by Stephen Cave
Others, however, have become disillusioned in their wait for the second coming and the resurrection. As a consequence, many have turned to a belief in the soul—which has since become part of orthodox belief for many Christian denominations, including Catholicism. However, not all have given up the ambition of resurrection—but instead of praying for an act of God, these optimists are increasingly putting their faith in an act of science. We are used to technology nowadays achieving what once would have been considered miraculous: in the next chapter we will see that there are those who believe it will soon allow us to raise the dead. And they are paying good money to ensure they will be among the risen. Yet one of literature’s most enduring classics describes what monsters we might create in our quest to overcome death; penned by a teenage girl, it is a story that more than any other captures the fears of our time: Frankenstein.
5
FRANKENSTEIN REDUX
THE MODERN REANIMATORS
“DREAM that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived.” So wrote the seventeen-year-old Mary Shelley two weeks after the death of her first child in February 1815. She went on: “Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits.”
It might have been more common to lose a child in the early nineteenth century than it is today, but as Mary Shelley’s words show, it was still deeply upsetting for the parents. This was already her second experience of the caprice of death: her first happened when she was herself only two weeks old, although she was to feel the loss throughout her life. Her own mother, the notorious radical thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, had died of an infection contracted while giving birth to the daughter who was to eclipse her in fame. Mary Shelley, while still only a teenager, knew that death was always lying in wait, ready to destroy our fragile attempts at happiness.
Throughout her life, she was haunted by the dream of resurrection—of returning the dead to life, like her little baby, warmed by the fire. It was a dream that the new science promised to make real and that both fascinated and terrified her. A dream that, through her, would come to fascinate and terrify all of us.
THIS was in the time shortly before the breakthroughs in hygiene and medicine that brought about the first revolution in human longevity. The intellectuals of the day knew that something was about to happen—that science was on the verge of remaking their world—and the latest experiments were the talk of the salons. Two such intellectuals were the poets Lord Byron, already by then infamous for his many love affairs, and the young Percy Bysshe Shelley—Mary’s lover and soon-to-be husband. The three spent the summer of 1816 together in the Alps around Geneva, in a self-imposed exile from the censure of British society—Percy Shelley was already married when he and Mary ran off together, and Byron was fleeing accusations of adultery, incest and sodomy. They were accompanied by Mary’s half sister Claire—who was pregnant by Byron—and Byron’s young doctor John Polidori.
This was the “sunless summer” of cold and incessant rain caused by a series of volcanic eruptions around the world. Crops failed across the Northern Hemisphere and a persistent fog clung to the land. Sheltering from the constant drizzle, the outcast writers discussed philosophy, composed poetry and read a collection of gothic tales that suited the gloomy weather. To pass the time, Byron challenged them all to write ghost stories of their own—a daunting challenge for a young girl in the company of such eminent authors. Every evening the party was carried away in debating great questions, but each morning Mary would be asked, “Have you thought of a story?”
But one of the “many and long” nightly conversations seized Mary’s imagination, as she later wrote: “Various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered.” Byron and Shelley speculated that “perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”
The “galvanism” that so excited Byron and Shelley referred to the work of the illustrious Italian scientist Luigi Galvani, who had discovered that severed frog’s legs could be made to hop by the application of electricity. In 1803 his nephew Professor Giovanni Aldini had toured England to publicize these wonderful powers. In one widely reported demonstration he applied electricity to the corpse of a freshly hanged murderer: according to a local newspaper, “the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened.” Applying the electricity lower down the body, “the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.” The audience was amazed and appalled by the demonstration, believing the murderer was at any moment going to be “fully restored”; science seemed on the verge of harnessing the power to resurrect the dead.
These thrilling ideas merged in Mary’s mind with her own anxieties, the visions of her lost baby and her fantasies of resuscitation. When she went to bed that night she could not sleep, giving herself over to a reverie—a “waking dream.” Her eyes closed, she saw a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together … the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.” In horror at what he has done, the scientist “would rush away from his odious handiwork … He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade.” But it does not; on the contrary. The scientist goes to his bed, exhausted, but is woken by a sudden noise and “behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”
Mary was terrified by this vision and preoccupied all night. The next day, she announced that she had found a theme for her “ghost story” and began writing. She was eighteen years old. Under the encouragement of Percy Shelley what she had planned as a short story grew within a year to a full-blown novel. The book’s title: Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus.
Mary Shelley’s most famous work is a profound study of the scientific quest to control nature—and a scathing critique of the hero who pursues that quest, the lone scientist who dares to claim the power of the gods for mankind. In its many forms and retellings, Frankenstein has become a modern myth—essential to our understanding of ourselves and the world. It is the first great work of science fiction and a warning that we continually confront anew.
But most of all, Frankenstein is an exploration of the fantasy of conquering death—a fantasy that Mary, like all of us at one time or another, had herself indulged. Her tragic hero aspires to take on the power that for thousands of years had been reserved for God alone—to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.” In other words, to resurrect the dead.
THE CONQUEST OF NATURE
WE saw in the last chapter that early Christianity flourished by promising that God would shortly raise the faithful to live again in eternal happiness. But the wait for the End Times has been a long one, and many have come to doubt whether we can be so sure of God’s good intentions, or indeed whether he is out there at all. The impatient and the skeptical have therefore been working on a resurrection narrative of their own, a secular version of the apocalyptic tradition with its promise of paradise. It is a narrative that has been enormously powerful in driving human progress and shapes much of the way we see the world today. Its claim is simple: that we do not have to wait for God to raise us from the grave; it is a power that we humans can claim for ourselves. We must only discover “the principle of life,” and then we can conquer death forever.
But we have also seen that the early attempt to make sense of resurrection—the Reassembly View, according to which your component particles would simply be put back together—is deeply flawed. In this chapter, we will explore an alternative theory of how re
surrection could ensure that it really is you clambering out of the grave and not some doppelgänger. But first we will look at what led Mary Shelley and her companions to believe that science was on the verge of claiming control over life and death, and how this belief has shaped our world.
AS Mary Shelley was penning Frankenstein, science was beginning to establish itself as the new authority on nature’s laws. In the preceding century, the scientific method of careful observation and experimentation had fully emerged from the obscurantism of the alchemists. Secret meetings had given way to public scientific societies, and coded tomes to published journals. But although the methods had changed, the aims remained the same: the mastery of nature and conquest of mortality.
In her novel, Mary Shelley has the career of her young scientist hero, Victor Frankenstein, reflect these developments: he first dabbles with alchemy and the search for an elixir of life before being convinced instead of the power of physics and chemistry. At college, he learns that the scientists who “pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles,” and “have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven” and “mimic the earthquake.”
This is the language of the new immortality narrative, which claims for science the powers of the gods. In chapter 4, we saw that earlier civilizations sought to control their fate through the performance of ancient, orderly rituals; the early success of science promised a much more active and effective means of taking charge of our destiny. It is a narrative of control and conquest, one that Mary Shelley captures in her description of these masculine scientists as those who seek “to penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places.” Frankenstein is convinced by the new ethos of the age that through force of will and reason, we can become masters of nature.
It is nature, after all, that decrees that we must die—that causes our joints to seize up, our skin to wrinkle and cancer to strike. In order to live forever, we must, like the gods, rise above these natural limits. This therefore is the grand project of science, its answer to the Mortality Paradox: death and disease might be what nature intends for us, but we can master nature and thwart her plans. The founding fathers of the scientific method were quite explicit about this. René Descartes, for example, talked openly of seeking knowledge that would “render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature” and was considered by his contemporaries to be obsessed with the extension of life. And Francis Bacon pursued what he considered this “most noble goal” of life extension to his death—in 1626 from pneumonia, which he contracted when experimenting with the use of snow to preserve corpses. Throughout its history, science has sought to make life unending and death reversible.
In chapter 3, we saw that scientific progress is driven forward by the Engineering Approach to mortality, the modern version of the Staying Alive Narrative, which attempts to break down the challenge of death into a list of potentially solvable problems like curing cancer, harnessing stem cells or stopping smoking. We can now see that this is part of a broader ideology of mastering nature—a belief that there are no natural limits that cannot in the end be overcome by reason. This belief extends beyond the hope of staying alive to encompass also its Plan B: resurrection.
This drive to mastery of nature is often regarded as the very essence of modernity. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has noted, with the advent of science, death came to be seen as an insult to our newfound powers—“the last, yet seemingly irremovable, relic of fate in a world increasingly designed and controlled by reason.” Death is a humiliating natural restriction from which we must be emancipated. The young scientist Frankenstein is inspired to break this final shackle and so embodies the arrogance and ambition of this new narrative. His successors today are a growing group of technophiles who, in the words of the leading authorities on science and society Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz, “explicitly embrace the pursuit of immortality, of human perfectibility, of dominion over nature, and of transcendence over the limits that time and space impose on the individual.”
The belief that we can conquer death through scientific mastery of nature is often set up as being in opposition to the religious tradition but in fact closely follows the Resurrection Narrative of apocalyptic Christianity. The prophets of scientific progress—including both Mary’s husband, Percy Shelley, and her father, the radical philosopher and writer William Godwin—promised the imminent arrival of a utopia in which the frailties of the human condition would be transcended. This is of course just what was preached by Jesus and St. Paul, who prophesied the Day of Judgment and subsequent arrival of heaven on earth. The only difference was that instead of a miraculous act of God bringing about the resurrection, we would achieve it ourselves through science.
I, AVATAR
MUCH of the energy of those inspired by this narrative is spent on research that offers to extend our days—that is, the pursuit of staying alive. But, as Victor Frankenstein recognized, the real prize for those who could learn to subjugate nature is not simply postponing death; it is the power of resurrection—bringing the dead back to life. After all, although some might hope to achieve the “longevity escape velocity” we met in chapter 3, many will recognize that there is a good chance that nature will get them before science has completed its conquering. Luckily, the narrative of endless progress reaches even beyond the grave.
We saw in chapter 4 that resurrecting the dead requires something extraordinary; it is not as easy as a certain energy company inadvertently suggested when they wrote to one recently deceased customer, “We are very sorry to lose your valued custom. Should you like to return at any point, please just let us know.” But the astonishing advances in technology in the past decades have given many hope that it will indeed be just this straightforward, that there will soon be companies offering that if you would like to return, then “please just let us know.” There are three theories in particular that are inspiring cutting-edge research in the promise of transcending our final limit: cryonics, mind-uploading and, once again, superintelligence.
Francis Bacon was onto the right idea on that fateful winter night when he decided to stuff a dead chicken with snow: freezing can indeed halt the decay that otherwise quickly turns a fresh corpse into a heap of stinking goo. Mary Shelley was well aware of this when, two hundred years after Bacon’s chilly death, she wrote her short story “Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman,” about a man frozen by an avalanche while returning across the Alps to England from Italy in 1654, only to be dug out and revived in 1826. Again presaging modern science fiction by generations, she explains that the ice and snow put him in a state of “suspended animation.” Rumors of such cases were rife in the 1800s—such as folktales from New England of how poor families struggling to feed the household through the harsh winter months would give the grandparents large quantities of homemade liquor, lay them in a coffin and bury them in a snowbank. When spring finally came they would be hauled out, defrosted and (allegedly) revived—perhaps with the help of a little more moonshine.
Whether modern techno-utopians believe these legends or not, they are convinced there is something in the idea of freezing bodies in order to ward off decay. At temperatures below –276°F, they argue, biological structures could be preserved for hundreds or even thousands of years without decomposing. Cryopreservation (that is, preserving things at extremely low temperatures) is already used for storing small samples of human tissue such as eggs and sperm. So it should be an ideal way of ensuring you are still around when scientists have worked out the finer points of resurrection. The leading prophets of the future scientific utopia are therefore signing up to have themselves supercooled. This is the practice known as cryonics, and already there are metal vats in numerous sites around the world containing the bodies of techno-optimists bobbing gently in liquid nitrogen.
Cryonics is of course not itself a recipe for resurrection; it is only a way of preserving corpses until the day when resur
rection is supposed to become possible. It is, if you like, the modern equivalent of mummification, but the doctors and scientists have yet to work out the modern equivalent of the various spells that are supposed to return these modern mummies to life. Given the enormous damage caused to our cells when they are supercooled, on top of the damage of whatever it was that killed the person in the first place, they have their work cut out for them. Skeptics therefore see cryonics as just an eccentric form of burial. But it has nonetheless captured the popular imagination, featuring in countless science fiction stories and shaping our vision of the future.
It is, however, currently rather pricey: cryonics institutes charge around $150,000 to look after your body in perpetuity. Some aspiring resurrectionists find this a little much, and they also reason that by the time they are ready for the icy thermos they might anyway be disillusioned with their old and creaky bodies. Perhaps, therefore, it is not worth preserving the whole body. After all, many believe that what matters is just the brain: that is what supports a person’s mind—memories, plans, hopes. Therefore, instead of signing up for the whole hog, they choose to have only their dead, severed head put in the freezer—for a mere $80,000. Such techno-optimists conclude that by the time technology is sufficiently advanced to defrost and repair a person, it will surely also be possible to grow or build a new body.
BUT the belief that it is only a person’s mind that really matters has led some futurologists to more extreme conclusions. Many people see the mind as essentially a set of information—memories, desires, dreams et cetera—encoded in the brain. They argue that it is only this information that matters, not how or where it is encoded. Brains are useful because our minds run on them like software on a computer, but if we found some other way of running that software, then the squishy gray matter would be dispensable. Given the amount of damage caused to the brain by lying around dead for a few hours, then being filled with antifreeze, then supercooled and, one day, thawed, some cryonicists believe it would be best if they left their old heads behind. The route to resurrection, they argue, is for their brains to be scanned, all their psychological data recorded, then a new brain built to encode it—like running the same software but on a spanking-new computer.
