Abstract
In November of 2019, the University of California Santa Cruz hosted a 3-day interdisciplinary conference to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. A panel of senior researchers convened to discuss the impact of the novel on modern discussions of scientific ethics. The panel featured Nandini Bhattacharya, George Blumenthal, Michael M. Chemers, David Haussler, and Jenny Reardon. In the process, the panelists acted as the Institutional Review Board for a proposal from Victor Frankenstein himself.
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Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus was a novel first published in 1819 and written by Mary Shelley. In the story, a scientist (Frankenstein) attempts to create a living human being, from lifeless tissue. He succeeds in this endeavor but is horrified by the Creature he created, and abandons him. The Creature, seeking revenge and hoping to compel Frankenstein to create a mate for him, murders Frankenstein’s family and leads him on a chase to the ends of the earth. Frankenstein is seen as an important and still-popular progenitor of modern horror and science fiction, but also as a touchstone for discussions of scientific ethics. See for example Turney (1998), Davis (2004) and Halpern (2016).
Dr. Blumenthal here refers to the Manhattan Project, the codename for the USA’s program to develop an atomic weapon. The effort began in 1942 and despite the codename, most of the research was conducted in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The research team included Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szliárd. The research resulted in the development of the atomic bombs which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
This is known as the “Einstein-Szilárd letter” (after the physicist Léo Szilárd who wrote the letter before Einstein signed it). Reproductions online are easy to find, but the original letter is kept at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum at Marist University. Einstein and Szilárd re-enacted their discussion about the letter in the 1946 March of Time film Atomic Power.
CRISPR refers to technology used to alter the genomes of organisms in vivo by “editing” certain kinds of DNA (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats).
Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was an Italian philosopher whose theories advanced the Copernican model of the universe (that the Earth revolved around the sun). Bruno went even further, theorizing that the stars themselves were suns with their own planetary systems. Partially for these theories, Bruno was denounced as a heretic and burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition.
It is important to clarify Dr. Haussler’s remarks here: while many science fiction stories do focus on Frankenstein-like individuals, and while the impact of Frankenstein on modern science fiction cannot be overestimated, this is by no means the only or even the most common concern of modern science-fiction stories.
Josef Mengele (1911–1979) was a Schutzstaffel (SS) officer in the Nazi forces during World War II. In the concentration camp at Auschwitz, he performed fatal medical experiments on prisoners, among whom he was known as the Angel of Death.
These are called “Mertonian norms” after Robert K. Merton discussed them in The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942).
An IRB (Institutional Review Board) is a committee set up by a funding organization, like a university, to protect the rights and welfare of human research subjects. IRBs review all research within an organization, whether it is funded or not, to determine the possible impact of the research on human beings, and has the power to monitor or even halt the research projects under its purview if they are not sufficiently protective of human rights and welfare.
Waldman is a character in the novel, who mentors the young Frankenstein during his medical studies at Ingolstadt.
Dr. Reardon refers to the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research which was convened in 1974 to provide the ethical principles and guidelines that should underscore all research involving human subjects. The result of their deliberations was the Belmont Report (1976), which states that all research must be guided by respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. The report calls for all research on human subjects to obtain informed consent, to fairly assess all risks and benefits to the subjects, and to maintain ethical selection of subjects. The entire report can be read here: https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/read-the-belmont-report/index.html.
For clarification, the US Department of Health & Human Services’ Office of Research Integrity defines “research” to include investigations that “develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge,” which should be understood to extend beyond the concerns and standards of the immediate local community (see https://ori.hhs.gov/content/chapter-3-The-Protection-of-Human-Subjects-Definitions). In addition, the 1947 Nuremberg Code and the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki explicitly provide ethical guidelines that apply internationally.
In the novel, Frankenstein does not reanimate a dead body—rather, he assembles the body of the Creature himself. The notion that Frankenstein was working with a complete cadaver comes out of later interpretations in different media, including films.
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Acknowledgements
This panel was made possible in part by funding from the Institute for the Humanities and the Arts Research Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Chemers, M.M. The Problem is Not Monsters: The FRANKENCON Panel on Science and Ethics. Sci Eng Ethics 27, 62 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00339-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-021-00339-0