Frankenstein: 200 Years of Scientific Dread

another world. You will have heard my story and can decide on you would rest, whether I quit forever the neighborhood of man and lead a harmless life, or become the scourge of your fellow creatures and the author of your own speedy ruin. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I am Christian Seger. And as you might have guessed from the title or from Robert's reading just now, we are talking

about Frankenstein. It is the month of October, it is our favorite time of year, and Frankenstein is two hundred years old this year, so we felt like we had to do an episode on Frankenstein. Yeah, it's such a great topic because it's it brings everything together, Like Frankenstein, of course, is just as a horror stand out, just a horror icon, um that the novel itself is a classic, and more importantly, I guess for a science show is

Frankenstein continues to cast this shadow over the sciences. It emerges from science, and and it continues to color our understanding and at times fear of science. It is. It is essentially science fiction. People often, you know, you forget about that when you just get caught up sometimes and just the sheer monster aspects of the thing. Yeah. I even read one account that described it as the first

science fiction novel. I don't know if that's necessarily true, but certainly we think of it as horror, probably more because of the movies. But the book itself is a little bit of both. And it's not the book itself, which we're gonna mainly focus on the book today. Of course, we'll talk about the other pop culture resonance of this book throughout history. But the book is not gory. It's uh, you know, the scenes where the monster kills people are

pretty much just like then he's snapped her neck. You know, it wasn't like, uh, it's it's not it's not Boris Karlafi even right, Yeah, it's it's really a tremendous book, but I think stands the test of time rather nicely. I don't think it communicates well to modern viewers. It's it's it's a complex book. The the monster, the creature is not just it's not it's not just a you know,

a shambling killer. He's a complex creature. Likewise, Victor Frankenstein is neither hero nor pure villain in this There are there are shades of gray and him as well. So it's a it's a story ultimately of two complex into vide rules of a creator and the created, and all the various um interpretations of that that flow both religiously scientifically and purely cultural. Yeah, there certainly are a lot,

and that's not really our mission here on this show. Um. I'm sure there are lots of other podcasts that are doing great uh literary readings of Frankenstein and sort of tearing apart its themes. We'll talk about those, but we're here mainly to look at the science behind it. Uh. We will briefly talk though, as we usually do, about you know, the the cultural importance of this media artifact basically, and I think it would be great for us to

start off by saying what's your favorite? What's your favorite Frankenstein. Yeah, I mean we all have our favorites, and these favorites are not always going to be colored by our you know, our appreciation for the text. You know, it's just growing up with the monster. Yours is the Aaron Eckhart form. My Frankenstein isn't that. I haven't seen that, and I kind of want to. It's real bad um for me.

I have to start by saying, I've never seen an adaptation where I felt like the monster, the creature, you know, captured the essence of the creature from the novel. So so I'm being perhaps a little unfair there, but but yeah, there's a there's this sort of idea of what the monster could be, and I've yet to see that really come to fruition on film. I do have to say, though, I have very strong memories of seeing what was probably

for many a rather lackluster Frankenstein. I don't know if I may be alone in this being like an iconic Frankenstein for me. But there was a TV movie, and I believe it aired on tnt UH titled Frankenstein, and it starred Patrick Bergen as Dr Frankenstein and Randy Quaid as as the creation and it it was it was quite I remember it as being good. I don't know if you would hold up Randy Quaid. And it was a seri serious movie. It was like a comedic Frankenstein.

It was a serious period piece. And Quade gave really a great serious performance as the monster. That was you know, I'm on par with what's in the book, you know, maybe not not perfect, but still in keeping with the novel. And and Patrick Bergen is always great. Uh. It featured, you know, all the arctic intrigue that that I always loved in the book that is absent from some of the film adaptations, many of the film adaptations really Uh.

It also has some wonderful scenes in which the monster and later he is doomed bride or created out of like a lead red liquids just kind of like a primordial soup that he brews up in a tank. And it was directed by David Wicks, who also did a Jekyl and Hide TV movie from nineteen ninety that starred Michael Caine and Cheryl Ladd and Josh Auckland. And I remember seeing that one on TV and finding it rather terrifying.

As well. Wow. Well, this was a period of time where I didn't live in the United States, so I must have it must have been off my cultural radar because I didn't have American television then, but I had never heard either of these. Wow, I was like Nursed on American television. There was no avoiding it for me. But yeah, I remember that's That's a film adaptation that I think back to a lot, even though I haven't seen it since I've seen it on TV in like,

I should really give it another viewing. Yeah. Well, from my part, I have two that I really love. The first is Bernie writz In, who a lot of people out there know as just a famous illustrator, especially in the horror genre. He in the late seventies early eighties had this passion project where he wanted to do an illustrated version of Frankenstein, and uh he did. It took him years to finish it, but Marvel Comics published it,

I think in the early eighties. Since gone out of print, but earlier this year, I was at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, and I found an oversized edition of this Frankenstein copy. In fact, that's right in front of me. Right now. And man, the illustrations in it are gorgeous. I think writs In is like one of the few people who captures the monster's essence, uh, at least according to the book. Um.

And this is just a really beautiful copy. So I always think of when I think of the Monster, and when I think of Victor Frankenstein, I think of these drawings. But I have to say, there's a totally whacked out version of Frankenstein that I also love from the comics that, uh, a guy we often talk about on the show, Grant Morrison did very short for issue series Frankenstein, Agent of Shade, and uh, Frankenstein is basically a monster hunter. The monster,

not Victor Frankenstein. He's a monster hunter and uh he goes like all over the world and even to Mars to hunt monsters. Uh. And it's just this absolutely insane, uh psychedelic Frankenstein ride. Uh and and uh so yeah, he's like part of like a group called Shade that's basically like like the government version of like a paranormal control team or something like that. So they send him in.

The Bride is in it too, and she's also an agent, and they have like sown extra arms on her, so she's like she's got a bunch of guns and weapons and stuff like that that she you know, she's adept at fighting with like I think six or seven limbs or something like that. Well, this sounds about right for for Grant Morrison. You have a gothic um horror creature that is also kind of a Hindu goddess that involved in some sort of paranormal psychedelic and oh yeah, he

very much plays up the Hindu goddess part. She even has like a jewel I think on her forehead and yeah, I should check that out. Um. And then of course, just from growing up the ones that well not growing up the ones that I love to or tom Noonan and Monster Squad, he was my Frankenstein because he was just like the nicest Frankenstein who helped out the kids at the end of that movie. He was a good guy Frankenstein. He was yeah, the monster and uh lately,

uh Penny dreadful. Rory Kneer's performance in that as the monster is wow, really great and it's essentially Robert Smith is very much Yeah, I can't remember the name of the guy who plays Victor Frankenstein. But he's incredible as well. The whole Frankenstein arc in Penny Dreadful Is is amazing,

very well done. Um. I have to say too that I have a lot of love for the Hammer Horror films, and there are spredations of of Frankenstein and the creature Christopher Lee, right, um it it depends on who's involved, you know. It's kind of a a revolving cast at times. Though.

Peter Peter Cushing played Victor or Dr Frankstein or whatever or Baron Frankenstein, whatever twist they were doing on it in a number of them, so he's kind of like the iconic Frankenstein, the Man, the Monster varied, but from a purely design level, I really love David the Prowls monster from Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell from Yeah. I'm sure you've seen this one where the monster looks like a gorilla with like the top of its headstone

back on classic Hammer Horror special effects. Yeah, so it looks tremendous. Yeah, we're really you know, uh, here in the States, I really wish that there was like easier access to all of those Hammer things. You can find a lot of them on YouTube nowadays, but like man, it would be great if you could just like stream all of those on like one service or or get them at your local video shop or something like that. They're really you have a great local video shop like

video yeah can, but that's it's harder with these streaming services. Yeah, yeah, they're not as readily available. Although Hammers making a comeback right now, so maybe they'll, I don't know, put their archives up so everybody can watch these crazy Frankenstein movies again. You know, I should go ahead, and we should go ahead and make one point before we move on into the media the episode, and that is, of course, there's always the whole Uh, there's Frankenstein the man, there's the

creature of the monster. And some people get really upset if you refer to the monster as Frankenstein. And yes, technically that is so the creature is not named Frankenstein, but at this point in the tradition of the character, it's it's almost interchangeable, it is. Yeah. In fact, almost every article I read for researching this episode had that disclaimer in it. And I believe it was St. Joshi,

who we've talked about on the show before. You've interviewed him on the show before he's a famous horror Uh would you say literate critic? Uh? He was basically like, look at this point, like it's not even worth arguing about. Like it's just become a cultural norm that people refer to the monster as Frankenstein. Just let it go. Let's all move on. Yeah, so we're probably gonna do a

little bit of both and just there with us forgive us. Personally, I love it when someone refers to plural Frankenstein's monsters by calling them Frankenstein's likens. Took the field and defeated I don't know, the New England Patriots. That would be a great I would actually watch sports if that was if that was available with Victor is the Coach, Ye green One, make that movie you heard it here first.

All right, Well, on that note, let's let's move Let's move ahead, and in doing so, let us move back in time and talk about the origins of Mary Shelley's um classic novel. Yeah. So, like I said, this isn't a literary podcast, but I do think it's important that we established some bit of a setting here for how this book was created, for what we're going to talk about science wise later on, Because some of this is important and the listeners may not be aware of this.

Some of it I wasn't aware of until dove in yesterday. So, uh, it's the two d year anniversary. We've been talking about this. Why is that important? Well, eighteen sixteen was referred to as the Year without a Summer. Most people know the story that Mary Shelley Percy Shelley, lord Byron and John Paula. Doori were in Switzerland vacation ng and they had a competition with one another to see who could write the

best horror story, and Mary came out with Frankenstein. What a lot of people don't know is that this was during an unexpectedly cold summer in Switzerland, So that's why they were enclosed indoors the whole time. And the reason why was it was a year after an eruption at Mount tim Bora and that had affected the climate somehow and made it much colder. I guess because the ash was still in the Yeah. Yeah, Like, if anyone anyone out there is familiar with the nuclear winter and theories

regarding that, it's the same thing. You have. Yeah, you have material that's ejected into the upper atmosphere and it serves as kind of a shade that chills the world. So they were stuck indoors trying to amuse themselves, and they came up with this contest and Mary started working on Frankenstein Um. For their parts, Byron wrote sort of like a summary and I guess polla DOORI then like took it further and wrote it into a story called The Vampire, which is another horror classic, and it later

influenced brom Stoker's Dracula. So this, you know, um Year without a Summer is like highly influential on the genre of horror as we know it. But here's another thing I didn't know. I'm curious if you've heard of this before. I learned about it from a comic book, a graphic novel by Warren Ellis and an artist named Marrik Olick SICKI called Frankenstein's Womb. And apparently there's two theories of

real life events that also contributed to the book. The first is that before they went to Switzerland for this infamous vacation, Mary and Percy visited the real Frankenstein castle that's near Drumstock, Germany in eighteen fourteen, and the story about that place goes that Conrad Dipple was there and he had experimented with human bodies there in his pursuit

of alchemy. So it's possible that Mary heard about all of this before uh they even went and had their horror story competition, and that she based Victor Frankenstein on Conrad Dipple. He claimed to have invented in a mixer of life, and he was rumored to have experimented on dead bodies. So there's lots of similarities. But this is like one of those things that sort of lost to history.

Nobody really knows well. I mean, there's certainly a alchemical DNA and Frankenstein's yeah, yeah, you know, it seems likely the second theory that comes out of this Frankenstein's Womb book, and it has been expressed in other places. Obviously, it's not like Warren Ellis cooked it up? Uh? Is that thematically Frankenstein is about a premature birth that Mary had an eighteen fifteen where their baby died two weeks after

it was born. So this is uh again like there and I'll get into this, like this woman had a horrible life full of medical misfortune, and honestly, it really seems like Percy Elly treated her like garbage. But it said that he didn't even care about the baby's condition after it was born, and went on to have an affair with her step sister right after I was born. Uh,

and that Frankenstein. The writing of it is her reconciliation with giving life and then that life dying, the death of her baby, and the horrible father that she had to put up with. So um and just all right, here's a little a side note about Percy Shelley. It sounds like an awful person all the way around. Like everything I've read about it, he just doesn't sound like a pleasant guy. Um. Not only was he this obnoxious adulterer, but according to Paula Dory's diary from that summer, this

is just one little instance of him. They were all sitting around telling stories or something, and Shelley just stood up and grabbed his head and started shrieking and ran out of the room like very pretentiously, and everybody was like, what is this all about? And he runs into the bathroom, he throws water into his face, and he comes back and he goes, well, I'm sorry, it's just while you

were talking. Just then, I suddenly imagine a woman who had eyes instead of nipples, and everybody was just like, oh, okay, moving on. Uh so he seems like a real character. Um, And I imagine for for Mary's part, you know, she I think they got together at like super early age, like she was like sixteen or something like that, and they were married maybe when she was nineteen or twenty, but like she had already given birth to this premature child. A lot, a lot of weird stuff around this, And well,

I guess I'm that theories like that. I can certainly see where it could be a part of the genesis of the story, because certainly misfortune and life in Vincent general tend to color our creative endeavors. But I guess I tend to shy away from theories that say, oh, this book right here is all about this one thing. Yeah, and I just don't think life necessarily works like well, and Frankenstein is one of those books right that, like I'm trying to remember if I read it in high school.

I definitely read it in college because I took a horror classes in college. But like, um, it's one of those books sort of like Catcher in the Rye where you can like you as the reader, bring your themes to it, and lots of people try to apply those and say, like this, this is what this is about, right, Uh, and Frankenstein is one of those. I mean it it's very universal in that way. Um, and so a lot

of people take different things from it. So, yeah, you're right, there isn't Those are just two sort of little maybe factoids about its genesis. Another thing I read was an article called the Medicine of Shelley and Frankenstein out of a journal called Emergency Medicine, and this sort of traced the medical misfortunes as I mentioned earlier, of Mary Shelley and how they may have influenced it. That she was very much aware of science, medicine, and the ideas of

life and death because of all of these things. So I'm gonna hit you with him real quick. So Mary Shelley's mother was Mary Wolston Kraft, who was a prominent feminist at the time, but she literally died ten days after giving birth to Mary from puerre parole fever, which was a pretty common occurrence at the time. I think. Uh. There's also a mention of the birth of their daughter, who I talked about earlier. Clara, that's the one who

died at twelve days of age. Reportedly, Mary had dreams of this dead daughter being reanimated by fire right afterwards. So you can imagine how like traumatized this woman was, Like she grew up without a mother, her first kid dies, she's I guess like eloped with this kind of jerk. Uh. In eighteen sixteen, just after Mary gave birth to their second child, William, her sister Fanny, committed suicide with laudanum.

Then in eighteen seventeen, Percy had another wife and her name was Harriet, and she committed suicide while she was pregnant with his child. Two weeks later, two weeks after this woman commits suicide, Percy, Mary's Mary. And then they have a third child, and that's Clara Everina Shelley, and she died at thirteen months of age from dysenterry. Then William, who was the one who was born earlier, he dies

in eighteen nineteen from malaria. So she's she's had three kids who died, her sister, her what do you call her other wife, and then her mother, they've all, like every everybody around her just died. Uh. And then Percy himself is lost at sea in eighteen two. Mary contracts smallpox in eight and she lives until the ripe old age of fifty two, when she died from a brain tumor.

So you guess you could say her short life was full of life, death, and the the whims of brilliant but unstable men exactly, which makes sense regarding the book, and and just that, like she would have been aware of a lot of the medical scientific goings on of the time, not just because of this, but also because her father and Percy and Byron they were all sort of interested in this stuff and talked about it and met with scientists at the time, as we'll talk about later.

So at the heart of Frankenstein, of course, we have the tale of a of a human creating life, particularly a human male creating life, using science to do so. Uh and and in and in that, like the mythic roots of this thing run pretty deep. And and if you follow the mythic roots far enough, you also reach like the basic uh, psychological underpinnings of this this whole notion of of humans giving life to an unliving object. Um. So I'm just gonna gonna gonna coast through some of

this here for you. So so we have numerous examples of this to draw in myth of course you've got uh. For instance, the Greek myth of Pygmalion, in which you know, female scalp sculpture is is awoken with the help of the god Venus. Uh. Medieval Jewish folk tales are full full of golems um, artificial beings that are you know, brought to life via a tablet of sacred words that are inserted beneath the clay, humanoids, tongues, um. Countless other

examples exist now. But humans have a knack for attributing life to artificial likenesses. And it's we call this anthropomorphism, and it refers to when we take non human or impersonal objects and we give them human or personal characteristics or behaviors. Yeah, and so this is a good spot for us to note something about Shelley's version of the monster, Uh, that this Frankenstein's Monster was not sewn together and blasted to life with lightning, as we've come to understand from

James Whale's ninety one film Uh. In fact, the machines that are in that were actually inspired by Nicola Tesla's high voltage devices. In the book, however, the monster is more like a golem or homunculous and that it's brought about by what is called, quote, an elemental principle of life like alchemy that is then applied to various quote raw materials from the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse. So yes, it's undead meat, I guess, but it's not even necessarily

human parts. It's more like a flesh goum. Yeah. And while there is you know, an allusion to some sort of electrical nature to the secret, it's very much a secret in the book because the book is is is told from the point of views of Victor and the creature, and Victor, as a first person uh narrator here does not want to share his secret. Like most of the book is about how ashamed and awful he feels about having brought this thing into being, and therefore he wants

to die with the secrets. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Remember the narrative setup is that they're in the Arctic. He's on a ship with the ship's captain I think, or somebody who's on the ship and just basically telling recounting the story to him and is full of woe at all the tragedy that it has wrought him. Yeah, as he and his created chase each other to the ends of

the earth. But but yeah, we have this basic idea that just that we have the power to think things to life, not in a literal sense, but in a you know, in a metaphoric and psychological sense. A brick is just a brick until we paint a smiley face on it, and then it becomes inevitably a little harder or a little easier to throw that brick down a well,

because he'ven imbued it with a sense of being. And this interesting court stems from something anthropologists called the law of similarity, which holds that humans inevitably links superficial, real life resemblances to deep, unreal resemblances. So a baby doll is in an actual infant, but it resembles one enough to make it real to the child who plays with it. And there's a way to test the law of similarity on your own. You can sketch a face of a loved one on a scrap of paper and then crumple

it in your hand. And when you do that, do you feel a connection? Do you feel like connects in that your mind forms, including the resemblance and the thing itself probably so. Uh so. Out of this phenomenon, we have innumerable magical and religious practices that emerge in human culture, such as harming a person's likeness to produce the same effect on the actual person uh so called sympathetic magic that includes the burning of effigies, the use of voodoo dolls.

And the roots of anthropypomorphic thinking lie in the human capacity for reflective consciousness, the ability to use what we know about ourselves to understand and predict predict the behaviors of others. And these empathetic qualities gave early humans and evolutionary advantage along that did not only outthink other people, but also to fit the behaviors of domesticated animals within the confines of human society. Yeah yeah, that's very important.

Yeah so. And then as a as kind of a sidebar to that, it also gives us the place and human cognition to dream about bringing man made likenesses to life, be it a at you of a woman or a flesh golemn in a Gothic basement, which brings us to alchemy. Um, and I want to read a passage here from the book. Actually, before we dive into this, there is Mary Shelley was obviously well aware of alchemy at the time, and she

works it into the book. There's a point where Victor's studying at the university and he's got some um I guess mentors, and one of them is referred to They don't give his first name, he's just M. Waldman. But Waldman sort of, you know, guides Victor's study and says, you can use my machine. So he's it's implied Waldman sort of knows how to do this himself. Maybe uh. And he says this about alchemists. He says, the ancient

teachers of this science promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The modern masters promised very little. They know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt and their eyes to pour over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her

hiding places. They ascend into the heavens. They have discovered how the blood circulates and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers. They can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows. So there's a little bit of a set up here that Shelley's giving us, which is, yes, alchemy was a thing, and we acknowledge that Victor Frankenstein is pretty influenced by it.

But modern science is here to pave the real way the alchemy left behind. Yeah, And and then I think it gets to the heart of what alchemy was, uh, you know, basically from the sixteenth of the eighteen centuries, it was a hodgepodge of early chemistry, occultism, essential all these these uh, these these graspings for understanding, some rooted in in pre scientific chemistry, like in an actual attempt to understand how these chemical properties interact with each other

and other. But but that is kind of muddled in together with a bunch of essentially who we uh, some actual like you know, there were some interesting discoveries that came out of alchemy, but you didn't have scientific rigor there to guide it right. And remember Conrad Dipple, who may or may not have influenced this story, was an alchemist and claimed that he had found the elixir of life. Now, the elixir of life is also known in alchemic circles

as the Philosopher's Stone. Yeah, the philosopher's Stone was certainly one of the main alchemical um uh goals. Maybe well, but there were a couple of other things that were interesting as well. Of course, there's there's always the attempt to turn things into gold, um right. For instance, there was a seventeen entry alchemist Hinnig Brundt distilled countless buckets of urine in an attempt to turn urine into gold. And if only we could do that only yeah, uh so,

if I could only spin urine into gold. His experiment failed, which would come to know, there's no surprise to anyone. But it did allow him to discover the element phosphorus. So so you can see here and how even though it was unguided and uh and uncertain and muddled with all these other disciplines, they still occasionally accidentally achieve something now and again, it's the history of science. Yea. Now, the fictional Frankenstein's work closely resembles alchemical attempts to produce H,

a minuscule artificial human avoid known as a homunculus. Uh and and uh. I've looked into this summing in the past. I'm always fascinated by the homunculus. Do you have a monster science episode about homunculi? I don't know. I just I've done a few posts here and there about it.

There's a there's a mini text known as the Libavack or the Book of the Cow, and it it lays out the homunculous creation formula and bizarre details so that the process begins by mixing human semen with a mystical phosphorescent elixir and ends with a newborn humunculous emerging from a cow, growing human skin and craving its mother's blood inside of a large glass or lead vessel. That sounds

totally legit to me. I mean, at any time I've mixed human semen with phosphorescent elixir, something close to this happens. I think I've been missing the cow ingredient. But but but at hard here? So what while lost amid false

concepts of spontaneous generation and magical Tomfoolery. Alchemists were pondering the possibility of creating an artificial rational animals, as they sometimes referred to it, through learned manipulation of organic tissue, and at the time, it was widely believed that humans could mimic and manipulate such natural reproductive processes, but biological science was still incubating, and humanity's first breakthroughs came in

the form of machines, uh, not flesh. And it's worth noting here too that the novel states that Victor specifically studied books by Albertus Magnus, Paris Celsus, and Cornelius Agrippa, who were all known alchemists, and that he considered lords of his imagination. Uh. Now, let's take a quick break. But when we get back, we can get into the machinery aspect of this of bringing life about by talking about automatons. Alright, we're back. So the automaton uh slightly

different deal than Frankenstein. I can't think offhand of any examples of like Frankenstein adaptations where they've gone for like a purely mechanical monster. The one that immediately pops into my head is Frankenstein's Army. Have you seen that? Yes, Yeah, they're very mechanical, but there is like organic tissue stone in there too, right, Yeah, they're kind of like steam punky.

Side words, Josh Clark turned me to that movie and I watched it on Netflix one time, So if you've never seen it, the premise of the movie is that Victor Frankenstein, it's like his grandson or somebody like that, is alive during World War two and the Russians. He's working for the Russians and he builds like this army of Frankenstein's that then just destroyed Nazis. And it's it's a found footage film too, like somehow they're filming the

entire thing during World War Two. It's a it's pretty great. It's been a sixteen it's more of a filmed haunted attraction that's more of a house than it is a movie. But it's still a lot of fun if you're in for that. The monster designs are amazing. That's the the best part. Now, as far as it's Frankenstein is concerned, Uh,

you know, we don't see a purely mechanical Frankenstein. It certainly that's not what he presented in the book, But it's really difficult to think about Frankenstein's historical underpinnings without thinking about the obsession of of automatons, the idea that, Okay, certainly people can't build something out of flesh, but we can build machines. And if we build machines that look like humans, if they if we can program them to to or make them so that they move in certain ways,

then we are at least mimicking a living body. Um. They're not intelligent in any sense of the world at word, but they serve as a forerunner to modern computational robots. Now. Accounts of automatons date back as far as the fourth century b C. When when a Greek poet Pindar wrote of animated statues on the streets of Rhodes uh and

you had accounts of other individuals building self propelled mechanical birds. Overtime, Countless engineers and inventors applied their intellect to create mechanical, pneumatic, hide rolic and even electric mimicry of biological life, and their attempts rained from Leonardo da Vinci's fifteenth century robotic Night, which was apparently designed to walk and sit to Jacques de w Consin's eighteenth century digesting duck, which which made the rounds, it was really more of a performance thing.

It was supposedly this mechanical duck was using its motorized chewing abilities, uh, to to eat and then it's digesting, and then it has a mechanical sphincter to mimic defecation. Uh. Reportedly the inspiration for the tre ducan. Yeah, in a way, kind of a mechanical tre duncan, but it didn't actually digest anything. It was just kind of a part of

the trick, but it didn't include actual biomimicry mechanics. But it all reflects this this idea that Okay, if the body may be mechanical in nature, and if we can build machines that replicate it, then then perhaps this is the first step and getting to the point where we can we can build a rational animal, that we can build a human, We can build an animal, we can build a duck that digests. That these things are within

the graphs of human achievement. Yeah, this speaks to I think just like this ongoing theme throughout human myth and also in science to a certain degree. But of you know, us creating life outside of our regular reproductive means, right, And of course Frankenstein's about that, But you can even say, like I don't know data from Star Trek. The next generation is also about that, right, like the way in

his own way he's at Frankenstein. You know it. It gets down to stuff we're still struggling with today, Like whatever we can create that that resembles a human, that resembles a human human thought, that that tweaks the human design? Like what's the divide between all that? That that that biology, the biomechanics, and actual identity, actual consciousness. Seventeenth century French

philosopher Reneed de Cartes viewed nature is primarily mechanical. He avoided the messier existential complications of this view by defining the human soul as an independent force, as as the ghost in the machine, as as philosopher and Descartes's critic Gilbert Ryle would later describe it, Yeah, Descartes classic philosopher, the old am I a brain in a jar? How do I prove that I'm not just a brain in a jar? And a demon is torturing me into thinking

that existence is real? That was That was like pretty much a whole semester of college for me, was trying to wrap my brain around that one. Yeah, and like I said, it, stuff we're still were worrying about today as we we were further and further towards the sort of artificial intelligence that potentially reflects our own consciousness. So that too, is as a major theme and in Frankenstein, because because the creature is, like I say, unlike some of the more basic uh film adaptations, he is a

rational creature, he has them, he has emotions. You feel a lot of sympathy for him in the book, really more in my heating anyway, you feel more sympathy for the creature than you do for Victor, who who is reckless and impulsive and uh, just kind of a disaster and and what is the creature but a result of his disastrous choices. Yeah, And this brings us around to the alternate title of the book, which is the modern Prometheus. Uh.

And in many ways, Victor is that modern Prometheus. And as we were talking about earlier, there's a million different ways that you can try to dissect that and figure out what the themes are going on there. I think the term modern Prometheus was coined by Emmanuel Kant and in reference it was referencing Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity.

So let's take this apart for just a second. Here, Prometheus in the Greek iteration stole fire from the gods, right, But then there's a Latin iteration as well of Prometheus, and he was basically bringing men to life I think from clay by using particles of quote, heavenly fire, so also electricity maybe. Um So there's there's a lot going

on in there. Was Mary Shelley purposely connecting it to both of those and how did she envision this the I guess symbology of Prometheus as as relevant to her context right the time that she lived in when people were experimenting with electricity, trying to discern what the meaning was between life and death and whether you could use

electricity to revive a dead body. Yeah, I mean the Promethean figures are are fascinating and in various mythologies, be at actual Prometheus or some other generation of where you have a character, uh an individual demigod, even sometimes it's just kind of a semi human hero who takes something from the gods and gives it to humans generally, it's like a technology or an ability. Their their Chinese myths where it's uh, it's more agricultural in nature, and so like,

what does that what does that mean? Does that mean that that humans here have they have they stepped out of beyond their boundaries? Are they doing so they dabbling in God's domain? Or is it simply like, hey, they have mastered something. Here is something that previously was the domain of of of of of of forces beyond their imagination,

and now it is within the human experience. Yeah. Obviously makes me think of the recent movie Prometheus, set within the alien mythology and the beginning of that where these uh what are they? These statuesque engineer aliens come to Earth and give life to earth basically by I mean, there's the first five minutes of the film, like one of them just dissolves, right and like his cellular parts become the nature of life. Well, yeah, they're presented as titans.

Prometheus was a Titan, So it's it's I mean, it's really the the metaphor is strong in that one. Yeah. So this brings us to the real nuts and bolts science behind Frankenstein and that all starts with bioelectricity. So I want to do just a real basic encyclopedia breakdown of what we mean by bioelectricity. Here we're referring to the electric potentials and currents that are produced by or

occurring within living organisms. So this is not necessarily Frankenstein's monster, but the experiments of people like Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta in the eighteenth century influenced this field of study, and we're gonna talk about them much more in the next couple of minutes. Generally, they were looking for a connection between electricity and the muscle contractions and frogs and other animals, and it lead to modern developments where we

can now measure bioelectric effects and clinical medicine. Right, you know, we can measure uh, how electricity emanates from our hearts and our brains, etcetera, as part of our modern medicine. The difference is that bioelectric city currents consist of a flow of ions, whereas the kind of electrical current that we use for power UH is more of a movement

of electrons. Bioelectric pulses a company all muscular contraction and a nerve and muscle cells Basically what happens there's a chemical or electrochemical stimulation that changes the cell membrane, so they discharge a current along those fibers and activate the contractile mechanism, so the contraction of these muscles. Now, Professor Sharon Rustin has written quite a bit about the science behind the context of the time that Mary Shelley was living in the influence this, and I want to talk

about a couple of these. There's uh three or four. The first is that at the time of the novels writing, drowning and resuscitation from drowning were a very big thing, as she tells it, despite the fact that a lot of people worked along the Thames in London, they couldn't necessarily swim uh. And so there was this group that

was started called the Royal Humane Society in London. It was established in seventeen seventy four, but its first name was the Society for the Recovery of Persons apparently drowned uh, and its whole aim was to publish information on how

to resuscitate others and save lives. Saving people from drowning was such a big deal that they used to have an annual procession in London of all of the people that were quote raised from the dead by these methods, okay, one of these people was Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wolston Craft, who had tried to kill herself by jumping off of Putney Bridge into the Thames, and afterwards she complained that

she was inhumanely brought back to life and misery. And as a consequence of these resurrections, there was a growing fear that wasn't just drowning, Like maybe you could appear dead and then you'd, oh, you'd be alive. So what if I get buried alive? This is where people really

start freaking about the idea of being buried alive. Uh. Yeah, this is interesting to think about because if you think back to a time where we're falling in the water, not being able to swim, essentially drowning, that that's just a complete death sentence, And then you see an uptick in the survivability of these experiences. Um he could we view it today is just a basic reality that individuals can be resuscitated. But but when the idea is fresh,

it takes on these kind of supernatural aspects. Yeah very much so. Uh, I mean Here's the thing is that doctors at the time, in fact, one of them was Shelley's doctor. His name was James Curry, wrote a book where he argued that the only way to be sure that someone was dead was if putrification began. Other states like painting, or being in a coma, or even being

asleep were sort of considered to be like death. And we see this reflected in the book Frankenstein in the way that she uses language to describe like when Elizabeth faints or when Victor collapses. They talk about it as if like they were momentarily dead and then came back. So it was a very different understanding of the difference between life and death at that time. Now we get into Galvani, Volta and Aldini. These are the Italian electrocutioners,

as I like to call them. These guys played with electricity. My understanding is you guys talked about the You and Joe talked about them in a previous episode that was all about sort of the zany religious antics around electricity. Uh yeah, yeah, Well, I'll be sure to include a link to to that episode of those episodes in the

on the landing page for this episode. So in the eighteen thirty one preface to the book, Shelley mentions that modern scientific discussions in galvanism influenced her story, and what she was referring to was the work of Italian physician Luigi Galvani. Uh And this guy basically found that a dead frog's leg would twitch as if they were alive when they are struck with a spark of electricity. He figured this out in seventeen eighty one while he was

dissecting a frog nearby a static electricity machine. His assistant accidentally touched a scalpel to a nerve in the frog's leg. The leg moved, and Galvanni immediately changed all of his research into something he called animal electricity. Tried to replicate

this experiment over and over again. His contemporary, Alessandro Volta, was one of the earliest readers of these papers, and he had already earned a reputation as discovering electric potential and charge, as well as being the first person to isolate methane gas. So Volta reproduced Galvani's experiments, but he had a totally different conclusion. He thought the electricity actually came from the metals in the in the room. The dissimilar metals and that the frog itself was just simply

a conductor for those. Galvani in the meantime, believed that electricity resided in the frog itself and thought the two dissimilar metals were merely conducting electricity from one part of the frog to another. He thought electrical energy was actually intrinsic to biological matter. And they developed this bitter feud over it, and academics from you know, around all just took sides and it became like an issue. It was like a modern debate. Um. They were both kind of

right in their own ways. They were also both kind of wrong in their own ways. I mean, it was a time when we were still trying to figure out what electricity was and how it worked, and then certainly how it it was involved in the in the processes of the human body and the movement of muscles, etcetera. And an electricity kind of had this holy area at the time, but it was this mystery of it was there was something divine in it. And this is even before like we get into uh Edison and Tesla and

their electricity wars and all that. In Volta invented the voltaic pile. Uh. This was basically a stack of disks of two different metals that were separated by brine soaked paper. This was the world's first battery. He invented it, and we know his stack worked today because dissimilar metals transfer electrons in an oxidation reduction reaction. We also know that the reason why the frog legs moved is because of what I was talking about earlier. Electricity plays a role

in muscular contractions. So again, they're both right, they're both wrong. Galvani actually responded to both the skepticism though, and he's just he just keeps conducting more sets on various animals and their exposed nerves and keeps recreating muscle contractions without those dissimilar metals present. Uh. And he absolutely believed nerves were insulated with non conductive coding, which we now call myelin, and that electrical impulses traveled through them to muscle cells.

There's another article that I read by guy named Richard Shaw, and it's called Volta's Battery, Animal Electricity and Frankenstein. All this stuff is connected. Uh. Shaw argues that Volta's invention was significant to the novel, as was Galvani and the existence of the idea of animal electricity. Uh. He argues that Shelley's book is actually a challenge of Volta's research trying to distinguish life in the near appearance of life.

So uh, it puts her in the book right in the middle of this big debate that was going on. And this is a quote from his paper. He says, Shelly understands animal electricity not as life, but as a token for life, and thereby arrests the tendency of the vitalists to make it an object and to mistake it for life itself. So this brings up a question where

we talked about this earlier. It's very unclear in the book what science is actually being used to create Frankenstein, and it seems to come out of as I recall, like he's just he's working himself over, clocking himself to the point of just near just I meanbe actually complete physical exhaustion. So he he alone has the brilliance, madness, and determination to grasp the secret, and he's not about

to share it with the rest of us because it's horrible. Well, we might be able to unpack this a little bit. Maybe the secret was the voltaic battery, at least in terms of what Shelley knew about at the time. Now here's where things get even weirder. And this also happened before Shelley wrote the book. Galvani had a nephew and his name was Giovanni Aldini, and he went a step further and he tried to reanimate hanged criminals with electricity

in eighteen oh three at Newgate Prison in London. He did this with the some success and a guy named George Forster who was found guilty of murdering his wife and child. Now a whole crowd was there and they all reported that they saw Forster's eye open, his right hand raise up and clench, and his leg move. And by the way, Aldini used Volta's pile in his electrocution experiment. Now, obviously he didn't bring the individual back to life so much as he just made a dance around a little

bit exactly. But it would have been interesting. What what if he had what have you been able to That would have been, Yeah, does he have to does he get another death set finance? Where is that sentence served? That's a good yeah. Yeah. The ethics, so many ethical quandaries, In fact, we're gonna get into that the end of this episode. There's a fun bit of ethics played with the science here. Uh, but let me even just finish with some more scientific stuff here. That that Mary Shelley

was clearly aware of. Another was Humphrey Davy's book The Elements of Chemical Philosophy. Now, Humphrey Davy and William Nicholson were the era's leading electrical researchers, and they were friends of her father, so she probably knew all about them as well as this history of electrical experiments with corpses, whether they be human or animals. Uh. Davy used Volta's battery for what is now called electrolysis and isolated a series of substances for the first time. He basically invented

electro chemistry. He went on to invent the Davy lamp, to which separated flame from gas so that there was safer usage of like lanterns in minds that were filled with methane gas. And he published this book, Elements of Chemical Philosophy in eighteen twelve as an account of the field within which he worked. So it's very much thought that this is a book that influenced Shelley. She was aware of it. He was a friend of the family, uh and clearly brought it into her work on Frankenstein.

Now one last little tie in here. There was a big focus on life and the body at the time as well, and another debate was going on between two surgeons, this time John Abernathy and William Lawrence, and they were arguing about the Nate sure of life. Now here's the thing. William Lawrence had been the Shelley's doctor previously. I mean, think about all those medical misfortunes we talked about earlier.

She must have visited a lot of doctors. So he was seen as a radical because he argued that life was simply the working operation of a body's functions and he didn't take the soul into account. And people got really upset about this. So subsequently he was forced to withdraw his book about this topic from publication and he had to actually resign from the hospital he worked at

because he didn't have a scientific principle for the soul. Now. Abernathy, on the other hand, argued that life didn't depend on the body's structure, and that our bodies were just these material substances that life was attached to as what he called quote a vital principle. Now this goes right back to what we were talking about earlier with alchemy and the biomechanical soul and especially goalms. I mean, essentially what abernatheists thing is like, Oh, we're just all golems that

are filled with souls. You know, when one uh one thing about all these historical um dissections I guess you'd say, of of Frankenstein and the and the the the individuals and the works that and they may have inspired Frankenstein is that sometimes when when you start absorbing a lot of it, it begins to feel like an attempt to ground a female authors success in the works of male

UH scientists and male writers and male professionals, etcetera. So I think it's important to note that no matter what her influences were, no matter what work she was, she was, she was drawing off of the way she assembled at all UH is brilliant. The way she assembled at all is is just above reproach. So we don't we don't want that to to bleed away in the dissection. Not at all. None of these guys that I just mentioned could have created a work as imaginative and insightful as Frankenstein.

And let's let's be honest here, neither did her husband or Lord Byron or Paula Dorri on that fateful summer. She was the only one who wrote, you know, who finished a novel. Paul Dory had that vampire story. That's fine, but I mean she created this uh long lasting, two hundred year epic that we're still looking back on today. Uh let's take a quick break, and then when we get back, let's talk about that. Where we are now two hundred years later and what Frankenstein's influences on all

of us. Alright, we're back, So yeah, Frankenstein continues to cast this long shadow not only over our culture, but also over our perception of science. And you'll still you go into something like Eureko Alerts or or any of the various science journalism websites, if you do a search for Frankenstein, you're gonna you're gonna find some some articles that are out directly related to Frankenstein is somewhere or another.

But you're also just gonna find Frankenstein used repeat as an adjective, as is even a slur um Tell me about it yesterday, trying to do research for this episode. Man, Like I really had to make use of all of the filters in our library search engine to try to really hone down what I was looking for. Because yeah, the just the term Frankenstein is used now as a bird, right, like to Frankenstein something. I use it like that, of course, but like there are scientific articles that throw it around

pretty pretty uh easily to draw attention. Yeah. And you know, as as much as we said we can discount and say all right, you're over using using this term, using it poorly, etcetera, it has still become a part of the way that we view science. I mean, that's how influential this was as a work of science fiction. Um, you know, I think Frankenstein, Man, it's a real quintessential work obviously, but it really speaks to what we do here on the show. I think, like our mission here

was stuff to blow your mind. Frankenstein is sort of this perfect text that we can attach what we do with and that like it is about science, but it's also about the larger world and the human experience. Uh it's just man, revisiting it this last year, I've just really fallen in love with it. Yeah, it is it's it's a wonderful text, and it has a little bit of every Everything that we love here on the show

is president in the book. But because one of the things with science fiction, first of all, it's a brilliant example, because she was vague and exactly how Victor is bringing life to this thing. And if you're vague enough, then nobody's gonna come along ten years later and say, oh, you've got it wrong, because he never he never actually shares the secret with the reader, totally right. So so

there's that. But then also we obviously have not reached the point in time where human achievement has equalled the fictional u achievement in the book, the creation of life. But we have made a number of advances that continue to push the boundaries and and and and certainly give life to this The shadow of Frankenstein is hanging over things.

I mean, advances in that synthetic biology and other fields. Uh. In nineteen fifty two we unlock the mysteries of DNA, and subsequent breakthroughs in genetics have empowered and the science of cloning. In two thousand ten, researchers created synthetic bacteria in the lab, the first one to be controlled entirely

by man made genetic instructions. Elsewhere, robotics continue to develop increasingly complex, increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence, and biologically inspired mechanical forms. And through all of this, uh yeah, Frankenstein's Monster continues to resonate as a powerful model of unchecked scientific advancement, as well as a reminder of the murky philosophical and

ethical quagmires we wish to avoid. So as as kind of a modern myth, Frankenstein taps into that fear that the like Victor will lack the wisdom or responsibility to control our scientific creations and uh and the Monster embodies such modern fears as a lab created black hole or

man made plagues, nuclear annihilation. And the story also poses the possibility that liked the Monster himself, science will deliver us to a place where we find the integrity of the human body violated, in the nature of the human

soul scourged. And these are themes. All of these are themes that we have talked about in the last year on the show, like whether we're talking about bioengineering or body hacking, or biosynthesis or you know, you and Joe did the electricity episode, like we're circling around this stuff unintentionally,

we're all in Frankenstein's orbit. Yeah, I mean, as we uh, as we've discussed um some biotechnology episodes in the summer, we see great examples of the science clearly outpacing our ability to really drive home what our rules and regulations and expectations should be. And I mean, what's more Frankenstein than that they absolutely advances are beyond what we were prepared for. So this leads us to my favorite article that I found in the whole pile of stuff about Frankenstein.

This is one of the most fun papers I've ever read. It reminds me of that one that we did when we did an episode on vampire blood drinking, the one about like how what the rate of infection would be if vampires were real. This is called Victor Frankenstein's Institutional Review Board Proposal, and it's written by G. Harrison and W. Gannon. It came out last year in It's a very fun

idea for an article. The idea is what would it be like if Victor Frankenstein had to submit his research to an institutional review board the way all scientists aff to today. So. Um, they basically took uh the I r B proposal, and they said it in seventeen nine at Ingolstadt, which is where he went to school. Uh, in the book where Frankenstein was a student, and in his proposal they made him consider comparative anatomy medical experimentation

in theories of life related to the debates around animal electricity. Now, because the theme of the novel is that he didn't consider the ethical consequences of his work and therefore suffered tragedy, they think that the I r B shows that it would have compelled him to consider the consequences of this experiment. I like this, I've never heard of it's so yeah. Yeah, it was published in Science and Engineering Ethics. Um. They note that in the novel Victor talked, as I mentioned earlier,

he talks about all these alchemists that he studied. Uh. But they say, in addition, you know, they basically create what you do for an IRB a literary review, and they add a long list of authors prevalent before that time in natural history who would have influenced the debates about reproduction, regeneration, anatomy, body functions in the interplay between electrochemical and pneumatic forces in living systems. Galvani, Volta, and Davy are all among these. They also remind us that

the electrical machines are from the movie. Again that's Nicola Tesla's inspiration. They're not in the book. They also say that, and this is maybe for all of you out there too, if you're unfamiliar, if you haven't been in an academic setting. The purpose of an i r B is to protect those involved in research using uh, anything that's impacting to

living human beings. So the present i RB structure was inspired by something called the Belmont Report, which drew its inquiries from both the Nuremberg Trials and the Tuskegee Syphilis study. And we're going to talk about irbes again in our other episode this week about Creepy Pasta's, but i'll keep it grunted here for now. These led to three broad

principles for the Belmont Report. The first is to respect people's autonomy, the second is to do no harm to the people involved in the study, and the third is justice or basically a fair sharing of the benefits of the research. Today's i RB is essentially a group of people at each institution who must have at least five members and conduct an initial and continuing review of these

research projects. I you know, in my time as a graduate student and working at the UM Georgia State University here in Atlanta, UH submitted many proposals to the RB. Everything from my thesis about Captain America had to go to them. To UM when I worked at the library at Georgia State University, if we wanted to interact with students and do some studies on like how they're using library materials, we had to submit it to the IRB.

So they look at pretty much everything, and they make you, UH take refresher courses on the Belmont Report over and over again so that you're really up to date on this stuff. The principles of the i RB. The big argument of this, this fun paper is that the principles of the IRB are all essentially what the monster is

appealing to Victor for throughout this entire novel. UH. One is his acknowledgment and respect as an autonomous human being, to the promotion of his welfare and to protect him from harm, and three to just treat him with some justice and equity. So from this and the books accounting. They argue that Victor always intended to create life from lifeless matter, which could constitute as impacting living human beings, and the outline a proposal. It's real. I'm gonna very

briefly cover it. It's like a twenty page paper, but uh he They cover the basic building blocks of life, including the protocols for how he's gonna catalog and carefully store all of his body parts, uh, the reconstitution of simpler organisms, basically, how he's going to reverse the process of death in all the various systems of a body, and then how he applies biotechnology to the creation of

a human being. And they speculate the way that he would pitch this is by generating electrical charges in a series of Leyden jars and supplementing them with a jolt of electricity from a bolt of lightning. All of this

would convulse this organism systems back into life. Their conclusion is that if Victor Frankenstein had just completed an i RB proposal, he would have had to consider the consequences of his experiment and acknowledge his responsibilities to his creature, and it would have given him the chance to think

through what he was doing ethically. I love it. My favorite quote from this paper is him saying, this is them writing in his voice, if I animate a human creature, I will assess risks for the being as well as for the surrounding community with whom the creature might interact. And another one is should I succeed in creating a rational being, I will ensure its privacy and try to ensure that it does not become a spectacle or a monster for the amusement of others. It's this is like

one of the most fun papers I've ever read. It's a it's a brilliant idea. Yeah, I want them to do a sequel to this where they write a proposal for Herbert West reanimator. I think that that would be another worthy cause. Oh yeah, just about any mad scientists would work, because I mean that's what I love about looking at a mad scientist character is asking like, what, like, what were your goals here? What were you really trying

to do? What was how do how does this possibly fit into any kind of actual um you know, scientific rigor so circling back to the two hundred year old thing, I just want to lead us out here with two of I think that we could easily say this the leading minds in horror literature that are alive today. The first is st. Jochi, who I mentioned at the top.

He has a book that I have mentioned on this show many times that is a survey of all of horror literature called Unutterable Horror uh and his section on Frankenstein in it, he says it is a richly complex tale that fully justifies the mountains of commentary it has inspired. So we mentioned that earlier. All of the swirling conversation about themes and intentions and influences and everything. He says,

it's all justified because this book is great. Um. He also says, the passages that are about science show that Shelley is departing from the Gothic traditions reliance on medieval superstition as the source for terror, and that's the real important point of this book is it's like a huge transition, turning point in the world of horror literature. He also argues that what gives the book merit is the creatures moral complexity. We talked about it earlier. Both the creature

and Victor Frankenstein are so morally complex. Joe she says it may be the sole genuine contribution of Gothic fiction to the great literature of the world, and its themes are eternal, and Shelly, to her credit, doesn't provide simple solutions to them, so it constantly makes us keep thinking. That's why we keep turning back to it. For two years. And then Uncle Stevie Stephen King from his book Dance maccob back in. I think that came out in like

eighty two, maybe eighty one. Yeah, this one I've never read, but I always remembered seeing it on the on the King racks. When I would, I would I would skip lunch for a week, uh in school to say about my lunch money to spend on Stephen King paperbacks, And I always I would consider that one, and I'm like, oh, it's not it's not a tale, this is nonfiction. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna spend it on you know, uh, different cycle of the Werewolf cycle. No, I never get cycled.

The Warwold was always a little bit more expensive prestige books. It was like that was like seven. Your cheapest was the Dead Zone at like four. So that was the first one I read out of cheapness. And then you have to work like some of the bigger ones. Though you're talking a thousand plus page books, that's like two weeks of lunch money, maybe three. See I always just hitting the library from bullies and read all of my Stephen King's books in there during lunch. But don's maccab

if you haven't read it. Is King's attempt to sort of gather all of the thoughts about the horror genre together in one book. Keep in mind he wrote this in like the late seventies, early eighties, so there's a lot that has happened since then. But I love it. I think you'd really like it, Robert. I keep going back to it. But in the book he outlines basically his argument is that there are three major archetypes of horror that we keep coming back to, and Frankenstein's Monster

is one of them. He calls it the Thing without a Name, which is important because Victor never names the monster. That's why we have this problem. There's no name for it. There is that like sort of I think there's a passage in it, or maybe it's something Shelley said outside of the book of like referring to it as Adam, like his atom. Some people call the monster Adam, and maybe he was just trying to, you know, retain scientific objectivity. He knew that had been named it, he'd have to

copy that. Um So King says that there are many examples of Frankenstein's inheritors, So everything from The Hulk, the Marvel Superhero The Hulk is a version of that too. The Thing from Another World that came out in ninete. Now remember King wrote this like two years before John Carpenter's version of the Thing came out. Uh, so he would have surely included that as the Thing without a Name. In fact, uh just last night Joe McCormick and I went and saw the Thing here in Atlanta at our

Plaza Theater. This first time I saw it on the big screen, and it was a wonderful experience. But yeah, I think it would qualify as this Thing without a Name. So when you're thinking of the types of horror that you watch, that's probably one of them. King also says this book has probably been the subject of more films than any other literary work in history, including the Bible, and I find it hard to argue with that. I mean, I haven't counted them, but man, there's a lot. I mean,

it was one of the earliest. You saw Edison's short Frankenstein film, and and then you have you go to IMDb and you put in Frankenstein or Victor Frankenstein. It's just yeah, you know, hundreds. It seems different generations of value those characters. So I just want to end on this. He argues that it uses one of horror's most common themes, that there are things that mankind was not meant to know.

And this brings us right back around again to the mission of stuff to blow your mind, and why Frankenstein is so important to it. This this idea of science and wonder and oddity and how much can we know and how far should we prod? Yeah, I think I think the the answer. My view on it is that

we should. We should not be afraid to prod and to move forward, but we should use if we're going to turn to Frankenstein, we used it as cautionary tale to say, hey, keep pushing, but no it you are going to discover things that you might not be prepared for as an individual, as a culture, as a legal system. And uh, and therefore you have to remain ever vigilant and and ever ready to adapt your mindset, even your

worldview to the new revel as revelations to come. All right, well, on that note, we're gonna go ahead and close out this, uh, this chapter of Frankenstein until we inevitably do another Frankenstein episode with perhaps some new angle in the years ahead. Hopefully, yeah, hopefully we'll be here to do the fourth anniversary of Frankenstein. We'll use a biotechnology to keep ourselves alive for two hundred more years so we can talk about it again. Then.

All right, so this is one of our Halloween episodes. Obviously we are in the Halloween season and it's sufforable in your mind. We're probably gonna stretch that Halloween season as far through the remainder of as possible, hopefully pushing Christmas and the holidays uh into January or a pit somewhere. Uh. So, Hey, if you're listening to this, dearing how aween, be aware that the stuff to blow your mind. Uh monster video series Monster Science is back with a fourth season or

series of episodes. We have six of them. Uh, and as you're listening to this, there should be two or three episodes already out. The first three are sex education oriented with takes on sexy vampires, alien husbands, and uh and face huggers from the alien films. Yes, and then we've got a lovely face hugger here hanging in the office from the ceiling. Now pretty good. Yeah, and then the back half of the series are going to deal with dragons, Godzilla, and of course the threat of pod people.

So Robert would never say this, but I'm gonna say it. Monster Science is my absolute favorite thing that how Stuff Works produces. I love it. I'm an unabashed fan of this series. Even if I wasn't involved in Stuff to Bowl your mind and didn't work here. It is the, in my opinion, the best thing that we put out here.

I definitely recommend that you watch it. They're funny, they're informative, they're fun, and they revolve around the lovely October horror themes that we like to play around with here on the show. I've seen two of these episodes. Joe and I are in a couple of them. Uh, They're they're great. And our producer, Tyler Man, he really goes out of his way, just makes great special effects. It's so much fun.

So we'll check them out and on that note, I'd like to throw out to a project on my own, which is I do another podcast outside of here called super Context, and this episode was a very scientific look at Frankenstein. But super Context is a show that's a autopsy of various forms of media. We do movies, television, music, we look at comics sometimes, and we talk about literature

as well. So if you want to show that's more along those lines but sort of plays in the same research heavy orientation that we do here, please check it out. It's called super Context and you can find us on Twitter and Tumbler. All right, And as far as stuff to Blow your Mind goes, as always, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes.

You'll find a new monster science episodes, you'll find blog posts, you'll find links out to our various social media accounts as well. Yeah, we are on Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, and Facebook. We're all over those. Follow us there to find out more about these videos, to see what new episodes are coming up, or just what kind of weird, bizarre science we come across in our journeys. And if you want to write us the old fashioned way. You can send us an email at blow the Mind at how stuff

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