor Frankenstein is sort of this, we're seeing maybe this implied comparison to Prometheus, the monster's the one that's doing all the things with fire.

So he stumbles off into the wilderness, he discovers fire and that it's good for him, then he learns how to make it, then he burns down his friend's cottage with fire, and then he kills himself with fire. So if we're seeing a Promethean connection, and maybe is the monster a failed Prometheus or a would have been Prometheus if only he'd been allowed to prosper? I don't know.

I like that read a lot. I'm going to move on because one of the things that our listeners have also been sending our way is this one very well-known Jeff Goldblum quote from the movie Jurassic Park. This idea, and we'll give the full quote in just a second, but the short version is, your scientists were so wrapped up in whether they could

that they didn't stop to consider whether they should. But the whole dialogue from there is actually a little bit more nuanced. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done, and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it.

You want to sell it. I don't think you're giving us out. think you're giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody's ever done before. Yeah, yeah, but your scientist were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't start to think if they should. So, Josie, as the bioethicist in the house, does this, does all of that Jurassic Park comparison ring true for you or this idea that maybe discipline was also part of the equation?

I mean, I think that it's not, so I'm not sure if the Jurassic quote is supposed to make, is supposed to be a fair sort of assessment of science today or scientists today because I do think that many scientists today are really aware of the context in which they're working and of the implications of their work and that goes all the way from junior scientists I meet and talk to all the way up to some of the most famous scientists working today and I think you know Jennifer Dowdner is a really amazing example of a scientist who was one of the people who invented CRISPR the new gene editing technology and who has then who has then who then immediately went on to like ask for help in thinking through its uses,

who was part of a group that called for a moratorium on its use in humans until more of the safety and some of the ethical and moral questions had been worked out. So there are so many scientists today who are absolutely engaged with their work and its implications in the world and how we can all together be involved in figuring out how to use it well. So I don't think that scientists are irresponsible as a big group. I mean, there's a lot of people, and there's always these stories of someone who does something, but I think overall we see much more responsible science today than in Jurassic Park. But it's hammered home in the book so often.

I mean, she takes every chance she can using the characters to talk about their responsibility, and he admits it himself after a while. Yeah, but do you think she was trying to say something about science? That's what I kind of doubt. I think she was trying to say something about people. Maybe she was trying to say something about powerful men or privileged men. I'm just not sure that she was trying to go after science and scientists as a sort of group. And I mean, I don't, you know, we can't really know that.

But we think of science and scientists as this sort of whole thing today that I just don't know if it would have was functioning that way for her. Well, and that actually takes me to another question, which is just how do modern scientists feel about this work as a whole? I mean, we have words like Frankenfood out there that don't speak well of the subject they're referring to, but does this mean scientists cringe whenever they see Frankenstein? And before you answer that, let me just jump in, as I always rudely do, and say this is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International. Ira. Let me just take a breath and just remind everybody about that. We're talking with Elizabeth Bear and Josephine Johnston about Frankenstein and Christy Taylor, who has been shepherding our book club for the last five weeks.

Yeah, so how do those modern scientists feel about Frankenstein? Oh, I definitely have met some scientists who do cringe at the word Frankenstein. I don't think it's because of the novel per se, but because of all of the cultural afterlife of the book. And as we discussed early on, the distance that separates this book from the sort of representations that many of us. have encountered in other, in film and cartoons and television, etc. So it definitely does have that. And then the term Franken was just so nice to have to plop on top of other words. But there's an interesting article in Science, the magazine Science,

published a few essays in January around this book. And one of those points out that some scientists actually use the word Franken in their own work on purpose, like almost I think it was a joke or like in as a way. of kind of, you know, drawing attention to what they're doing, so it's not always used in a pejorative way. And so I think it must be much more of a mix. But, yeah, it can feel like an accusation to some people. Elizabeth, I want to go back to you. So Mary Shelley wrote this book.

We're talking about how books, stories of science fiction often help us navigate times of change or anxiety. If you were writing a modern Frankenstein story, what would be the Hinkley? anxieties you would want to play up in a story like that. It's interesting, actually, especially in the heels of the Jurassic Park conversation, because Jurassic Park is sort of a modern Frankenstein. It's a story of somebody taking, it's not that the science is bad as that inadequate responsibility is taken for the results of the science and for taking care of it. If I were writing a, there is a grand tradition in science fiction of the cautionary tale.

The if this goes on story is what we refer to them as. If I were writing one today, I think it would probably have to deal with the unintended consequences of political divisions in a time when some anthropogenic and potentially natural disasters are a much bigger threat to the health and well-being of the human speech. she's around the globe than what your where your neighbor goes to church loves That's a big thought

Was that sufficiently vague? I think that was Speaking of vague, I'm going to take over and go to the phones here. 8447248255. Let's go to Noel in Sacramento. Hi, Noel. Quickly. Hi, it's Noel. Well, I have been portraying Mary Shelley through a living history program for the better part of a decade.

And I have to say thank you for getting more of the word out that it was written by a woman. It surprises me every time I go out and play her, how many people have heard of Frankenstein, how few people know it was written by a woman. Wow. And one of the things that other people may not know is that when we're talking about Frankenstein, we're really talking about Victor Frankenstein. I think one of my favorite little quips that helps, I think, highlight this in a lot of ways is just knowledge is knowing that Frankenstein is not the monster, but wisdom is knowing that perhaps he is. Wow, wow. That's beautiful.

I'm very judgy. I'm writing that down right now. Yeah, and as we wrap up, I guess I want to really really. Really quickly ask all of you, would this all have been a happy story if the monster had just gotten a hug? All right. We'll leave everybody to contemplate that because we've run out of time. It's time as all good things must come to an end. We have to adjourn our meeting of the book club.

I want to thank our guests so much for joining us today, Elizabeth Baer, Josephine Johnston, and, of course, Christy Taylor. Thank you. And if you want to get one last set of Franken resources from us, or hear about future book clubs, please subscribe to our special book club newsletter. That's Science Friday.com slash Frankenstein. We'll be picking up a new book, maybe with your help, before too long. ScienceFriiday.com slash Frankenstein to sign up. And before we go, if you're not done with Frankenstein, we've created a monster for you,

a monster party, that is. We're celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's classic with a Frankenfest, a Frankenstein variety show. We have a comedy and music storytelling from Story Collider. That's March 7th at 7 p.m. at caveat in New York. Tickets and info are available at sciencefriady.com slash Frankenfest. Science Friday.com slash Frankenfest. That will be March 5th at 7 p.m. in caveat.

Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.