#135 = Volume 45, Part 2 = July 2018
SPECIAL ISSUE ON FRANKENSTEIN (Edited by Michael Griffin and Nicole Lobdell)
Shannon N. Conley
An Age of Frankenstein: Monstrous Motifs, Imaginative Capacities, and Assisted Reproductive Technologies
The Birth of a Monster. Imagine a scientist standing over a dead man. Metal rods, awaiting electrical impulses, are affixed to various places on the body, including face, torso, and limbs. The scientist and the body are not alone; encircling them is a crowd of onlookers, holding their breaths in a hush of fearful anticipation. Will the dead man come back to life?, they wonder. The silence becomes even more palpable as the scientist makes a motion to apply electricity to the metal rods. Electricity courses through the rods into the body of the deceased. The dead man begins to move.
The scene described above is not pulled from the latest television science- fiction (sf) drama or the most recent of the summer blockbusters. The year was 1803, the scientist was a real scientist, Giovanni Aldini, and the dead man was a real dead man—convicted murderer George Forster. In January 1803, at the Royal College of Surgeons, Aldini applied bimetallic electricity via metal rods to make Forster’s freshly executed body convulse and move as if it still had vestiges of life (Parent 638). When electricity was applied to Foster’s mouth and an ear via metal rods, “the jaw immediately began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened” (Aldini 80), and when applied to both ears, the entire face began to convulse, and “a motion of the head manifested.” When Aldini applied electricity to Forster's rectum, “such violent muscular contractions were excited, as almost to give the appearance of re-animation” (80).
Aldini's experimental theater was the birthplace of the Frankenstein motif, an image that would ultimately come to represent science as a runaway force, as innovation out of control. Aldini's gruesome experiments, part of an emerging field known as “galvanism,” catalyzed early debates around the limitations of responsible science and whether scientists were overstepping their boundaries. The newspapers reported on the experiments in vivid detail over the course of the next few decades. Their accounts illuminated the debates about whether the galvanists were controlling nature in order to raise the dead or whether their research could provide important societal benefits, if “judiciously regulated” (“Hydrophobia Cured”).
Capacities for Anticipatory Governance? This paper situates the galvanists’ experiments and the accompanying public discourse regarding galvanism’s benefits and dangers within the framework of anticipatory governance and within a broader narrative exploring the use of monstrous motifs from sf in debates around emerging technologies in Britain. The anticipatory governance literature has proposed that it is indeed possible to remedy the apparent gap among emerging technologies, ethics, and the law—that with the proper tools and by establishing governance capacities throughout society, it is possible to govern proactively and to assess technological progress critically in real time (Barben et al.).
A common theme in social discourse around technology is that society tends to fall behind technological progress (Winner 10) and that new technologies advance with little attention given to their potential implications until it is too late. One dominant perspective within this discourse is that “ethics and law have typically lagged far behind technological change,” and that if something is not done, technology will continue to outpace them (French ix). While ethics and law may not keep pace with technological change in specific cases, when this is stated as a dictum, it erases numerous counter-examples in which society is actively thinking about the implications of new and emerging technologies long before the technologies themselves came into existence. Moreover, anticipatory governance requires not only formalized institutional procedures and data analysis but also creative and imaginative capacities for envisioning possible futures. Ethical reasoning in particular is central to balancing scientific freedom, societal benefit, and the needs for legal and regulatory forms of governance. One way that the capacities are forged in the public sphere is through sf, which serves as a mechanism for engagement with both desirable and undesirable scientific and technological futures. This paper illustrates how sf has cultivated these capacities in deliberations around assisted reproductive technologies.
In further developing the anticipatory governance concept, this paper advances the notion that anticipatory governance is an ongoing societal activity distributed among a number of formal and informal societal capacities that evolve in tandem with emerging technologies. Specifically, I explore historical deliberative moments in the governance of biological and reproductive technologies and the ways in which those moments indicate the cultivation of capacities for grappling with new technologies. It challenges the assumption that society is always sleepwalking through fundamental socio-technical configurations (Winner 10) and that society does not understand or is not well equipped to grapple with such issues. Rather, historical and contemporary capacities for anticipatory governance do exist—beyond formal governmental entities such as the United Kingdom’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority—and these capacities are rich and extensive in a way that perhaps seems surprising, especially when juxtaposed against commonly held assumptions that society is perennially lagging behind.
Miller and Bennett’s work on sf and democracy serves as an entry point for thinking about the ways that the imaginative capacities of society might also serve as important anticipatory capacities. They argue that this approach is not “prediction.” Instead, “tools built on science fiction might serve as a means for building a reflexive capacity into the governance of technology” (598). A major challenge for modern-day democracies is to “engage the public in questions about the future.” Integrating narratives of socio-technical futures into technology assessment practices might serve as a means of combating Winner’s problem of “technological somnambulism”(10). Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and others have “cast indelible shadows over the meaning and imagination of science and technology in modern societies” (Miller and Bennett 599). Science fiction can provide a means for the public to “engage vitally with scientific and technological futures” (605).
In order to investigate the role of the literary imagination as an anticipatory governance capacity, this paper analyzes themes of birth and reproduction from Mary Shelley’s lived experiences and her encoding of them in her novel. It analyzes archival newspaper evidence from 1800 onwards in order to explore long-running conversations in British society that occurred prior to the 1978 birth of Louise Brown, the first “test-tube baby.” And it explores how the “monster” and “test-tube baby” motifs from Frankenstein and Brave New World framed debates around emerging reproductive technologies and also served as tools for thinking about their governance.
The analysis is divided into three cases. The first case discusses the social and scientific context from which Frankenstein emerged, focusing on the development of galvanism, a real-life emerging technology that influenced Mary Shelley as she was writing her novel. It investigates early calls for the responsible innovation of galvanism leading up to the publication of Frankenstein in 1818. This section also draws from the body of literary criticism on the novel and analyzes the themes of sex, abandonment, reproduction, and death in Mary Shelley’s life and the ways in which they were woven into her novel as a literary and personal “birth myth” (Moers 319). The second case discusses the context surrounding the publication of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It serves as a kind of transition, linking Shelley and Frankenstein to modern considerations around reproduction and technology. The third case looks at the context leading up to the birth of Louise Brown and how Frankenstein and Brave New World shaped the debates around the responsible innovation of reproductive technologies in Britain.
Societal Benefits and Reflections on the Darker Side. Even as early as 1800, the societal benefits of galvanism were being discussed in the public sphere. An article by William Pigram, writing for the Observer in 1800, provides one such example. The application of electricity to medicine had seen great successes, commented Pigram, “where the blind have been restored to their sight, the deaf to their hearing, and the palsied limb to vigour and health” (3). Despite the advances that had been made by trailblazers such as Benjamin Franklin, Pigram noted that the science was “yet in its infancy” (3). The new science of galvanism, remarked Pigram, has given insight into the properties of different metals, that some “have an influence on animals, and so powerful indeed, as to occasion their limbs to contract, and to evince other symptoms of life, even after the animal is dead!” (3). Research in this area would not only be philosophically gratifying, but could also “provide in the highest degree useful to mankind” (3).
While Aldini was unable to restart the heart of a dead animal or human, he did travel through Europe demonstrating his experiments in sending electrical currents through dead bodies in order to make them convulse and move as if alive. Another scientist, Carl August Weinhold, even claimed to have brought dead animals back to life. In one instance, Weinhold used the bodies of decapitated kittens to demonstrate the power of electrical current. By removing their spinal cords and replacing them with zinc and silver batteries, Weinhold was able to start their hearts beating, and the bodies even “bounded around” for a short amount of time (Pilkington).
An early newspaper account of Aldini’s experiments describes his experimental work to the British public in vivid detail. He captivated the attention and imagination of his audience by applying electricity to the body of a dead dog, whose head had been severed from its body, causing it to move as if vestiges of life were still present. Aldini’s display made such an impact that it elicited the suggestion that, out of curiosity, galvanism might be tested on the fresh body of a dead criminal (“Polic”). George Forster would have the unfortunate honor of serving as Aldini’s best known human subject.
Other reflections on galvanism illuminated its darker side, speculating that the possibility of raising the dead could be a tangible reality. In January 1820, a commentary on galvanic experiments labeled the practice as “horrible phenomena!” (cf. Johnson). The experiments, carried out by a Dr. Ure on the corpse of a murderer known as “Clydsdale,” were judged to be “truly appalling” (Johnson 1319). In one of the experiments electricity was applied to the neck of the corpse, and it appeared as if it were going to come back to life. Many observers left the room over the course of the experiment, and one fainted from “terror or sickness” (Johnson 1319). When electricity was applied to the nerves in the elbow, some of the spectators thought the criminal had come back to life, and Dr. Ure felt that the body would have been fully reanimated had the spine not been severed.
Emerging alongside the graphic descriptions of the effects of galvanism on dead bodies were accounts regarding its healing properties—it was “found beneficial in cases of blindness as well as deafness” (“A Character”). The technique was reported to have “great success” in combating paralysis of the optic nerve and even cured a man of madness. The madman, who was bitten by a dog, had suddenly become petrified of water and any object that shined (considered to be symptoms of hydrophobia). He was taken to Professor Rossi at Milan, where the application of galvanism led to an “astonishing cure.” The Observer article that described the man’s fantastic recovery from hydrophobia also reflected that galvanism could “do much harm by misapplication” (“Hydrophobia Cured”). If the technology was “judiciously regulated,” however, it could do a great deal of good; “at the moment when any accidental cause has suspended the functions of the vital organs, [it] may preserve the lives of thousands” (“Hydrophobia Cured”). Other accounts surfaced of ill individuals who were “indebted … to the successful application of Galvanism,” such as Francis Cooke, a “poor blind sailor” whose sight was restored. Following examination by medical experts at Bath, it was declared that “the sight of one eye was perfectly recovered” (“Editorial Article 1”).
Credible Science versus Swindle: Humphry Davy Calls for Debate and Educated Citizens. As galvanism became popular, so too did conversations regarding what comprised credible scientific work. The debate around legitimate versus illegitimate scientific practice was headed by renowned chemist Sir Humphry Davy, a friend of Mary Shelley. Davy was known for lecturing on galvanism and was an outspoken critic of many of its practi-tioners, arguing that many were pretenders masquerading as scientists. In one lecture, detailed in the Observer, Davy emphasized the importance of the history undergirding electrical experimentation, remarking on the work of “illustrious characters” such as Benjamin Franklin in providing foundational knowledge of electricity (“Royal Institution”). Davy also discussed the dangers of an uninformed public; members of the public who could not understand the principles behind the science were setting themselves up to be swindled. It was the duty of scientists, argued Davy, to “pursue and disclose the truth,” and that he would prefer to “be persecuted and die a martyr to its sacred cause, than live the slave of error, and be the parasite of false opinions” (“Royal Institution”).
Davy maintained that science is best cultivated in environments that value free and open discussion, rather than those where freedom is stifled (“Royal Institution”). Although Mary Shelley was only a young girl at the time of Aldini’s famous demonstration at the Royal College of Surgeons, Davy recounted the experiments in vivid detail to her over a decade later.
Widely considered to be the first modern work of sf, Frankenstein sparked the imaginative capacities of the British consciousness in grappling with the evolving relationships between human beings and technology and the increasing power of scientific endeavors to control and manipulate human and animal life. Frankenstein has been called the “foundation-stone of the modern genre of science fiction” (Stableford 11) and the “first myth of modern times” (Hitchcock 4). The mad scientist archetype developed in the novel became a cultural metaphor for “the ever present possibility that scientists, by the very nature of their activities, may get things disastrously wrong and that ordinary people may suffer as a result” (Mulkay 159). As Aldini’s deceased human bodies moved and decapitated kittens “bounded about,” it appeared in Shelley’s lifetime that reanimation would be a real possibility in the near future. The novel highlighted questions about the boundaries and limits of scientific practice and illuminated the value conflicts created by the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, Enlightenment ideas, and the immense potential and peril of science pushing the boundaries of convention.
Frankenstein as a “Birth Myth.” Frankenstein is a reflection on birth, death, technology, and parthenogenesis. As she carefully studied Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), with its glorification of heavenly, angelic maleness, and grotesque, hellish femaleness, the teenage Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was forced to confront the monstrous nature of her own birth, an event that caused her mother’s death eleven days later. She would often go to her mother’s grave at St. Pancras church yard, where she would read with Percy Shelley (including the famous writings of her own parents), write, or have sex with him (Gilbert and Gubar 330). Her teenage years were a complex time in which she had to come to terms with her father’s rejection of her (due to her relationship with Percy), to grapple with the tragic circumstances of her own birth, to develop as a sexual being herself, and to mourn her own failed pregnancies (Badalamenti 420, Gilbert and Gubar 330-31).
She was “barely pregnant but aware of the fact” when she ran away with Percy in July 1814 (Moers 323). At the same time, Percy’s wife, Harriet, was pregnant with his legitimate “son and heir” (qtd. in Moers 323). In November 1814, Harriet gave birth to a healthy son; the following February, Mary’s daughter was born, “illegitimate, premature, and sickly” (Moers 323); and in March 1815, Mary recorded the tragic death of her daughter, who died before she was even given a name (Moers 323-24). When she began work on Frankenstein in the summer and fall of 1816, Mary was still “unmarried, [and] illegitimately pregnant” for the third time, having also had a son by Percy in January 1816 (Gilbert and Gubar 344). The themes of birth and death were therefore as salient and “hideously mixed” in Mary’s own life as they were in Victor Frankenstein’s “workshop of filthy creation” where the unnamed creature was born (Moers 324).
According to Ellen Moers, the novel itself can be considered a “birth myth,” encompassing Mary’s ruminations on birth and death, love and responsibility (319). It was written immediately preceding and during a time when the teenage Mary was almost constantly pregnant or nursing (Gilbert and Gubar 331). She endured multiple miscarriages, and only one of her children survived into adulthood. These experiences had an indelible impact on her. She encoded her feelings into the novel, and it was out of this painful context of birth and death that Frankenstein was born. Frankenstein, as well as the context it emerged from, is a story about parenthood—about the care parents must take for their creations, lest they unleash something truly monstrous upon the world. The novel served as a “substitute expression of deeply troubling feelings” regarding Mary’s own painful experiences with childbirth, miscarriage, and her complex relationships with Percy Shelley, her estranged father, and her dead mother (Badalamenti 420). These chaotic early experiences, particularly her painful experiences of maternity, set her apart from the other writers of the time. It is from such trauma that “monsters [are] born” (Moers 318).
Like Mary Shelley, Gilbert and Gubar observe, “Victor Frankenstein has a baby” (336). He is like the biblical Eve, who “fall[s] into guilty knowledge and painful maternity,” and enters the “realm of generation,” ultimately giving birth “by intellectual parturition to a giant monster” (337). He, too, experiences “‘pregnancy’ and childbirth,” as indicated by the terms he uses to frame his “creation myth,” including such terms as:
‘incredible labours,’ ‘emaciated with confinement,’ ‘a passing trance,’ ‘oppressed by a slow fever,’ ‘nervous to a painful degree,’ ‘exercise and amusement … would drive away incipient disease,’ ‘the instruments of life.’... (337)
Given Shelley’s context, that she was both a woman and a young mother, Frankenstein is “an original twist to an old myth” (Moers 323). Unlike the stories in which a protagonist seeks immortality, pushing the bounds of life and death for his own life-extension, Victor Frankenstein defies this, not by seeking immortality for himself through new science and technology, but “by giving birth” and facilitating the “creation of a new [life]” (323). As she gave birth to her “hideous progeny” of a novel, and as Victor parthenogenetically birthed a nameless creature in his womb-like workshop, Shelley transformed the typical paradigm of a Romantic novel into “a phantasmagoria of the nursery” (324).
The novel serves as an anxious rumination on the role of women in reproduction and the potentially disastrous implications of a world in which women are excommunicated from the reproductive process. Mellor describes this as a “rape of nature,” a “stealing of the female’s control over reproduction,” and an “elimination of the necessity to have females at all” (363, 355).
To sum up, at every level Victor Frankenstein is engaged in a rape of nature, a violent penetration and usurpation of the female’s “hiding places” of the womb. Terrified of female sexuality and the power of human reproduction it enables, both he and the patriarchal society he represents use the technologies of science and the laws of the polis to manipulate, control, and repress women (363). The role of the female is destroyed in Victor’s “usurpation of the natural mode of human reproduction”—this manifests in a nightmare he has after he gives birth to the creature, “in which his bride-to-be is transformed in his arms into the corpse of his dead mother” (Mellor 355).
The theme of “unnatural reproduction” as an endeavor that can lead to disastrous consequences resonates from the novel through debates around new reproductive and genetic technologies in the present day. In the case of Frankenstein, Mellor notes that “Appropriately, Nature prevents Frankenstein from constructing a normal human being: an unnatural method of reproduction produces an unnatural being” (364). This leads to Victor’s immediate “instinctive withdrawal from his child,” an action that “sets in motion the series of events that produces the monster who destroys Frankenstein’s family, friends, and self” (364). Victor is punished by being denied his own chance at “natural procreation” when Elizabeth, his bride, is killed the same day they are wed, preventing him from having his own biological children, “leaving Frankenstein entirely without progeny” (365). The revenge of Nature is “absolute,” writes Mellor: “he who violates her sacred hiding places is destroyed” (365). The novel, without knowledge of the reproductive technologies that would emerge over a 150 years later, provides an early reflection on the potential implications of tampering with nature, describing the undesirable, tragic outcomes that emerged due to Frankenstein’s lack of foresight and rejection of his child. It anticipated the tensions and debates around “natural” versus “unnatural” modes of creation, and the responsibility of creators towards their creations, long before the advent of new reproductive technologies.
The Wings of Daedalus: The Brave New World of the 1930s. While Frankenstein’s monster was making its way into popular discourse, the British state was beginning to focus increasingly on knowing and growing its population. In 1911 the British conducted a census that for the first time included a fertility component. In this year, the falling fertility rate was “placed on an entirely new footing of observational rigor,” with the British government, for the first time, seeking to compile a full overview of “fertility patterns” for the entire nation (including England and Wales, but excluding Scotland) (Szreter 2). The results of the census were published in two reports, one in 1917 and one in 1923. In part, the explanation for the decline became one of birth control technologies—that the wealthier classes were utilizing new methods of birth control in order to limit pregnancies, and the lower classes were following suit. It is against this backdrop of a state obsession with fertility that Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932) was published.
Forty-six years prior to the birth of Louise Brown—the world’s first baby born via in vitro fertilization—writers, journalists, scientists, and citizens were debating the consequences of reproductive technologies that had not yet come into existence. Brave New World provided citizens with a glimpse into a future in which reproduction extends beyond all current scientific and social conventions, where reproduction begins outside of the womb, and human embryos are selected based on their genetic characteristics.
Some of the foundational ideas in Huxley’s novel were likely influenced by his intellectual relationship with biochemist John Burdon Sanderson (J.B.S.) Haldane, a prominent biologist who co-founded the Journal of Experimental Biology with Aldous’s brother Julian Huxley. Haldane was one of the first scientists to argue that ectogenesis, reproduction outside of the human body, was a distinct possibility in society’s near-future, and he was the first to use the term in describing human reproduction outside of the body (Nicol). In his book Daedalus; or, Science and the Future, which was the text of a 1923 lecture that he gave at the Cambridge Heretics Society, Haldane made a number of predictions about scientific advances, particularly in the realm of biology. He predicted that ectogenesis would become universal, and he painted a future Earth that was as compelling as it was horrifying. Haldane closed the lecture with a haunting description of a scientist, working towards the new biological revolution, fully cognizant of its terrible beauty: “The scientific worker of the future will more and more resemble the lonely figure of Daedalus as he becomes conscious of his ghastly mission, and proud of it” (49). While neither Julian Huxley nor J.B.S. Haldane claimed credit for the scientific underpinnings of Brave New World (Nicol), the parallels between Haldane’s visions of the impending biological revolution and Aldous Huxley’s dystopian World State are evident.
Brave New World Enters the Public Lexicon: The Social Significance of Infertility in Britain. “Mr. Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ is going to be fearfully and wonderingly read by everyone,” declared the Observer (“This Week’s Diary”). “Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ stands out as one of the novels of the year which linger persistently in the reader’s memory,” stated another reviewer (Linford). The novel was praised by the Observer as being one of the top four novels of 1932 (“The Albatross”). And a number of British reviews of the book praised it for its prophetic qualities. One reviewer commented that the “metabiological nightmare” that Huxley brought to life “might well be more prophetic than he imagined” and that the novel served as a provocative “deterrent [rather] than a summons to salvation by science” (Brown). Another reviewer noted that Huxley’s “fanciful but compelling ingenuity” illustrated the world as it might be “if our present scientific control of nature were carried to its logical extreme” (Marriott).
The period between the publication of Huxley and Haldane’s work and the 1978 birth of Louise Brown was a time of transition. The pre-World War II conversation, with its focus on fertility and the declining population, was different from the conversation that evolved after the war. There was a line being drawn between the concerns raised by Haldane and Huxley (babies being born without mothers) and the evolving post-WWII framing of research on human reproduction. In the 1960s, with news that researchers were attempting to grow humans outside of the womb, it seemed as if Haldane’s and Huxley’s fears could soon become reality—that modern scientists might become real-life Victor Frankensteins and create monstrosities born through ectogenesis. Frankenstein and Brave New World would continue to shape the debates around human reproduction, but the dominant societal framing around research on human reproduction would evolve again to focus on the tensions between helping infertile couples to have children and the responsible limitations of research on human reproduction. It was into this social context that the work of Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards took center stage, accompanied by a rabbit in the passenger seat.
An Unconventional Passenger. In 1970s England, it was not uncommon for gynecologist Patrick Steptoe to be seen driving from Oldham to Cambridge with a rabbit in the passenger seat of his car (Doyle). Steptoe’s unconventional driving companion served as an ideal incubator for human eggs, which he would remove from women during gynecological surgery and house in the womb of the rabbit for the road trip. Once the eggs successfully arrived in Cambridge, physiologist Robert Edwards would mix human sperm with the eggs in an attempt to create in vitro embryos, or embryos conceived outside of the human body. Fertilization had been successfully achieved with hamster and mouse eggs, but consistent, successful in vitro fertilization of human eggs was proving to be a greater challenge, both technically and ethically (Tucker).
Societal hackles were raised early on when in 1961 Italian embryologist Daniele Petrucci claimed to have achieved successful fertilization of a human egg in a “test tube,” destroying the embryo after 29 days of development, “because it had become monstrous and was about to outgrow its glass cell” (“Italian Charges Test Tube Prof”). The Vatican condemned the activity, stating that creating human life outside of its “natural conditions” would have “monstrous consequences” (“Embryo Experiments Condemned”). A few years later, Petrucci claimed to have created forty embryos through IVF in a device he called a “biological cradle” (“Italian Claims Success”), but again, rather than publishing his results in a scientific journal, he made his announcements through the popular press. Lacking support from Italy, most of Western Europe, and the United States, Petrucci moved to the Soviet Union, where he and Moscow scientists claimed to have developed artificial wombs to keep embryos alive and growing. They even claimed to have kept a fetus alive for six months outside of the womb before it died (Henig 32-33). Petrucci’s claims stirred up dystopian images of cheapened human life and mechanized baby factories and read “like something out of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World” (“Italian Claims Success”). Unlike Petrucci, Edwards was not interested in keeping embryos alive outside of the womb for an extended period of time.
Steptoe and Edwards began collaborating after they met at the 1968 meeting of the Endocrinological and Gynaecological section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Edwards was impressed with Steptoe’s use of laparoscopy in order to diagnose gynecological conditions. Edwards and Steptoe discussed the safety of their methods, as well as the potential ethical ramifications: “We agreed to work together as equals, pursue our work carefully, and stop if any danger emerged to patients or children, but not for vague religious or political reasons” (Edwards 1092). For Steptoe, the collaboration presented a “unique opportunity” to help people: “He was a scientist, I was a doctor. We both wanted to help people who had seemingly insoluble infertility problems. So why not?” (Edwards and Steptoe 99).
New Hope for the Childless. In 1969, The Guardian announced a “startling discovery” in Cambridge. Patrick Steptoe and his team had been successful in fertilizing a human egg with human sperm outside of the human body. They had produced a fertilized embryo, but destroyed it over the course of experimenting on it. The nightly news piece that originally covered the story reported that the nascent technology could go “even further,” by “continu[ing] to develop the fertilised egg artificially and perhaps even produce a human baby without using the mother’s body again at all” (“New Hope for Childless”). The Guardian also quoted a Nature commentary, praising the potentialities of the emerging technology:
The day of the test-tube baby is not here yet, and the advantages of this work are clear. These are not perverted men in white coats doing nasty experiments on human beings, but reasonable scientists carrying out perfectly justifiable research. (“New Hope for Childless”)
In this account, the author is arguing that Steptoe and Edwards are very different from the “perverted” Frankenstein-esque Dr. Petrucci, who was trying to create monsters in test tubes. Rather, these “reasonable scientists” are working for the betterment of society, helping families suffering from infertility. The Nature and Guardian commentaries signify a shift in societal conversations around the nature of research in human reproduction. Despite the shift indicated in these commentaries, the tensions between the solving of health/infertility issues and scientists “playing god” would continue to permeate and shape social debates.
Out of Control Monsters. The 15 February 1969 issue of the Guardian featured a cartoon of a scientist clad in a white laboratory coat, placing sperm into a test tube containing an egg (Tucker, “Conception in the Lab”). As the cartoon progresses, the scientist watches the test tube in happy anticipation, as a baby emerges from it. The next frame shows the scientist standing next to it, patting it on the head. The baby then begins to grow quickly … very quickly. Before the scientist knows it, the baby is taller than he is and begins transforming into a grotesque monster. Now much larger than the scientist, the baby-monster pats the scientist on the head. The last two frames illustrate the out-of-control monster stuffing the scientist into a test tube, and the final frames show the scientist, squished inside the tube, shouting “Son! Let me out son. Listen to me son. Son!!!”
The article accompanying the comic, authored by Guardian Science Correspondent Anthony Tucker, advised readers not to jump to conclusions. He explained that, while it might be a distant possibility that an embryo could be developed to full term within a laboratory—as the Italian scientist Petrucci claimed to have achieved, a feat that was “tinged with horror and hedged round with all manner of moral, ethical and legal problems”—the “potential human value of being able to manipulate fertilisation outside of the body” should not be disregarded. Hereditary diseases and genetic conditions could be avoided using the technique. Tucker wrote that while dystopian human selective breeding programs were likely not right around the corner, the responsibility would rest on society to ensure that such a future would not come into existence (“Conception in the Lab”).
A Cross Between a Virgin Birth and a Frankenstein? Anticipatory Activity Four Years Prior to the Birth of Louise Brown. A mythology exists around the birth of Louise Brown, the first baby conceived via in-vitro fertilization: that her 1978 birth suddenly shocked society out of its technological somnambulism. It has been observed that the 1982 convening of Britain’s Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, chaired by Mary Warnock, and the passage of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act in 1990 were the first significant nodes of anticipatory activity around assisted reproductive technologies. While it can be argued that the establishment of horizon-scanning, forward-looking regulatory entities such as Britain’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in 1991 is a clear example of institutional anticipatory governance (documented in Conley), focusing exclusively on the HFEA leaves out a rich history of governmental and non-governmental anticipatory activity leading up to its establishment. For example, in 1971, the British Association for the Advancement of Science formed an interdisciplinary study group to examine emerging issues associated with new reproductive technologies, such as laboratory fertilization, sperm banks, and artificial insemination. The British Association viewed itself as playing the “special role” of an “intermediary body” by providing links between scientists and society, “educating the public on the one hand and ensuring consideration for the state of science and its social implications by leaders in all walks of life on the other” (Social Concern and Biological Advances 3). The work of this body serves as an example of how imaginative capacities, cultivated through sf, make possible the anticipatory governance illustrated in the final report of the study group, entitled Social Concern and Biological Advances. This report stated that social issues were increasingly being seen as involving issues of science. Additionally, the report noted, “scientific advances themselves often cause difficulties for society” (3). The study group, comprised of scientists including Robert Edwards, church representatives, politicians, journalists, and legal professionals, called for urgent overhauls of existing law and “entirely new measures for control” (Tucker, “‘Test-Tube Baby’ Laws”).
The media quickly picked up the report, with Anthony Tucker writing that such changes were necessary and “urgently needed” if British society was to “cope successfully with the problems posed by sperm banks, artificial insemination, and laboratory fertilisation of human eggs” (“‘Test-Tube Baby’ Laws”). The recommendations put forth by the report to grapple proactively with the emerging issues included special “specifically targeted meetings” between stakeholders (community leaders, politicians, and scientists) to address problems, “public dangers,” and a course of action. Other recommendations included legally defining the status of children born through donor conception, regulating sperm banks, and creating a framework that outlines procedures for the procuring of sperm.
While the report recommended that research on laboratory fertilization techniques should move forward, it also said the government and scientists “must be prepared to act quickly to ‘prevent abuse,’ and that there must be a continuing review of advances in research on genetic engineering so as to foresee ‘implications and social consequences’” (Tucker, “‘Test-Tube Baby’ Laws”). While caution was urged by the study group, researchers such as Anne McLaren, an Edinburgh scientist, argued that an IVF birth would have greater chances for “normality” than a regular birth: “There will be a public tendency to regard the unfortunate child born in this way as a cross between the virgin birth and Frankenstein.... [However] the chances would actually be lower with an egg transfer than with a normal conception because the baby is going to be monitored the whole time” (“Normality Chance”).
Imaginative Capacities in an Age of Frankenstein. Steptoe and Edwards were ultimately successful with their work, resulting in the birth of Louise Brown in 1978. In the years following the birth, Britain established the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, a regulatory body specifically tasked with exploring the future of new reproductive technologies and providing guidance regarding their governance. At the time of Brown’s birth, newspaper articles with headlines recalling images from Frankenstein and Brave New World populated the newsstands in Britain and abroad. In the New York Times (1978), for example, letters to the editor debated the ethics of the technique, invoking the name of Frankenstein and making note of “Brave New World Syndrome” (“Letters on the ‘Threat’”). Today, in the months leading up to the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein and Louise Brown’s 40th birthday, we live in an age of Frankenstein. Themes from Shelley’s and Huxley’s works continue to remain relevant as society grapples with the new capacities presented by emerging technologies, such as the Crispr-Cas9 gene- editing technique. Headlines herald an age of “Frankenflies” sent to destroy the Zika virus (Staletovich) and to protect crops (Poulter), and debate “Regulating the Brave New World of Human Gene Editing” (Smaglik).
The cases discussed above are relevant to an understanding of anticipatory governance because they represent evolving capacities for thinking about and engaging in the governance of emerging technologies—reflections on what society ought to look like, or not look like. They illustrate the capacity of society to participate in anticipatory negotiations of socio-technical contracts long before the technologies themselves come into existence. I use the term “socio-technical contracts” to signify the coupled configurations of social and technological arrangements through which societies envision and organize the construction and application of new and emerging technologies. In each case, socio-technical reconfiguration is ongoing, and each reconfiguration is accompanied by debates about how that reconfiguration should happen. As I have discussed, the capacities for negotiating socio-technical contracts are reflected in the ongoing stories, metaphors, and motifs that shape and engage societal perceptions and debates around new technologies, specifically in this case, those in the biological sciences. In developing the anticipatory governance concept, Barben et al. posit that “futuristic discourse” around technologies, and the accompanying societal considerations and uncertainties, calls for “the cultivation of a societal capacity for foresight” and “more generalized abilities to bridge the cognitive gap between present and future” (991). What are those “generalized abilities” for connecting the present with the future, and what are the modes by which societies cultivate their capacity for foresight? Examining historic cases such as those discussed in this paper provides some insights. Could we think of Humphry Davy’s critique of the practice of galvanism as an early call for responsible innovation? Might we consider the publication of Frankenstein as an informal exercise in capacity building for anticipatory governance, as an exercise in foresight around human reproduction by Mary Shelley? Narratives such as Frankenstein and Brave New World can illustrate what are both attainable and desirable futures for a society, but they can also provide visions of what is not desirable and can play an important role in setting a framework for a robust deliberative capacity for creatively grappling with present and future socio-technical contracts.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Special thanks to Emily York, Monamie Bhadra, Brenda Trinidad, Clark Miller, and David Guston for their feedback on this paper.
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