How new advances in science rekindle old myths and fears.
by Michele Pridmore-Brown
Philip Ball
UNNATURAL
The heretical idea of making people
In the years leading up to the birth of the first baby produced by IVF, tinkering with life was routinely decried as Promethean hubris, Faustian ambition or sorcery. But once a real, squalling baby named Louise Brown arrived, on July 25, 1978, in Oldham Hospital, Manchester, courtesy of a great deal of tinkering, it became awfully hard to denounce her. Her “lusty yell” reverberated “round the brave new world”, announced Newsweek in a sentence that managed to sprinkle joy with a dash of unease by way of Huxley’s dystopia. One American comic famously quipped that perhaps one ought to send a card not to the parents but to the Dupont chemical company. The Vatican, faced with the reality of a life, perforce had to wish the family well, but frowned sonorously at the “unnatural” means that had brought this life about.
It took 4 million more babies like Louise Brown, and thirty-two years, for Patrick Steptoe, who had made Brown’s life possible, to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. His partner, Landrum Shettles, was long dead. Yet even then, a Vatican spokesman on bioethics declared the prize “out of order”. Philip Ball’s book can be read as an excavation of this complex debate.
Unnatural is not about assisted conception per se, but rather about our relationship to what Ball calls “anthropoeia”: the making of (artificial) people. In particular, it is about our fear of the unnatural, why tinkering with nature brings on thoughts of Prometheus’ eagle-pecked liver: of hubris punished, or, worse yet, of Frankenstein’s monster. IVF babies are of course very widely accepted now, but each time a fresh innovation – genetic engineering, cloning, synthetic biology – comes up the pipeline, an allied set of tropes is deployed. Prometheus, Frankenstein and Brave New World serve as a kind of unreflective shorthand. Ball’s book is a determinedly reflective account of how these myths are channelled through history: how they tell us about ourselves, about the human imagination, about our ever-evolving definitions of life, and about our fraught relationship to science and technology.
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by Michele Pridmore-Brown
Philip Ball
UNNATURAL
The heretical idea of making people In the years leading up to the birth of the first baby produced by IVF, tinkering with life was routinely decried as Promethean hubris, Faustian ambition or sorcery. But once a real, squalling baby named Louise Brown arrived, on July 25, 1978, in Oldham Hospital, Manchester, courtesy of a great deal of tinkering, it became awfully hard to denounce her. Her “lusty yell” reverberated “round the brave new world”, announced Newsweek in a sentence that managed to sprinkle joy with a dash of unease by way of Huxley’s dystopia. One American comic famously quipped that perhaps one ought to send a card not to the parents but to the Dupont chemical company. The Vatican, faced with the reality of a life, perforce had to wish the family well, but frowned sonorously at the “unnatural” means that had brought this life about.
It took 4 million more babies like Louise Brown, and thirty-two years, for Patrick Steptoe, who had made Brown’s life possible, to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. His partner, Landrum Shettles, was long dead. Yet even then, a Vatican spokesman on bioethics declared the prize “out of order”. Philip Ball’s book can be read as an excavation of this complex debate.
Unnatural is not about assisted conception per se, but rather about our relationship to what Ball calls “anthropoeia”: the making of (artificial) people. In particular, it is about our fear of the unnatural, why tinkering with nature brings on thoughts of Prometheus’ eagle-pecked liver: of hubris punished, or, worse yet, of Frankenstein’s monster. IVF babies are of course very widely accepted now, but each time a fresh innovation – genetic engineering, cloning, synthetic biology – comes up the pipeline, an allied set of tropes is deployed. Prometheus, Frankenstein and Brave New World serve as a kind of unreflective shorthand. Ball’s book is a determinedly reflective account of how these myths are channelled through history: how they tell us about ourselves, about the human imagination, about our ever-evolving definitions of life, and about our fraught relationship to science and technology.
Read more:
