Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Here my tale. It is long and strange,
Speaker 1: and the temperature of this place is not fitting to
Speaker 1: your fine sensations. Come to the hut upon the mountain.
Speaker 1: The sun is yet high in the heavens before it
Speaker 1: descends to hide itself beyond yon snowy precipices and illuminate
Speaker 1: another world. You will have heard my story and can
Speaker 1: decide on you would rest, whether I quit forever the
Speaker 1: neighborhood of man and lead a harmless life, or become
Speaker 1: the scourge of your fellow creatures and the author of
Speaker 1: your own speedy ruin. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I am
Speaker 1: Christian Seger. And as you might have guessed from the
Speaker 1: title or from Robert's reading just now, we are talking
Speaker 1: about Frankenstein. It is the month of October, it is
Speaker 1: our favorite time of year, and Frankenstein is two hundred
Speaker 1: years old this year, so we felt like we had
Speaker 1: to do an episode on Frankenstein. Yeah, it's such a
Speaker 1: great topic because it's it brings everything together, Like Frankenstein,
Speaker 1: of course, is just as a horror stand out, just
Speaker 1: a horror icon, um that the novel itself is a classic,
Speaker 1: and more importantly, I guess for a science show is
Speaker 1: Frankenstein continues to cast this shadow over the sciences. It
Speaker 1: emerges from science, and and it continues to color our
Speaker 1: understanding and at times fear of science. It is. It
Speaker 1: is essentially science fiction. People often, you know, you forget
Speaker 1: about that when you just get caught up sometimes and
Speaker 1: just the sheer monster aspects of the thing. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: even read one account that described it as the first
Speaker 1: science fiction novel. I don't know if that's necessarily true,
Speaker 1: but certainly we think of it as horror, probably more
Speaker 1: because of the movies. But the book itself is a
Speaker 1: little bit of both. And it's not the book itself,
Speaker 1: which we're gonna mainly focus on the book today. Of course,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about the other pop culture resonance of this
Speaker 1: book throughout history. But the book is not gory. It's uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the scenes where the monster kills people are
Speaker 1: pretty much just like then he's snapped her neck. You know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't like, uh, it's it's not it's not Boris
Speaker 1: Karlafi even right, Yeah, it's it's really a tremendous book,
Speaker 1: but I think stands the test of time rather nicely.
Speaker 1: I don't think it communicates well to modern viewers. It's
Speaker 1: it's it's a complex book. The the monster, the creature
Speaker 1: is not just it's not it's not just a you know,
Speaker 1: a shambling killer. He's a complex creature. Likewise, Victor Frankenstein
Speaker 1: is neither hero nor pure villain in this There are
Speaker 1: there are shades of gray and him as well. So
Speaker 1: it's a it's a story ultimately of two complex into
Speaker 1: vide rules of a creator and the created, and all
Speaker 1: the various um interpretations of that that flow both religiously
Speaker 1: scientifically and purely cultural. Yeah, there certainly are a lot,
Speaker 1: and that's not really our mission here on this show. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there are lots of other podcasts that are
Speaker 1: doing great uh literary readings of Frankenstein and sort of
Speaker 1: tearing apart its themes. We'll talk about those, but we're
Speaker 1: here mainly to look at the science behind it. Uh.
Speaker 1: We will briefly talk though, as we usually do, about
Speaker 1: you know, the the cultural importance of this media artifact basically,
Speaker 1: and I think it would be great for us to
Speaker 1: start off by saying what's your favorite? What's your favorite Frankenstein. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean we all have our favorites, and these favorites
Speaker 1: are not always going to be colored by our you know,
Speaker 1: our appreciation for the text. You know, it's just growing
Speaker 1: up with the monster. Yours is the Aaron Eckhart form.
Speaker 1: My Frankenstein isn't that. I haven't seen that, and I
Speaker 1: kind of want to. It's real bad um for me.
Speaker 1: I have to start by saying, I've never seen an
Speaker 1: adaptation where I felt like the monster, the creature, you know,
Speaker 1: captured the essence of the creature from the novel. So
Speaker 1: so I'm being perhaps a little unfair there, but but yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a there's this sort of idea of what the
Speaker 1: monster could be, and I've yet to see that really
Speaker 1: come to fruition on film. I do have to say, though,
Speaker 1: I have very strong memories of seeing what was probably
Speaker 1: for many a rather lackluster Frankenstein. I don't know if
Speaker 1: I may be alone in this being like an iconic
Speaker 1: Frankenstein for me. But there was a TV movie, and
Speaker 1: I believe it aired on tnt UH titled Frankenstein, and
Speaker 1: it starred Patrick Bergen as Dr Frankenstein and Randy Quaid
Speaker 1: as as the creation and it it was it was
Speaker 1: quite I remember it as being good. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you would hold up Randy Quaid. And it was
Speaker 1: a seri serious movie. It was like a comedic Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: It was a serious period piece. And Quade gave really
Speaker 1: a great serious performance as the monster. That was you know,
Speaker 1: I'm on par with what's in the book, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe not not perfect, but still in keeping with the novel.
Speaker 1: And and Patrick Bergen is always great. Uh. It featured,
Speaker 1: you know, all the arctic intrigue that that I always
Speaker 1: loved in the book that is absent from some of
Speaker 1: the film adaptations, many of the film adaptations really Uh.
Speaker 1: It also has some wonderful scenes in which the monster
Speaker 1: and later he is doomed bride or created out of
Speaker 1: like a lead red liquids just kind of like a
Speaker 1: primordial soup that he brews up in a tank. And
Speaker 1: it was directed by David Wicks, who also did a
Speaker 1: Jekyl and Hide TV movie from nineteen ninety that starred
Speaker 1: Michael Caine and Cheryl Ladd and Josh Auckland. And I
Speaker 1: remember seeing that one on TV and finding it rather terrifying.
Speaker 1: As well. Wow. Well, this was a period of time
Speaker 1: where I didn't live in the United States, so I
Speaker 1: must have it must have been off my cultural radar
Speaker 1: because I didn't have American television then, but I had
Speaker 1: never heard either of these. Wow, I was like Nursed
Speaker 1: on American television. There was no avoiding it for me.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I remember that's That's a film adaptation that
Speaker 1: I think back to a lot, even though I haven't
Speaker 1: seen it since I've seen it on TV in like,
Speaker 1: I should really give it another viewing. Yeah. Well, from
Speaker 1: my part, I have two that I really love. The
Speaker 1: first is Bernie writz In, who a lot of people
Speaker 1: out there know as just a famous illustrator, especially in
Speaker 1: the horror genre. He in the late seventies early eighties
Speaker 1: had this passion project where he wanted to do an
Speaker 1: illustrated version of Frankenstein, and uh he did. It took
Speaker 1: him years to finish it, but Marvel Comics published it,
Speaker 1: I think in the early eighties. Since gone out of print,
Speaker 1: but earlier this year, I was at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon,
Speaker 1: and I found an oversized edition of this Frankenstein copy.
Speaker 1: In fact, that's right in front of me. Right now.
Speaker 1: And man, the illustrations in it are gorgeous. I think
Speaker 1: writs In is like one of the few people who
Speaker 1: captures the monster's essence, uh, at least according to the book. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is just a really beautiful copy. So I
Speaker 1: always think of when I think of the Monster, and
Speaker 1: when I think of Victor Frankenstein, I think of these drawings.
Speaker 1: But I have to say, there's a totally whacked out
Speaker 1: version of Frankenstein that I also love from the comics that, uh,
Speaker 1: a guy we often talk about on the show, Grant
Speaker 1: Morrison did very short for issue series Frankenstein, Agent of Shade,
Speaker 1: and uh, Frankenstein is basically a monster hunter. The monster,
Speaker 1: not Victor Frankenstein. He's a monster hunter and uh he
Speaker 1: goes like all over the world and even to Mars
Speaker 1: to hunt monsters. Uh. And it's just this absolutely insane,
Speaker 1: uh psychedelic Frankenstein ride. Uh and and uh so yeah,
Speaker 1: he's like part of like a group called Shade that's
Speaker 1: basically like like the government version of like a paranormal
Speaker 1: control team or something like that. So they send him in.
Speaker 1: The Bride is in it too, and she's also an agent,
Speaker 1: and they have like sown extra arms on her, so
Speaker 1: she's like she's got a bunch of guns and weapons
Speaker 1: and stuff like that that she you know, she's adept
Speaker 1: at fighting with like I think six or seven limbs
Speaker 1: or something like that. Well, this sounds about right for
Speaker 1: for Grant Morrison. You have a gothic um horror creature
Speaker 1: that is also kind of a Hindu goddess that involved
Speaker 1: in some sort of paranormal psychedelic and oh yeah, he
Speaker 1: very much plays up the Hindu goddess part. She even
Speaker 1: has like a jewel I think on her forehead and yeah,
Speaker 1: I should check that out. Um. And then of course,
Speaker 1: just from growing up the ones that well not growing
Speaker 1: up the ones that I love to or tom Noonan
Speaker 1: and Monster Squad, he was my Frankenstein because he was
Speaker 1: just like the nicest Frankenstein who helped out the kids
Speaker 1: at the end of that movie. He was a good
Speaker 1: guy Frankenstein. He was yeah, the monster and uh lately,
Speaker 1: uh Penny dreadful. Rory Kneer's performance in that as the
Speaker 1: monster is wow, really great and it's essentially Robert Smith
Speaker 1: is very much Yeah, I can't remember the name of
Speaker 1: the guy who plays Victor Frankenstein. But he's incredible as well.
Speaker 1: The whole Frankenstein arc in Penny Dreadful Is is amazing,
Speaker 1: very well done. Um. I have to say too that
Speaker 1: I have a lot of love for the Hammer Horror films,
Speaker 1: and there are spredations of of Frankenstein and the creature
Speaker 1: Christopher Lee, right, um it it depends on who's involved,
Speaker 1: you know. It's kind of a a revolving cast at times. Though.
Speaker 1: Peter Peter Cushing played Victor or Dr Frankstein or whatever
Speaker 1: or Baron Frankenstein, whatever twist they were doing on it
Speaker 1: in a number of them, so he's kind of like
Speaker 1: the iconic Frankenstein, the Man, the Monster varied, but from
Speaker 1: a purely design level, I really love David the Prowls
Speaker 1: monster from Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell from Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've seen this one where the monster looks
Speaker 1: like a gorilla with like the top of its headstone
Speaker 1: back on classic Hammer Horror special effects. Yeah, so it
Speaker 1: looks tremendous. Yeah, we're really you know, uh, here in
Speaker 1: the States, I really wish that there was like easier
Speaker 1: access to all of those Hammer things. You can find
Speaker 1: a lot of them on YouTube nowadays, but like man,
Speaker 1: it would be great if you could just like stream
Speaker 1: all of those on like one service or or get
Speaker 1: them at your local video shop or something like that.
Speaker 1: They're really you have a great local video shop like
Speaker 1: video yeah can, but that's it's harder with these streaming services. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're not as readily available. Although Hammers making a comeback
Speaker 1: right now, so maybe they'll, I don't know, put their
Speaker 1: archives up so everybody can watch these crazy Frankenstein movies again.
Speaker 1: You know, I should go ahead, and we should go
Speaker 1: ahead and make one point before we move on into
Speaker 1: the media the episode, and that is, of course, there's
Speaker 1: always the whole Uh, there's Frankenstein the man, there's the
Speaker 1: creature of the monster. And some people get really upset
Speaker 1: if you refer to the monster as Frankenstein. And yes,
Speaker 1: technically that is so the creature is not named Frankenstein,
Speaker 1: but at this point in the tradition of the character,
Speaker 1: it's it's almost interchangeable, it is. Yeah. In fact, almost
Speaker 1: every article I read for researching this episode had that
Speaker 1: disclaimer in it. And I believe it was St. Joshi,
Speaker 1: who we've talked about on the show before. You've interviewed
Speaker 1: him on the show before he's a famous horror Uh
Speaker 1: would you say literate critic? Uh? He was basically like,
Speaker 1: look at this point, like it's not even worth arguing about.
Speaker 1: Like it's just become a cultural norm that people refer
Speaker 1: to the monster as Frankenstein. Just let it go. Let's
Speaker 1: all move on. Yeah, so we're probably gonna do a
Speaker 1: little bit of both and just there with us forgive us. Personally,
Speaker 1: I love it when someone refers to plural Frankenstein's monsters
Speaker 1: by calling them Frankenstein's likens. Took the field and defeated
Speaker 1: I don't know, the New England Patriots. That would be
Speaker 1: a great I would actually watch sports if that was
Speaker 1: if that was available with Victor is the Coach, Ye
Speaker 1: green One, make that movie you heard it here first.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, on that note, let's let's move Let's
Speaker 1: move ahead, and in doing so, let us move back
Speaker 1: in time and talk about the origins of Mary Shelley's
Speaker 1: um classic novel. Yeah. So, like I said, this isn't
Speaker 1: a literary podcast, but I do think it's important that
Speaker 1: we established some bit of a setting here for how
Speaker 1: this book was created, for what we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about science wise later on, Because some of this is
Speaker 1: important and the listeners may not be aware of this.
Speaker 1: Some of it I wasn't aware of until dove in yesterday. So, uh,
Speaker 1: it's the two d year anniversary. We've been talking about this.
Speaker 1: Why is that important? Well, eighteen sixteen was referred to
Speaker 1: as the Year without a Summer. Most people know the
Speaker 1: story that Mary Shelley Percy Shelley, lord Byron and John Paula.
Speaker 1: Doori were in Switzerland vacation ng and they had a
Speaker 1: competition with one another to see who could write the
Speaker 1: best horror story, and Mary came out with Frankenstein. What
Speaker 1: a lot of people don't know is that this was
Speaker 1: during an unexpectedly cold summer in Switzerland, So that's why
Speaker 1: they were enclosed indoors the whole time. And the reason
Speaker 1: why was it was a year after an eruption at
Speaker 1: Mount tim Bora and that had affected the climate somehow
Speaker 1: and made it much colder. I guess because the ash
Speaker 1: was still in the Yeah. Yeah, Like, if anyone anyone
Speaker 1: out there is familiar with the nuclear winter and theories
Speaker 1: regarding that, it's the same thing. You have. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have material that's ejected into the upper atmosphere and it
Speaker 1: serves as kind of a shade that chills the world.
Speaker 1: So they were stuck indoors trying to amuse themselves, and
Speaker 1: they came up with this contest and Mary started working
Speaker 1: on Frankenstein Um. For their parts, Byron wrote sort of
Speaker 1: like a summary and I guess polla DOORI then like
Speaker 1: took it further and wrote it into a story called
Speaker 1: The Vampire, which is another horror classic, and it later
Speaker 1: influenced brom Stoker's Dracula. So this, you know, um Year
Speaker 1: without a Summer is like highly influential on the genre
Speaker 1: of horror as we know it. But here's another thing
Speaker 1: I didn't know. I'm curious if you've heard of this before.
Speaker 1: I learned about it from a comic book, a graphic
Speaker 1: novel by Warren Ellis and an artist named Marrik Olick
Speaker 1: SICKI called Frankenstein's Womb. And apparently there's two theories of
Speaker 1: real life events that also contributed to the book. The
Speaker 1: first is that before they went to Switzerland for this
Speaker 1: infamous vacation, Mary and Percy visited the real Frankenstein castle
Speaker 1: that's near Drumstock, Germany in eighteen fourteen, and the story
Speaker 1: about that place goes that Conrad Dipple was there and
Speaker 1: he had experimented with human bodies there in his pursuit
Speaker 1: of alchemy. So it's possible that Mary heard about all
Speaker 1: of this before uh they even went and had their
Speaker 1: horror story competition, and that she based Victor Frankenstein on
Speaker 1: Conrad Dipple. He claimed to have invented in a mixer
Speaker 1: of life, and he was rumored to have experimented on
Speaker 1: dead bodies. So there's lots of similarities. But this is
Speaker 1: like one of those things that sort of lost to history.
Speaker 1: Nobody really knows well. I mean, there's certainly a alchemical
Speaker 1: DNA and Frankenstein's yeah, yeah, you know, it seems likely
Speaker 1: the second theory that comes out of this Frankenstein's Womb book,
Speaker 1: and it has been expressed in other places. Obviously, it's
Speaker 1: not like Warren Ellis cooked it up? Uh? Is that
Speaker 1: thematically Frankenstein is about a premature birth that Mary had
Speaker 1: an eighteen fifteen where their baby died two weeks after
Speaker 1: it was born. So this is uh again like there
Speaker 1: and I'll get into this, like this woman had a
Speaker 1: horrible life full of medical misfortune, and honestly, it really
Speaker 1: seems like Percy Elly treated her like garbage. But it
Speaker 1: said that he didn't even care about the baby's condition
Speaker 1: after it was born, and went on to have an
Speaker 1: affair with her step sister right after I was born. Uh,
Speaker 1: and that Frankenstein. The writing of it is her reconciliation
Speaker 1: with giving life and then that life dying, the death
Speaker 1: of her baby, and the horrible father that she had
Speaker 1: to put up with. So um and just all right,
Speaker 1: here's a little a side note about Percy Shelley. It
Speaker 1: sounds like an awful person all the way around. Like
Speaker 1: everything I've read about it, he just doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: a pleasant guy. Um. Not only was he this obnoxious adulterer,
Speaker 1: but according to Paula Dory's diary from that summer, this
Speaker 1: is just one little instance of him. They were all
Speaker 1: sitting around telling stories or something, and Shelley just stood
Speaker 1: up and grabbed his head and started shrieking and ran
Speaker 1: out of the room like very pretentiously, and everybody was like,
Speaker 1: what is this all about? And he runs into the bathroom,
Speaker 1: he throws water into his face, and he comes back
Speaker 1: and he goes, well, I'm sorry, it's just while you
Speaker 1: were talking. Just then, I suddenly imagine a woman who
Speaker 1: had eyes instead of nipples, and everybody was just like, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: moving on. Uh so he seems like a real character. Um,
Speaker 1: And I imagine for for Mary's part, you know, she
Speaker 1: I think they got together at like super early age,
Speaker 1: like she was like sixteen or something like that, and
Speaker 1: they were married maybe when she was nineteen or twenty,
Speaker 1: but like she had already given birth to this premature child.
Speaker 1: A lot, a lot of weird stuff around this, And well,
Speaker 1: I guess I'm that theories like that. I can certainly
Speaker 1: see where it could be a part of the genesis
Speaker 1: of the story, because certainly misfortune and life in Vincent
Speaker 1: general tend to color our creative endeavors. But I guess
Speaker 1: I tend to shy away from theories that say, oh,
Speaker 1: this book right here is all about this one thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I just don't think life necessarily works like well,
Speaker 1: and Frankenstein is one of those books right that, like
Speaker 1: I'm trying to remember if I read it in high school.
Speaker 1: I definitely read it in college because I took a
Speaker 1: horror classes in college. But like, um, it's one of
Speaker 1: those books sort of like Catcher in the Rye where
Speaker 1: you can like you as the reader, bring your themes
Speaker 1: to it, and lots of people try to apply those
Speaker 1: and say, like this, this is what this is about, right, Uh,
Speaker 1: and Frankenstein is one of those. I mean it it's
Speaker 1: very universal in that way. Um, and so a lot
Speaker 1: of people take different things from it. So, yeah, you're right,
Speaker 1: there isn't Those are just two sort of little maybe
Speaker 1: factoids about its genesis. Another thing I read was an
Speaker 1: article called the Medicine of Shelley and Frankenstein out of
Speaker 1: a journal called Emergency Medicine, and this sort of traced
Speaker 1: the medical misfortunes as I mentioned earlier, of Mary Shelley
Speaker 1: and how they may have influenced it. That she was
Speaker 1: very much aware of science, medicine, and the ideas of
Speaker 1: life and death because of all of these things. So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna hit you with him real quick. So Mary
Speaker 1: Shelley's mother was Mary Wolston Kraft, who was a prominent
Speaker 1: feminist at the time, but she literally died ten days
Speaker 1: after giving birth to Mary from puerre parole fever, which
Speaker 1: was a pretty common occurrence at the time. I think. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's also a mention of the birth of their daughter,
Speaker 1: who I talked about earlier. Clara, that's the one who
Speaker 1: died at twelve days of age. Reportedly, Mary had dreams
Speaker 1: of this dead daughter being reanimated by fire right afterwards.
Speaker 1: So you can imagine how like traumatized this woman was,
Speaker 1: Like she grew up without a mother, her first kid dies,
Speaker 1: she's I guess like eloped with this kind of jerk. Uh.
Speaker 1: In eighteen sixteen, just after Mary gave birth to their
Speaker 1: second child, William, her sister Fanny, committed suicide with laudanum.
Speaker 1: Then in eighteen seventeen, Percy had another wife and her
Speaker 1: name was Harriet, and she committed suicide while she was
Speaker 1: pregnant with his child. Two weeks later, two weeks after
Speaker 1: this woman commits suicide, Percy, Mary's Mary. And then they
Speaker 1: have a third child, and that's Clara Everina Shelley, and
Speaker 1: she died at thirteen months of age from dysenterry. Then William,
Speaker 1: who was the one who was born earlier, he dies
Speaker 1: in eighteen nineteen from malaria. So she's she's had three
Speaker 1: kids who died, her sister, her what do you call
Speaker 1: her other wife, and then her mother, they've all, like
Speaker 1: every everybody around her just died. Uh. And then Percy
Speaker 1: himself is lost at sea in eighteen two. Mary contracts
Speaker 1: smallpox in eight and she lives until the ripe old
Speaker 1: age of fifty two, when she died from a brain tumor.
Speaker 1: So you guess you could say her short life was
Speaker 1: full of life, death, and the the whims of brilliant
Speaker 1: but unstable men exactly, which makes sense regarding the book,
Speaker 1: and and just that, like she would have been aware
Speaker 1: of a lot of the medical scientific goings on of
Speaker 1: the time, not just because of this, but also because
Speaker 1: her father and Percy and Byron they were all sort
Speaker 1: of interested in this stuff and talked about it and
Speaker 1: met with scientists at the time, as we'll talk about later.
Speaker 1: So at the heart of Frankenstein, of course, we have
Speaker 1: the tale of a of a human creating life, particularly
Speaker 1: a human male creating life, using science to do so.
Speaker 1: Uh and and in and in that, like the mythic
Speaker 1: roots of this thing run pretty deep. And and if
Speaker 1: you follow the mythic roots far enough, you also reach
Speaker 1: like the basic uh, psychological underpinnings of this this whole
Speaker 1: notion of of humans giving life to an unliving object. Um.
Speaker 1: So I'm just gonna gonna gonna coast through some of
Speaker 1: this here for you. So so we have numerous examples
Speaker 1: of this to draw in myth of course you've got uh.
Speaker 1: For instance, the Greek myth of Pygmalion, in which you know,
Speaker 1: female scalp sculpture is is awoken with the help of
Speaker 1: the god Venus. Uh. Medieval Jewish folk tales are full
Speaker 1: full of golems um, artificial beings that are you know,
Speaker 1: brought to life via a tablet of sacred words that
Speaker 1: are inserted beneath the clay, humanoids, tongues, um. Countless other
Speaker 1: examples exist now. But humans have a knack for attributing
Speaker 1: life to artificial likenesses. And it's we call this anthropomorphism,
Speaker 1: and it refers to when we take non human or
Speaker 1: impersonal objects and we give them human or personal characteristics
Speaker 1: or behaviors. Yeah, and so this is a good spot
Speaker 1: for us to note something about Shelley's version of the monster, Uh,
Speaker 1: that this Frankenstein's Monster was not sewn together and blasted
Speaker 1: to life with lightning, as we've come to understand from
Speaker 1: James Whale's ninety one film Uh. In fact, the machines
Speaker 1: that are in that were actually inspired by Nicola Tesla's
Speaker 1: high voltage devices. In the book, however, the monster is
Speaker 1: more like a golem or homunculous and that it's brought
Speaker 1: about by what is called, quote, an elemental principle of
Speaker 1: life like alchemy that is then applied to various quote
Speaker 1: raw materials from the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse. So yes,
Speaker 1: it's undead meat, I guess, but it's not even necessarily
Speaker 1: human parts. It's more like a flesh goum. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: while there is you know, an allusion to some sort
Speaker 1: of electrical nature to the secret, it's very much a
Speaker 1: secret in the book because the book is is is
Speaker 1: told from the point of views of Victor and the creature,
Speaker 1: and Victor, as a first person uh narrator here does
Speaker 1: not want to share his secret. Like most of the
Speaker 1: book is about how ashamed and awful he feels about
Speaker 1: having brought this thing into being, and therefore he wants
Speaker 1: to die with the secrets. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Remember the
Speaker 1: narrative setup is that they're in the Arctic. He's on
Speaker 1: a ship with the ship's captain I think, or somebody
Speaker 1: who's on the ship and just basically telling recounting the
Speaker 1: story to him and is full of woe at all
Speaker 1: the tragedy that it has wrought him. Yeah, as he
Speaker 1: and his created chase each other to the ends of
Speaker 1: the earth. But but yeah, we have this basic idea
Speaker 1: that just that we have the power to think things
Speaker 1: to life, not in a literal sense, but in a
Speaker 1: you know, in a metaphoric and psychological sense. A brick
Speaker 1: is just a brick until we paint a smiley face
Speaker 1: on it, and then it becomes inevitably a little harder
Speaker 1: or a little easier to throw that brick down a well,
Speaker 1: because he'ven imbued it with a sense of being. And
Speaker 1: this interesting court stems from something anthropologists called the law
Speaker 1: of similarity, which holds that humans inevitably links superficial, real
Speaker 1: life resemblances to deep, unreal resemblances. So a baby doll
Speaker 1: is in an actual infant, but it resembles one enough
Speaker 1: to make it real to the child who plays with it.
Speaker 1: And there's a way to test the law of similarity
Speaker 1: on your own. You can sketch a face of a
Speaker 1: loved one on a scrap of paper and then crumple
Speaker 1: it in your hand. And when you do that, do
Speaker 1: you feel a connection? Do you feel like connects in
Speaker 1: that your mind forms, including the resemblance and the thing
Speaker 1: itself probably so. Uh so. Out of this phenomenon, we
Speaker 1: have innumerable magical and religious practices that emerge in human culture,
Speaker 1: such as harming a person's likeness to produce the same
Speaker 1: effect on the actual person uh so called sympathetic magic
Speaker 1: that includes the burning of effigies, the use of voodoo dolls.
Speaker 1: And the roots of anthropypomorphic thinking lie in the human
Speaker 1: capacity for reflective consciousness, the ability to use what we
Speaker 1: know about ourselves to understand and predict predict the behaviors
Speaker 1: of others. And these empathetic qualities gave early humans and
Speaker 1: evolutionary advantage along that did not only outthink other people,
Speaker 1: but also to fit the behaviors of domesticated animals within
Speaker 1: the confines of human society. Yeah yeah, that's very important.
Speaker 1: Yeah so. And then as a as kind of a
Speaker 1: sidebar to that, it also gives us the place and
Speaker 1: human cognition to dream about bringing man made likenesses to life,
Speaker 1: be it a at you of a woman or a
Speaker 1: flesh golemn in a Gothic basement, which brings us to alchemy. Um,
Speaker 1: and I want to read a passage here from the book. Actually,
Speaker 1: before we dive into this, there is Mary Shelley was
Speaker 1: obviously well aware of alchemy at the time, and she
Speaker 1: works it into the book. There's a point where Victor's
Speaker 1: studying at the university and he's got some um I
Speaker 1: guess mentors, and one of them is referred to They
Speaker 1: don't give his first name, he's just M. Waldman. But
Speaker 1: Waldman sort of, you know, guides Victor's study and says,
Speaker 1: you can use my machine. So he's it's implied Waldman
Speaker 1: sort of knows how to do this himself. Maybe uh.
Speaker 1: And he says this about alchemists. He says, the ancient
Speaker 1: teachers of this science promised impossibilities and performed nothing. The
Speaker 1: modern masters promised very little. They know that metals cannot
Speaker 1: be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera.
Speaker 1: But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble
Speaker 1: in dirt and their eyes to pour over the microscope
Speaker 1: or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the
Speaker 1: recesses of nature and show how she works in her
Speaker 1: hiding places. They ascend into the heavens. They have discovered
Speaker 1: how the blood circulates and the nature of the air
Speaker 1: we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers.
Speaker 1: They can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake,
Speaker 1: and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.
Speaker 1: So there's a little bit of a set up here
Speaker 1: that Shelley's giving us, which is, yes, alchemy was a thing,
Speaker 1: and we acknowledge that Victor Frankenstein is pretty influenced by it.
Speaker 1: But modern science is here to pave the real way
Speaker 1: the alchemy left behind. Yeah, And and then I think
Speaker 1: it gets to the heart of what alchemy was, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, basically from the sixteenth of the eighteen centuries,
Speaker 1: it was a hodgepodge of early chemistry, occultism, essential all
Speaker 1: these these uh, these these graspings for understanding, some rooted
Speaker 1: in in pre scientific chemistry, like in an actual attempt
Speaker 1: to understand how these chemical properties interact with each other
Speaker 1: and other. But but that is kind of muddled in
Speaker 1: together with a bunch of essentially who we uh, some
Speaker 1: actual like you know, there were some interesting discoveries that
Speaker 1: came out of alchemy, but you didn't have scientific rigor
Speaker 1: there to guide it right. And remember Conrad Dipple, who
Speaker 1: may or may not have influenced this story, was an
Speaker 1: alchemist and claimed that he had found the elixir of life. Now,
Speaker 1: the elixir of life is also known in alchemic circles
Speaker 1: as the Philosopher's Stone. Yeah, the philosopher's Stone was certainly
Speaker 1: one of the main alchemical um uh goals. Maybe well,
Speaker 1: but there were a couple of other things that were
Speaker 1: interesting as well. Of course, there's there's always the attempt
Speaker 1: to turn things into gold, um right. For instance, there
Speaker 1: was a seventeen entry alchemist Hinnig Brundt distilled countless buckets
Speaker 1: of urine in an attempt to turn urine into gold.
Speaker 1: And if only we could do that only yeah, uh so,
Speaker 1: if I could only spin urine into gold. His experiment failed,
Speaker 1: which would come to know, there's no surprise to anyone.
Speaker 1: But it did allow him to discover the element phosphorus.
Speaker 1: So so you can see here and how even though
Speaker 1: it was unguided and uh and uncertain and muddled with
Speaker 1: all these other disciplines, they still occasionally accidentally achieve something
Speaker 1: now and again, it's the history of science. Yea. Now,
Speaker 1: the fictional Frankenstein's work closely resembles alchemical attempts to produce H,
Speaker 1: a minuscule artificial human avoid known as a homunculus. Uh
Speaker 1: and and uh. I've looked into this summing in the past.
Speaker 1: I'm always fascinated by the homunculus. Do you have a
Speaker 1: monster science episode about homunculi? I don't know. I just
Speaker 1: I've done a few posts here and there about it.
Speaker 1: There's a there's a mini text known as the Libavack
Speaker 1: or the Book of the Cow, and it it lays
Speaker 1: out the homunculous creation formula and bizarre details so that
Speaker 1: the process begins by mixing human semen with a mystical
Speaker 1: phosphorescent elixir and ends with a newborn humunculous emerging from
Speaker 1: a cow, growing human skin and craving its mother's blood
Speaker 1: inside of a large glass or lead vessel. That sounds
Speaker 1: totally legit to me. I mean, at any time I've
Speaker 1: mixed human semen with phosphorescent elixir, something close to this happens.
Speaker 1: I think I've been missing the cow ingredient. But but
Speaker 1: but at hard here? So what while lost amid false
Speaker 1: concepts of spontaneous generation and magical Tomfoolery. Alchemists were pondering
Speaker 1: the possibility of creating an artificial rational animals, as they
Speaker 1: sometimes referred to it, through learned manipulation of organic tissue,
Speaker 1: and at the time, it was widely believed that humans
Speaker 1: could mimic and manipulate such natural reproductive processes, but biological
Speaker 1: science was still incubating, and humanity's first breakthroughs came in
Speaker 1: the form of machines, uh, not flesh. And it's worth
Speaker 1: noting here too that the novel states that Victor specifically
Speaker 1: studied books by Albertus Magnus, Paris Celsus, and Cornelius Agrippa,
Speaker 1: who were all known alchemists, and that he considered lords
Speaker 1: of his imagination. Uh. Now, let's take a quick break.
Speaker 1: But when we get back, we can get into the
Speaker 1: machinery aspect of this of bringing life about by talking
Speaker 1: about automatons. Alright, we're back. So the automaton uh slightly
Speaker 1: different deal than Frankenstein. I can't think offhand of any
Speaker 1: examples of like Frankenstein adaptations where they've gone for like
Speaker 1: a purely mechanical monster. The one that immediately pops into
Speaker 1: my head is Frankenstein's Army. Have you seen that? Yes, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're very mechanical, but there is like organic tissue stone
Speaker 1: in there too, right, Yeah, they're kind of like steam punky.
Speaker 1: Side words, Josh Clark turned me to that movie and
Speaker 1: I watched it on Netflix one time, So if you've
Speaker 1: never seen it, the premise of the movie is that
Speaker 1: Victor Frankenstein, it's like his grandson or somebody like that,
Speaker 1: is alive during World War two and the Russians. He's
Speaker 1: working for the Russians and he builds like this army
Speaker 1: of Frankenstein's that then just destroyed Nazis. And it's it's
Speaker 1: a found footage film too, like somehow they're filming the
Speaker 1: entire thing during World War Two. It's a it's pretty great.
Speaker 1: It's been a sixteen it's more of a filmed haunted
Speaker 1: attraction that's more of a house than it is a movie.
Speaker 1: But it's still a lot of fun if you're in
Speaker 1: for that. The monster designs are amazing. That's the the
Speaker 1: best part. Now, as far as it's Frankenstein is concerned, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we don't see a purely mechanical Frankenstein. It
Speaker 1: certainly that's not what he presented in the book, But
Speaker 1: it's really difficult to think about Frankenstein's historical underpinnings without
Speaker 1: thinking about the obsession of of automatons, the idea that, Okay,
Speaker 1: certainly people can't build something out of flesh, but we
Speaker 1: can build machines. And if we build machines that look
Speaker 1: like humans, if they if we can program them to
Speaker 1: to or make them so that they move in certain ways,
Speaker 1: then we are at least mimicking a living body. Um.
Speaker 1: They're not intelligent in any sense of the world at word,
Speaker 1: but they serve as a forerunner to modern computational robots. Now.
Speaker 1: Accounts of automatons date back as far as the fourth
Speaker 1: century b C. When when a Greek poet Pindar wrote
Speaker 1: of animated statues on the streets of Rhodes uh and
Speaker 1: you had accounts of other individuals building self propelled mechanical birds. Overtime,
Speaker 1: Countless engineers and inventors applied their intellect to create mechanical, pneumatic,
Speaker 1: hide rolic and even electric mimicry of biological life, and
Speaker 1: their attempts rained from Leonardo da Vinci's fifteenth century robotic Night,
Speaker 1: which was apparently designed to walk and sit to Jacques
Speaker 1: de w Consin's eighteenth century digesting duck, which which made
Speaker 1: the rounds, it was really more of a performance thing.
Speaker 1: It was supposedly this mechanical duck was using its motorized
Speaker 1: chewing abilities, uh, to to eat and then it's digesting,
Speaker 1: and then it has a mechanical sphincter to mimic defecation. Uh.
Speaker 1: Reportedly the inspiration for the tre ducan. Yeah, in a way,
Speaker 1: kind of a mechanical tre duncan, but it didn't actually
Speaker 1: digest anything. It was just kind of a part of
Speaker 1: the trick, but it didn't include actual biomimicry mechanics. But
Speaker 1: it all reflects this this idea that Okay, if the
Speaker 1: body may be mechanical in nature, and if we can
Speaker 1: build machines that replicate it, then then perhaps this is
Speaker 1: the first step and getting to the point where we
Speaker 1: can we can build a rational animal, that we can
Speaker 1: build a human, We can build an animal, we can
Speaker 1: build a duck that digests. That these things are within
Speaker 1: the graphs of human achievement. Yeah, this speaks to I
Speaker 1: think just like this ongoing theme throughout human myth and
Speaker 1: also in science to a certain degree. But of you know,
Speaker 1: us creating life outside of our regular reproductive means, right,
Speaker 1: And of course Frankenstein's about that, But you can even say,
Speaker 1: like I don't know data from Star Trek. The next
Speaker 1: generation is also about that, right, like the way in
Speaker 1: his own way he's at Frankenstein. You know it. It
Speaker 1: gets down to stuff we're still struggling with today, Like
Speaker 1: whatever we can create that that resembles a human, that
Speaker 1: resembles a human human thought, that that tweaks the human design?
Speaker 1: Like what's the divide between all that? That that that biology,
Speaker 1: the biomechanics, and actual identity, actual consciousness. Seventeenth century French
Speaker 1: philosopher Reneed de Cartes viewed nature is primarily mechanical. He
Speaker 1: avoided the messier existential complications of this view by defining
Speaker 1: the human soul as an independent force, as as the
Speaker 1: ghost in the machine, as as philosopher and Descartes's critic
Speaker 1: Gilbert Ryle would later describe it, Yeah, Descartes classic philosopher,
Speaker 1: the old am I a brain in a jar? How
Speaker 1: do I prove that I'm not just a brain in
Speaker 1: a jar? And a demon is torturing me into thinking
Speaker 1: that existence is real? That was That was like pretty
Speaker 1: much a whole semester of college for me, was trying
Speaker 1: to wrap my brain around that one. Yeah, and like
Speaker 1: I said, it, stuff we're still were worrying about today
Speaker 1: as we we were further and further towards the sort
Speaker 1: of artificial intelligence that potentially reflects our own consciousness. So
Speaker 1: that too, is as a major theme and in Frankenstein,
Speaker 1: because because the creature is, like I say, unlike some
Speaker 1: of the more basic uh film adaptations, he is a
Speaker 1: rational creature, he has them, he has emotions. You feel
Speaker 1: a lot of sympathy for him in the book, really
Speaker 1: more in my heating anyway, you feel more sympathy for
Speaker 1: the creature than you do for Victor, who who is
Speaker 1: reckless and impulsive and uh, just kind of a disaster
Speaker 1: and and what is the creature but a result of
Speaker 1: his disastrous choices. Yeah, And this brings us around to
Speaker 1: the alternate title of the book, which is the modern Prometheus. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in many ways, Victor is that modern Prometheus. And
Speaker 1: as we were talking about earlier, there's a million different
Speaker 1: ways that you can try to dissect that and figure
Speaker 1: out what the themes are going on there. I think
Speaker 1: the term modern Prometheus was coined by Emmanuel Kant and
Speaker 1: in reference it was referencing Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity.
Speaker 1: So let's take this apart for just a second. Here,
Speaker 1: Prometheus in the Greek iteration stole fire from the gods, right,
Speaker 1: But then there's a Latin iteration as well of Prometheus,
Speaker 1: and he was basically bringing men to life I think
Speaker 1: from clay by using particles of quote, heavenly fire, so
Speaker 1: also electricity maybe. Um So there's there's a lot going
Speaker 1: on in there. Was Mary Shelley purposely connecting it to
Speaker 1: both of those and how did she envision this the
Speaker 1: I guess symbology of Prometheus as as relevant to her
Speaker 1: context right the time that she lived in when people
Speaker 1: were experimenting with electricity, trying to discern what the meaning
Speaker 1: was between life and death and whether you could use
Speaker 1: electricity to revive a dead body. Yeah, I mean the
Speaker 1: Promethean figures are are fascinating and in various mythologies, be
Speaker 1: at actual Prometheus or some other generation of where you
Speaker 1: have a character, uh an individual demigod, even sometimes it's
Speaker 1: just kind of a semi human hero who takes something
Speaker 1: from the gods and gives it to humans generally, it's
Speaker 1: like a technology or an ability. Their their Chinese myths
Speaker 1: where it's uh, it's more agricultural in nature, and so like,
Speaker 1: what does that what does that mean? Does that mean
Speaker 1: that that humans here have they have they stepped out
Speaker 1: of beyond their boundaries? Are they doing so they dabbling
Speaker 1: in God's domain? Or is it simply like, hey, they
Speaker 1: have mastered something. Here is something that previously was the
Speaker 1: domain of of of of of of forces beyond their imagination,
Speaker 1: and now it is within the human experience. Yeah. Obviously
Speaker 1: makes me think of the recent movie Prometheus, set within
Speaker 1: the alien mythology and the beginning of that where these
Speaker 1: uh what are they? These statuesque engineer aliens come to
Speaker 1: Earth and give life to earth basically by I mean,
Speaker 1: there's the first five minutes of the film, like one
Speaker 1: of them just dissolves, right and like his cellular parts
Speaker 1: become the nature of life. Well, yeah, they're presented as titans.
Speaker 1: Prometheus was a Titan, So it's it's I mean, it's
Speaker 1: really the the metaphor is strong in that one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this brings us to the real nuts and bolts
Speaker 1: science behind Frankenstein and that all starts with bioelectricity. So
Speaker 1: I want to do just a real basic encyclopedia breakdown
Speaker 1: of what we mean by bioelectricity. Here we're referring to
Speaker 1: the electric potentials and currents that are produced by or
Speaker 1: occurring within living organisms. So this is not necessarily Frankenstein's monster,
Speaker 1: but the experiments of people like Luigi Galvani and Alessandro
Speaker 1: Volta in the eighteenth century influenced this field of study,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna talk about them much more in the
Speaker 1: next couple of minutes. Generally, they were looking for a
Speaker 1: connection between electricity and the muscle contractions and frogs and
Speaker 1: other animals, and it lead to modern developments where we
Speaker 1: can now measure bioelectric effects and clinical medicine. Right, you know,
Speaker 1: we can measure uh, how electricity emanates from our hearts
Speaker 1: and our brains, etcetera, as part of our modern medicine.
Speaker 1: The difference is that bioelectric city currents consist of a
Speaker 1: flow of ions, whereas the kind of electrical current that
Speaker 1: we use for power UH is more of a movement
Speaker 1: of electrons. Bioelectric pulses a company all muscular contraction and
Speaker 1: a nerve and muscle cells Basically what happens there's a
Speaker 1: chemical or electrochemical stimulation that changes the cell membrane, so
Speaker 1: they discharge a current along those fibers and activate the
Speaker 1: contractile mechanism, so the contraction of these muscles. Now, Professor
Speaker 1: Sharon Rustin has written quite a bit about the science
Speaker 1: behind the context of the time that Mary Shelley was
Speaker 1: living in the influence this, and I want to talk
Speaker 1: about a couple of these. There's uh three or four.
Speaker 1: The first is that at the time of the novels writing,
Speaker 1: drowning and resuscitation from drowning were a very big thing,
Speaker 1: as she tells it, despite the fact that a lot
Speaker 1: of people worked along the Thames in London, they couldn't
Speaker 1: necessarily swim uh. And so there was this group that
Speaker 1: was started called the Royal Humane Society in London. It
Speaker 1: was established in seventeen seventy four, but its first name
Speaker 1: was the Society for the Recovery of Persons apparently drowned uh,
Speaker 1: and its whole aim was to publish information on how
Speaker 1: to resuscitate others and save lives. Saving people from drowning
Speaker 1: was such a big deal that they used to have
Speaker 1: an annual procession in London of all of the people
Speaker 1: that were quote raised from the dead by these methods, okay,
Speaker 1: one of these people was Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wolston Craft,
Speaker 1: who had tried to kill herself by jumping off of
Speaker 1: Putney Bridge into the Thames, and afterwards she complained that
Speaker 1: she was inhumanely brought back to life and misery. And
Speaker 1: as a consequence of these resurrections, there was a growing
Speaker 1: fear that wasn't just drowning, Like maybe you could appear
Speaker 1: dead and then you'd, oh, you'd be alive. So what
Speaker 1: if I get buried alive? This is where people really
Speaker 1: start freaking about the idea of being buried alive. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is interesting to think about because if you think
Speaker 1: back to a time where we're falling in the water,
Speaker 1: not being able to swim, essentially drowning, that that's just
Speaker 1: a complete death sentence, And then you see an uptick
Speaker 1: in the survivability of these experiences. Um he could we
Speaker 1: view it today is just a basic reality that individuals
Speaker 1: can be resuscitated. But but when the idea is fresh,
Speaker 1: it takes on these kind of supernatural aspects. Yeah very
Speaker 1: much so. Uh, I mean Here's the thing is that
Speaker 1: doctors at the time, in fact, one of them was
Speaker 1: Shelley's doctor. His name was James Curry, wrote a book
Speaker 1: where he argued that the only way to be sure
Speaker 1: that someone was dead was if putrification began. Other states
Speaker 1: like painting, or being in a coma, or even being
Speaker 1: asleep were sort of considered to be like death. And
Speaker 1: we see this reflected in the book Frankenstein in the
Speaker 1: way that she uses language to describe like when Elizabeth
Speaker 1: faints or when Victor collapses. They talk about it as
Speaker 1: if like they were momentarily dead and then came back.
Speaker 1: So it was a very different understanding of the difference
Speaker 1: between life and death at that time. Now we get
Speaker 1: into Galvani, Volta and Aldini. These are the Italian electrocutioners,
Speaker 1: as I like to call them. These guys played with electricity.
Speaker 1: My understanding is you guys talked about the You and
Speaker 1: Joe talked about them in a previous episode that was
Speaker 1: all about sort of the zany religious antics around electricity.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, yeah, Well, I'll be sure to include a
Speaker 1: link to to that episode of those episodes in the
Speaker 1: on the landing page for this episode. So in the
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty one preface to the book, Shelley mentions that
Speaker 1: modern scientific discussions in galvanism influenced her story, and what
Speaker 1: she was referring to was the work of Italian physician
Speaker 1: Luigi Galvani. Uh And this guy basically found that a
Speaker 1: dead frog's leg would twitch as if they were alive
Speaker 1: when they are struck with a spark of electricity. He
Speaker 1: figured this out in seventeen eighty one while he was
Speaker 1: dissecting a frog nearby a static electricity machine. His assistant
Speaker 1: accidentally touched a scalpel to a nerve in the frog's leg.
Speaker 1: The leg moved, and Galvanni immediately changed all of his
Speaker 1: research into something he called animal electricity. Tried to replicate
Speaker 1: this experiment over and over again. His contemporary, Alessandro Volta,
Speaker 1: was one of the earliest readers of these papers, and
Speaker 1: he had already earned a reputation as discovering electric potential
Speaker 1: and charge, as well as being the first person to
Speaker 1: isolate methane gas. So Volta reproduced Galvani's experiments, but he
Speaker 1: had a totally different conclusion. He thought the electricity actually
Speaker 1: came from the metals in the in the room. The
Speaker 1: dissimilar metals and that the frog itself was just simply
Speaker 1: a conductor for those. Galvani in the meantime, believed that
Speaker 1: electricity resided in the frog itself and thought the two
Speaker 1: dissimilar metals were merely conducting electricity from one part of
Speaker 1: the frog to another. He thought electrical energy was actually
Speaker 1: intrinsic to biological matter. And they developed this bitter feud
Speaker 1: over it, and academics from you know, around all just
Speaker 1: took sides and it became like an issue. It was
Speaker 1: like a modern debate. Um. They were both kind of
Speaker 1: right in their own ways. They were also both kind
Speaker 1: of wrong in their own ways. I mean, it was
Speaker 1: a time when we were still trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what electricity was and how it worked, and then certainly
Speaker 1: how it it was involved in the in the processes
Speaker 1: of the human body and the movement of muscles, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And an electricity kind of had this holy area at
Speaker 1: the time, but it was this mystery of it was
Speaker 1: there was something divine in it. And this is even
Speaker 1: before like we get into uh Edison and Tesla and
Speaker 1: their electricity wars and all that. In Volta invented the
Speaker 1: voltaic pile. Uh. This was basically a stack of disks
Speaker 1: of two different metals that were separated by brine soaked paper.
Speaker 1: This was the world's first battery. He invented it, and
Speaker 1: we know his stack worked today because dissimilar metals transfer
Speaker 1: electrons in an oxidation reduction reaction. We also know that
Speaker 1: the reason why the frog legs moved is because of
Speaker 1: what I was talking about earlier. Electricity plays a role
Speaker 1: in muscular contractions. So again, they're both right, they're both wrong.
Speaker 1: Galvani actually responded to both the skepticism though, and he's
Speaker 1: just he just keeps conducting more sets on various animals
Speaker 1: and their exposed nerves and keeps recreating muscle contractions without
Speaker 1: those dissimilar metals present. Uh. And he absolutely believed nerves
Speaker 1: were insulated with non conductive coding, which we now call myelin,
Speaker 1: and that electrical impulses traveled through them to muscle cells.
Speaker 1: There's another article that I read by guy named Richard Shaw,
Speaker 1: and it's called Volta's Battery, Animal Electricity and Frankenstein. All
Speaker 1: this stuff is connected. Uh. Shaw argues that Volta's invention
Speaker 1: was significant to the novel, as was Galvani and the
Speaker 1: existence of the idea of animal electricity. Uh. He argues
Speaker 1: that Shelley's book is actually a challenge of Volta's research
Speaker 1: trying to distinguish life in the near appearance of life.
Speaker 1: So uh, it puts her in the book right in
Speaker 1: the middle of this big debate that was going on.
Speaker 1: And this is a quote from his paper. He says,
Speaker 1: Shelly understands animal electricity not as life, but as a
Speaker 1: token for life, and thereby arrests the tendency of the
Speaker 1: vitalists to make it an object and to mistake it
Speaker 1: for life itself. So this brings up a question where
Speaker 1: we talked about this earlier. It's very unclear in the
Speaker 1: book what science is actually being used to create Frankenstein,
Speaker 1: and it seems to come out of as I recall,
Speaker 1: like he's just he's working himself over, clocking himself to
Speaker 1: the point of just near just I meanbe actually complete
Speaker 1: physical exhaustion. So he he alone has the brilliance, madness,
Speaker 1: and determination to grasp the secret, and he's not about
Speaker 1: to share it with the rest of us because it's horrible. Well,
Speaker 1: we might be able to unpack this a little bit.
Speaker 1: Maybe the secret was the voltaic battery, at least in
Speaker 1: terms of what Shelley knew about at the time. Now
Speaker 1: here's where things get even weirder. And this also happened
Speaker 1: before Shelley wrote the book. Galvani had a nephew and
Speaker 1: his name was Giovanni Aldini, and he went a step
Speaker 1: further and he tried to reanimate hanged criminals with electricity
Speaker 1: in eighteen oh three at Newgate Prison in London. He
Speaker 1: did this with the some success and a guy named
Speaker 1: George Forster who was found guilty of murdering his wife
Speaker 1: and child. Now a whole crowd was there and they
Speaker 1: all reported that they saw Forster's eye open, his right
Speaker 1: hand raise up and clench, and his leg move. And
Speaker 1: by the way, Aldini used Volta's pile in his electrocution experiment. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously he didn't bring the individual back to life so
Speaker 1: much as he just made a dance around a little
Speaker 1: bit exactly. But it would have been interesting. What what
Speaker 1: if he had what have you been able to That
Speaker 1: would have been, Yeah, does he have to does he
Speaker 1: get another death set finance? Where is that sentence served?
Speaker 1: That's a good yeah. Yeah. The ethics, so many ethical quandaries,
Speaker 1: In fact, we're gonna get into that the end of
Speaker 1: this episode. There's a fun bit of ethics played with
Speaker 1: the science here. Uh, but let me even just finish
Speaker 1: with some more scientific stuff here. That that Mary Shelley
Speaker 1: was clearly aware of. Another was Humphrey Davy's book The
Speaker 1: Elements of Chemical Philosophy. Now, Humphrey Davy and William Nicholson
Speaker 1: were the era's leading electrical researchers, and they were friends
Speaker 1: of her father, so she probably knew all about them
Speaker 1: as well as this history of electrical experiments with corpses,
Speaker 1: whether they be human or animals. Uh. Davy used Volta's
Speaker 1: battery for what is now called electrolysis and isolated a
Speaker 1: series of substances for the first time. He basically invented
Speaker 1: electro chemistry. He went on to invent the Davy lamp,
Speaker 1: to which separated flame from gas so that there was
Speaker 1: safer usage of like lanterns in minds that were filled
Speaker 1: with methane gas. And he published this book, Elements of
Speaker 1: Chemical Philosophy in eighteen twelve as an account of the
Speaker 1: field within which he worked. So it's very much thought
Speaker 1: that this is a book that influenced Shelley. She was
Speaker 1: aware of it. He was a friend of the family,
Speaker 1: uh and clearly brought it into her work on Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: Now one last little tie in here. There was a
Speaker 1: big focus on life and the body at the time
Speaker 1: as well, and another debate was going on between two surgeons,
Speaker 1: this time John Abernathy and William Lawrence, and they were
Speaker 1: arguing about the Nate sure of life. Now here's the thing.
Speaker 1: William Lawrence had been the Shelley's doctor previously. I mean,
Speaker 1: think about all those medical misfortunes we talked about earlier.
Speaker 1: She must have visited a lot of doctors. So he
Speaker 1: was seen as a radical because he argued that life
Speaker 1: was simply the working operation of a body's functions and
Speaker 1: he didn't take the soul into account. And people got
Speaker 1: really upset about this. So subsequently he was forced to
Speaker 1: withdraw his book about this topic from publication and he
Speaker 1: had to actually resign from the hospital he worked at
Speaker 1: because he didn't have a scientific principle for the soul. Now. Abernathy,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, argued that life didn't depend on
Speaker 1: the body's structure, and that our bodies were just these
Speaker 1: material substances that life was attached to as what he
Speaker 1: called quote a vital principle. Now this goes right back
Speaker 1: to what we were talking about earlier with alchemy and
Speaker 1: the biomechanical soul and especially goalms. I mean, essentially what
Speaker 1: abernatheists thing is like, Oh, we're just all golems that
Speaker 1: are filled with souls. You know, when one uh one
Speaker 1: thing about all these historical um dissections I guess you'd say,
Speaker 1: of of Frankenstein and the and the the the individuals
Speaker 1: and the works that and they may have inspired Frankenstein
Speaker 1: is that sometimes when when you start absorbing a lot
Speaker 1: of it, it begins to feel like an attempt to
Speaker 1: ground a female authors success in the works of male
Speaker 1: UH scientists and male writers and male professionals, etcetera. So
Speaker 1: I think it's important to note that no matter what
Speaker 1: her influences were, no matter what work she was, she was,
Speaker 1: she was drawing off of the way she assembled at
Speaker 1: all UH is brilliant. The way she assembled at all
Speaker 1: is is just above reproach. So we don't we don't
Speaker 1: want that to to bleed away in the dissection. Not
Speaker 1: at all. None of these guys that I just mentioned
Speaker 1: could have created a work as imaginative and insightful as Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: And let's let's be honest here, neither did her husband
Speaker 1: or Lord Byron or Paula Dorri on that fateful summer.
Speaker 1: She was the only one who wrote, you know, who
Speaker 1: finished a novel. Paul Dory had that vampire story. That's fine,
Speaker 1: but I mean she created this uh long lasting, two
Speaker 1: hundred year epic that we're still looking back on today.
Speaker 1: Uh let's take a quick break, and then when we
Speaker 1: get back, let's talk about that. Where we are now
Speaker 1: two hundred years later and what Frankenstein's influences on all
Speaker 1: of us. Alright, we're back, So yeah, Frankenstein continues to
Speaker 1: cast this long shadow not only over our culture, but
Speaker 1: also over our perception of science. And you'll still you
Speaker 1: go into something like Eureko Alerts or or any of
Speaker 1: the various science journalism websites, if you do a search
Speaker 1: for Frankenstein, you're gonna you're gonna find some some articles
Speaker 1: that are out directly related to Frankenstein is somewhere or another.
Speaker 1: But you're also just gonna find Frankenstein used repeat as
Speaker 1: an adjective, as is even a slur um Tell me
Speaker 1: about it yesterday, trying to do research for this episode. Man,
Speaker 1: Like I really had to make use of all of
Speaker 1: the filters in our library search engine to try to
Speaker 1: really hone down what I was looking for. Because yeah,
Speaker 1: the just the term Frankenstein is used now as a bird, right,
Speaker 1: like to Frankenstein something. I use it like that, of course,
Speaker 1: but like there are scientific articles that throw it around
Speaker 1: pretty pretty uh easily to draw attention. Yeah. And you know,
Speaker 1: as as much as we said we can discount and
Speaker 1: say all right, you're over using using this term, using
Speaker 1: it poorly, etcetera, it has still become a part of
Speaker 1: the way that we view science. I mean, that's how
Speaker 1: influential this was as a work of science fiction. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I think Frankenstein, Man, it's a real quintessential
Speaker 1: work obviously, but it really speaks to what we do
Speaker 1: here on the show. I think, like our mission here
Speaker 1: was stuff to blow your mind. Frankenstein is sort of
Speaker 1: this perfect text that we can attach what we do
Speaker 1: with and that like it is about science, but it's
Speaker 1: also about the larger world and the human experience. Uh
Speaker 1: it's just man, revisiting it this last year, I've just
Speaker 1: really fallen in love with it. Yeah, it is it's
Speaker 1: it's a wonderful text, and it has a little bit
Speaker 1: of every Everything that we love here on the show
Speaker 1: is president in the book. But because one of the
Speaker 1: things with science fiction, first of all, it's a brilliant example,
Speaker 1: because she was vague and exactly how Victor is bringing
Speaker 1: life to this thing. And if you're vague enough, then
Speaker 1: nobody's gonna come along ten years later and say, oh,
Speaker 1: you've got it wrong, because he never he never actually
Speaker 1: shares the secret with the reader, totally right. So so
Speaker 1: there's that. But then also we obviously have not reached
Speaker 1: the point in time where human achievement has equalled the
Speaker 1: fictional u achievement in the book, the creation of life.
Speaker 1: But we have made a number of advances that continue
Speaker 1: to push the boundaries and and and and certainly give
Speaker 1: life to this The shadow of Frankenstein is hanging over things.
Speaker 1: I mean, advances in that synthetic biology and other fields. Uh.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty two we unlock the mysteries of DNA,
Speaker 1: and subsequent breakthroughs in genetics have empowered and the science
Speaker 1: of cloning. In two thousand ten, researchers created synthetic bacteria
Speaker 1: in the lab, the first one to be controlled entirely
Speaker 1: by man made genetic instructions. Elsewhere, robotics continue to develop
Speaker 1: increasingly complex, increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence, and biologically inspired mechanical forms.
Speaker 1: And through all of this, uh yeah, Frankenstein's Monster continues
Speaker 1: to resonate as a powerful model of unchecked scientific advancement,
Speaker 1: as well as a reminder of the murky philosophical and
Speaker 1: ethical quagmires we wish to avoid. So as as kind
Speaker 1: of a modern myth, Frankenstein taps into that fear that
Speaker 1: the like Victor will lack the wisdom or responsibility to
Speaker 1: control our scientific creations and uh and the Monster embodies
Speaker 1: such modern fears as a lab created black hole or
Speaker 1: man made plagues, nuclear annihilation. And the story also poses
Speaker 1: the possibility that liked the Monster himself, science will deliver
Speaker 1: us to a place where we find the integrity of
Speaker 1: the human body violated, in the nature of the human
Speaker 1: soul scourged. And these are themes. All of these are
Speaker 1: themes that we have talked about in the last year
Speaker 1: on the show, like whether we're talking about bioengineering or
Speaker 1: body hacking, or biosynthesis or you know, you and Joe
Speaker 1: did the electricity episode, like we're circling around this stuff unintentionally,
Speaker 1: we're all in Frankenstein's orbit. Yeah, I mean, as we uh,
Speaker 1: as we've discussed um some biotechnology episodes in the summer,
Speaker 1: we see great examples of the science clearly outpacing our
Speaker 1: ability to really drive home what our rules and regulations
Speaker 1: and expectations should be. And I mean, what's more Frankenstein
Speaker 1: than that they absolutely advances are beyond what we were
Speaker 1: prepared for. So this leads us to my favorite article
Speaker 1: that I found in the whole pile of stuff about Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: This is one of the most fun papers I've ever read.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of that one that we did when
Speaker 1: we did an episode on vampire blood drinking, the one
Speaker 1: about like how what the rate of infection would be
Speaker 1: if vampires were real. This is called Victor Frankenstein's Institutional
Speaker 1: Review Board Proposal, and it's written by G. Harrison and W. Gannon.
Speaker 1: It came out last year in It's a very fun
Speaker 1: idea for an article. The idea is what would it
Speaker 1: be like if Victor Frankenstein had to submit his research
Speaker 1: to an institutional review board the way all scientists aff
Speaker 1: to today. So. Um, they basically took uh the I
Speaker 1: r B proposal, and they said it in seventeen nine
Speaker 1: at Ingolstadt, which is where he went to school. Uh,
Speaker 1: in the book where Frankenstein was a student, and in
Speaker 1: his proposal they made him consider comparative anatomy medical experimentation
Speaker 1: in theories of life related to the debates around animal electricity. Now,
Speaker 1: because the theme of the novel is that he didn't
Speaker 1: consider the ethical consequences of his work and therefore suffered tragedy,
Speaker 1: they think that the I r B shows that it
Speaker 1: would have compelled him to consider the consequences of this experiment.
Speaker 1: I like this, I've never heard of it's so yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was published in Science and Engineering Ethics. Um. They
Speaker 1: note that in the novel Victor talked, as I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: he talks about all these alchemists that he studied. Uh.
Speaker 1: But they say, in addition, you know, they basically create
Speaker 1: what you do for an IRB a literary review, and
Speaker 1: they add a long list of authors prevalent before that
Speaker 1: time in natural history who would have influenced the debates
Speaker 1: about reproduction, regeneration, anatomy, body functions in the interplay between
Speaker 1: electrochemical and pneumatic forces in living systems. Galvani, Volta, and
Speaker 1: Davy are all among these. They also remind us that
Speaker 1: the electrical machines are from the movie. Again that's Nicola
Speaker 1: Tesla's inspiration. They're not in the book. They also say that,
Speaker 1: and this is maybe for all of you out there too,
Speaker 1: if you're unfamiliar, if you haven't been in an academic setting.
Speaker 1: The purpose of an i r B is to protect
Speaker 1: those involved in research using uh, anything that's impacting to
Speaker 1: living human beings. So the present i RB structure was
Speaker 1: inspired by something called the Belmont Report, which drew its
Speaker 1: inquiries from both the Nuremberg Trials and the Tuskegee Syphilis study.
Speaker 1: And we're going to talk about irbes again in our
Speaker 1: other episode this week about Creepy Pasta's, but i'll keep
Speaker 1: it grunted here for now. These led to three broad
Speaker 1: principles for the Belmont Report. The first is to respect
Speaker 1: people's autonomy, the second is to do no harm to
Speaker 1: the people involved in the study, and the third is
Speaker 1: justice or basically a fair sharing of the benefits of
Speaker 1: the research. Today's i RB is essentially a group of
Speaker 1: people at each institution who must have at least five
Speaker 1: members and conduct an initial and continuing review of these
Speaker 1: research projects. I you know, in my time as a
Speaker 1: graduate student and working at the UM Georgia State University
Speaker 1: here in Atlanta, UH submitted many proposals to the RB.
Speaker 1: Everything from my thesis about Captain America had to go
Speaker 1: to them. To UM when I worked at the library
Speaker 1: at Georgia State University, if we wanted to interact with
Speaker 1: students and do some studies on like how they're using
Speaker 1: library materials, we had to submit it to the IRB.
Speaker 1: So they look at pretty much everything, and they make you,
Speaker 1: UH take refresher courses on the Belmont Report over and
Speaker 1: over again so that you're really up to date on
Speaker 1: this stuff. The principles of the i RB. The big
Speaker 1: argument of this, this fun paper is that the principles
Speaker 1: of the IRB are all essentially what the monster is
Speaker 1: appealing to Victor for throughout this entire novel. UH. One
Speaker 1: is his acknowledgment and respect as an autonomous human being,
Speaker 1: to the promotion of his welfare and to protect him
Speaker 1: from harm, and three to just treat him with some
Speaker 1: justice and equity. So from this and the books accounting.
Speaker 1: They argue that Victor always intended to create life from
Speaker 1: lifeless matter, which could constitute as impacting living human beings,
Speaker 1: and the outline a proposal. It's real. I'm gonna very
Speaker 1: briefly cover it. It's like a twenty page paper, but
Speaker 1: uh he They cover the basic building blocks of life,
Speaker 1: including the protocols for how he's gonna catalog and carefully
Speaker 1: store all of his body parts, uh, the reconstitution of
Speaker 1: simpler organisms, basically, how he's going to reverse the process
Speaker 1: of death in all the various systems of a body,
Speaker 1: and then how he applies biotechnology to the creation of
Speaker 1: a human being. And they speculate the way that he
Speaker 1: would pitch this is by generating electrical charges in a
Speaker 1: series of Leyden jars and supplementing them with a jolt
Speaker 1: of electricity from a bolt of lightning. All of this
Speaker 1: would convulse this organism systems back into life. Their conclusion
Speaker 1: is that if Victor Frankenstein had just completed an i
Speaker 1: RB proposal, he would have had to consider the consequences
Speaker 1: of his experiment and acknowledge his responsibilities to his creature,
Speaker 1: and it would have given him the chance to think
Speaker 1: through what he was doing ethically. I love it. My
Speaker 1: favorite quote from this paper is him saying, this is
Speaker 1: them writing in his voice, if I animate a human creature,
Speaker 1: I will assess risks for the being as well as
Speaker 1: for the surrounding community with whom the creature might interact.
Speaker 1: And another one is should I succeed in creating a
Speaker 1: rational being, I will ensure its privacy and try to
Speaker 1: ensure that it does not become a spectacle or a
Speaker 1: monster for the amusement of others. It's this is like
Speaker 1: one of the most fun papers I've ever read. It's
Speaker 1: a it's a brilliant idea. Yeah, I want them to
Speaker 1: do a sequel to this where they write a proposal
Speaker 1: for Herbert West reanimator. I think that that would be
Speaker 1: another worthy cause. Oh yeah, just about any mad scientists
Speaker 1: would work, because I mean that's what I love about
Speaker 1: looking at a mad scientist character is asking like, what, like,
Speaker 1: what were your goals here? What were you really trying
Speaker 1: to do? What was how do how does this possibly
Speaker 1: fit into any kind of actual um you know, scientific
Speaker 1: rigor so circling back to the two hundred year old thing,
Speaker 1: I just want to lead us out here with two
Speaker 1: of I think that we could easily say this the
Speaker 1: leading minds in horror literature that are alive today. The
Speaker 1: first is st. Jochi, who I mentioned at the top.
Speaker 1: He has a book that I have mentioned on this
Speaker 1: show many times that is a survey of all of
Speaker 1: horror literature called Unutterable Horror uh and his section on
Speaker 1: Frankenstein in it, he says it is a richly complex
Speaker 1: tale that fully justifies the mountains of commentary it has inspired.
Speaker 1: So we mentioned that earlier. All of the swirling conversation
Speaker 1: about themes and intentions and influences and everything. He says,
Speaker 1: it's all justified because this book is great. Um. He
Speaker 1: also says, the passages that are about science show that
Speaker 1: Shelley is departing from the Gothic traditions reliance on medieval
Speaker 1: superstition as the source for terror, and that's the real
Speaker 1: important point of this book is it's like a huge transition,
Speaker 1: turning point in the world of horror literature. He also
Speaker 1: argues that what gives the book merit is the creatures
Speaker 1: moral complexity. We talked about it earlier. Both the creature
Speaker 1: and Victor Frankenstein are so morally complex. Joe she says
Speaker 1: it may be the sole genuine contribution of Gothic fiction
Speaker 1: to the great literature of the world, and its themes
Speaker 1: are eternal, and Shelly, to her credit, doesn't provide simple
Speaker 1: solutions to them, so it constantly makes us keep thinking.
Speaker 1: That's why we keep turning back to it. For two years.
Speaker 1: And then Uncle Stevie Stephen King from his book Dance
Speaker 1: maccob back in. I think that came out in like
Speaker 1: eighty two, maybe eighty one. Yeah, this one I've never read,
Speaker 1: but I always remembered seeing it on the on the
Speaker 1: King racks. When I would, I would I would skip
Speaker 1: lunch for a week, uh in school to say about
Speaker 1: my lunch money to spend on Stephen King paperbacks, And
Speaker 1: I always I would consider that one, and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's not it's not a tale, this is nonfiction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna spend it on you know, uh,
Speaker 1: different cycle of the Werewolf cycle. No, I never get cycled.
Speaker 1: The Warwold was always a little bit more expensive prestige books.
Speaker 1: It was like that was like seven. Your cheapest was
Speaker 1: the Dead Zone at like four. So that was the
Speaker 1: first one I read out of cheapness. And then you
Speaker 1: have to work like some of the bigger ones. Though
Speaker 1: you're talking a thousand plus page books, that's like two
Speaker 1: weeks of lunch money, maybe three. See I always just
Speaker 1: hitting the library from bullies and read all of my
Speaker 1: Stephen King's books in there during lunch. But don's maccab
Speaker 1: if you haven't read it. Is King's attempt to sort
Speaker 1: of gather all of the thoughts about the horror genre
Speaker 1: together in one book. Keep in mind he wrote this
Speaker 1: in like the late seventies, early eighties, so there's a
Speaker 1: lot that has happened since then. But I love it.
Speaker 1: I think you'd really like it, Robert. I keep going
Speaker 1: back to it. But in the book he outlines basically
Speaker 1: his argument is that there are three major archetypes of
Speaker 1: horror that we keep coming back to, and Frankenstein's Monster
Speaker 1: is one of them. He calls it the Thing without
Speaker 1: a Name, which is important because Victor never names the monster.
Speaker 1: That's why we have this problem. There's no name for it.
Speaker 1: There is that like sort of I think there's a
Speaker 1: passage in it, or maybe it's something Shelley said outside
Speaker 1: of the book of like referring to it as Adam,
Speaker 1: like his atom. Some people call the monster Adam, and
Speaker 1: maybe he was just trying to, you know, retain scientific objectivity.
Speaker 1: He knew that had been named it, he'd have to
Speaker 1: copy that. Um So King says that there are many
Speaker 1: examples of Frankenstein's inheritors, So everything from The Hulk, the
Speaker 1: Marvel Superhero The Hulk is a version of that too.
Speaker 1: The Thing from Another World that came out in ninete.
Speaker 1: Now remember King wrote this like two years before John
Speaker 1: Carpenter's version of the Thing came out. Uh, so he
Speaker 1: would have surely included that as the Thing without a Name.
Speaker 1: In fact, uh just last night Joe McCormick and I
Speaker 1: went and saw the Thing here in Atlanta at our
Speaker 1: Plaza Theater. This first time I saw it on the
Speaker 1: big screen, and it was a wonderful experience. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it would qualify as this Thing without a Name.
Speaker 1: So when you're thinking of the types of horror that
Speaker 1: you watch, that's probably one of them. King also says
Speaker 1: this book has probably been the subject of more films
Speaker 1: than any other literary work in history, including the Bible,
Speaker 1: and I find it hard to argue with that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I haven't counted them, but man, there's a lot. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was one of the earliest. You saw Edison's short
Speaker 1: Frankenstein film, and and then you have you go to
Speaker 1: IMDb and you put in Frankenstein or Victor Frankenstein. It's
Speaker 1: just yeah, you know, hundreds. It seems different generations of
Speaker 1: value those characters. So I just want to end on this.
Speaker 1: He argues that it uses one of horror's most common themes,
Speaker 1: that there are things that mankind was not meant to know.
Speaker 1: And this brings us right back around again to the
Speaker 1: mission of stuff to blow your mind, and why Frankenstein
Speaker 1: is so important to it. This this idea of science
Speaker 1: and wonder and oddity and how much can we know
Speaker 1: and how far should we prod? Yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: think the the answer. My view on it is that
Speaker 1: we should. We should not be afraid to prod and
Speaker 1: to move forward, but we should use if we're going
Speaker 1: to turn to Frankenstein, we used it as cautionary tale
Speaker 1: to say, hey, keep pushing, but no it you are
Speaker 1: going to discover things that you might not be prepared
Speaker 1: for as an individual, as a culture, as a legal system.
Speaker 1: And uh, and therefore you have to remain ever vigilant
Speaker 1: and and ever ready to adapt your mindset, even your
Speaker 1: worldview to the new revel as revelations to come. All right, well,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're gonna go ahead and close out this, uh,
Speaker 1: this chapter of Frankenstein until we inevitably do another Frankenstein
Speaker 1: episode with perhaps some new angle in the years ahead. Hopefully, yeah,
Speaker 1: hopefully we'll be here to do the fourth anniversary of Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: We'll use a biotechnology to keep ourselves alive for two
Speaker 1: hundred more years so we can talk about it again. Then.
Speaker 1: All right, so this is one of our Halloween episodes.
Speaker 1: Obviously we are in the Halloween season and it's sufforable
Speaker 1: in your mind. We're probably gonna stretch that Halloween season
Speaker 1: as far through the remainder of as possible, hopefully pushing
Speaker 1: Christmas and the holidays uh into January or a pit somewhere. Uh. So, Hey,
Speaker 1: if you're listening to this, dearing how aween, be aware
Speaker 1: that the stuff to blow your mind. Uh monster video
Speaker 1: series Monster Science is back with a fourth season or
Speaker 1: series of episodes. We have six of them. Uh, and
Speaker 1: as you're listening to this, there should be two or
Speaker 1: three episodes already out. The first three are sex education
Speaker 1: oriented with takes on sexy vampires, alien husbands, and uh
Speaker 1: and face huggers from the alien films. Yes, and then
Speaker 1: we've got a lovely face hugger here hanging in the
Speaker 1: office from the ceiling. Now pretty good. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: the back half of the series are going to deal
Speaker 1: with dragons, Godzilla, and of course the threat of pod people.
Speaker 1: So Robert would never say this, but I'm gonna say it.
Speaker 1: Monster Science is my absolute favorite thing that how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works produces. I love it. I'm an unabashed fan of
Speaker 1: this series. Even if I wasn't involved in Stuff to
Speaker 1: Bowl your mind and didn't work here. It is the,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, the best thing that we put out here.
Speaker 1: I definitely recommend that you watch it. They're funny, they're informative,
Speaker 1: they're fun, and they revolve around the lovely October horror
Speaker 1: themes that we like to play around with here on
Speaker 1: the show. I've seen two of these episodes. Joe and
Speaker 1: I are in a couple of them. Uh, They're they're great.
Speaker 1: And our producer, Tyler Man, he really goes out of
Speaker 1: his way, just makes great special effects. It's so much fun.
Speaker 1: So we'll check them out and on that note, I'd
Speaker 1: like to throw out to a project on my own,
Speaker 1: which is I do another podcast outside of here called
Speaker 1: super Context, and this episode was a very scientific look
Speaker 1: at Frankenstein. But super Context is a show that's a
Speaker 1: autopsy of various forms of media. We do movies, television, music,
Speaker 1: we look at comics sometimes, and we talk about literature
Speaker 1: as well. So if you want to show that's more
Speaker 1: along those lines but sort of plays in the same
Speaker 1: research heavy orientation that we do here, please check it out.
Speaker 1: It's called super Context and you can find us on
Speaker 1: Twitter and Tumbler. All right, And as far as stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind goes, as always, head on over
Speaker 1: to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is
Speaker 1: the mothership. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes.
Speaker 1: You'll find a new monster science episodes, you'll find blog posts,
Speaker 1: you'll find links out to our various social media accounts
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Speaker 1: We're all over those. Follow us there to find out
Speaker 1: more about these videos, to see what new episodes are
Speaker 1: coming up, or just what kind of weird, bizarre science
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Speaker 1: us an email at blow the Mind at how stuff
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