Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters

by Matt Kaplan

  Unsurprisingly, The Island of Dr. Moreau has found its way onto the silver screen three times since it was first written, and in the latest (and not particularly good) adaptation, released in 1996, it embraced the rising use of genetics. Shifting from Wells’s original suggestion that the doctor was surgically humanizing beasts, the recent version describes the doctor as using drug therapy and gene manipulation to accomplish the same result. Along the same lines is Rupert Wyatt’s 2011 film, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which links the testing of a newly developed Alzheimer’s drug on primates with the development of human intelligence among the apes themselves. Like The Island of Dr. Moreau, Rise of the Planet of the Apes again raises the question of who or what the monster actually is. Humans certainly have their moments of villainy in the story, but the apes, with their disturbingly human facial characteristics and ability to so effectively slink through the shadows once they escape from captivity, definitely are frightening. Are they the heroes? It certainly feels that way when a valiant gorilla sacrifices itself to save the leader ape, Caesar, from gunfire. Indeed, there is much here that is similar to King Kong, with sympathy building for the creatures that would typically be identified as monsters. That there is a lot of ambiguity is unquestionable and, based upon where modern science is headed, understandable.

  The creatures of Wells’s imagination are not as far from reality as they might seem. Numerous mice, rabbits, sheep, fish, and birds have already been genetically engineered to carry and express the genes of other animals, including the genes of humans. The methods that are used vary. Some techniques directly insert genetic material from one animal into the area where the genes of a developing egg cell are found. Some labs are engineering viruses to carry genetic material and inject it into the newly developing cells of an embryo. Perhaps the most widely known technique adds genes to stem cells, which have the ability to become other types of cells in the body. By altering stem cells in this way and then adding these altered stem cells to a developing embryo, the added genes become expressed as the embryo grows.

  Such techniques have already made it possible for teams to create a mouse with the liver of a rat. This might not sound like a big deal, since mice and rats are closely related, but giving one species the ability to grow and live off of the organs of another is not that far from what Wells was writing about.23 Indeed, the journal Nature published an editorial in 2011 titled “The Legacy of Doctor Moreau,” arguing that even though the blending of animal and human characteristics will likely be viewed by modern audiences with the same level of horror as Victorian audiences greeted Wells’s beast folk, such horror must be overcome for the sake of science and properly managed by a well-established framework of rules.

  A mouse with a rat liver does not inspire horror among the public, but what about a rodent born with furless human skin? The skin is, in fact, just another organ and, genetically speaking, creating such a rodent in the lab is something researchers are on the verge of doing. This will likely be met with widespread revulsion,24 but for the sake of finding treatments for life-threatening skin diseases, like skin cancer, should such revulsion be overcome? Nature certainly argues for this, with the caveat of careful government oversight. But what of a monkey being born with a human brain?

  Based upon how far research has progressed in recent years, such a creature is now no longer outside the realm of possibilities. Although it will not be created in a lab tomorrow or next year, in the coming decades an animal of this sort may well become very real. But what would such a creature endure? We would have to apply all ethical regulations afforded to humans to a monkey with a human brain, but the mere possibility of such an organism being created and the terrible questions that such scientific work raises are understandably frightening. Could it ever learn to speak? Would it go insane? Might it resent its creators and plot revenge?

  To help keep the nightmares at bay and maintain some level of ethical control, the Academy of Medical Sciences in London has set out a number of rules intended to guide genetics work during the years ahead. Among other things, it clarifies the practices that should be considered reasonable during the introduction of human stem cells into animals that lead to the creation of “chimeric” embryos.

  Chimera, still very much alive, still generating fear, and most certainly coming soon to a cinema near you (probably in the form of a vengeful monkey with a human brain).

  * * *

  16 And in some regions by snakes too!

  17 The result of triplets that end up connected to one another in the womb.

  18 Honestly, instead of featuring as a monster in Greek mythology, it would have made more sense for such a creature to have played the lead role in one of Sophocles’ or Euripides’ tragedies.

  19 Predator/prey interaction fossils are very occasionally discovered, and they are fascinating. A fossil of a Protoceratops struggling for its life against an attacking Velociraptor was found in Mongolia. The predator has its claws wrapped around the prey and the prey was clearly doing everything it could to throw off its assailant, but the battle ended with both dinosaurs dead, as either a sudden sandstorm quickly buried them or a sand dune collapsed on them as they struggled. It is one of the most impressive fossils ever discovered, mostly because such interactions are exceedingly uncommon in the fossil record. (FYI—You can buy a re-creation of this for $9,500 (plus shipping!). www.bhigr.com/store/product.php?productid=464.)

  20 The University of California, Berkeley, has a very large collection of these sorts of fossils excavated from tar pits in Southern California but is unable to store them with the rest of their fossils in the university’s paleontology museum because of the stench and the dangerous nature of the petroleum fumes. The university now keeps them in the bell tower at the center of the campus where they can “de-gas” in peace.

  21 According to Hesiod’s Theogony, the Sphinx, Chimera, and Cerberus were siblings. One has to wonder if their sibling status was invented to explain them all being found in a similar location or in a similar fossilized state.

  22 Heroes don’t usually say things like “Each time I dip a living creature in the bath of burning pain, I say, ‘This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!’”

  23 Remember, humans and chimpanzees are actually more closely related to one another than mice and rats.

  24 And fiery protests that will make all the battles fought over stem-cell research look like a picnic in the park.

  * * *

  3

  It Came from the Earth—Minotaur, Medusa

  “Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?”

  —Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark

  While walking along the sun-baked hills of the Greek islands and staring out over the sparkling blue water, it is hard to think of anything other than paradise. There are no dark forests, no tar pits, and no fierce beasts, just the gentle sea breeze. It is hardly the sort of place where one would expect to find a monster, yet on the island of Crete, one of the earliest and fiercest of monsters came into existence, and not on the surface of the island but in the subterranean world below it.

  Half bull and half man, the Minotaur lived deep in an underground labyrinth and captivated the ancient Greeks who frequently portrayed it in their art. Some drew it with the head of a man and the body of a bull, making it look kind of like a Centaur. Others presented it as a man with a bull’s head. Many artistic depictions of the beast show it attacking and eating people.

  The myth, as described by Apollodorus, tells of a man named Minos on the island of Crete who sought to become king: “Minos aspired to the throne, but was rebuffed. He claimed, however, that he had received the sovereignty from the gods and to prove it he said that whatever he prayed for would come about. So while sacrificing to Poseidon, he prayed for a bull25 to appear from the depths of the sea, and promised to sacrifice it upon its appearance. And Poseidon did send up to him a splendid [white] bull.”

  Yet Minos proved
greedy. After becoming king, he decided he liked the bull so much that he kept it as a pet rather than sacrifice it. This angered Poseidon, who “devised that Pasiphaë [Minos’s wife] should develop a lust for it [the bull]. In her passion for the bull she took on as her accomplice a genius architect named Daidalos… . He built a wooden cow on wheels, . . . skinned a real cow, and sewed the contraption into the skin, and then, after placing Pasiphaë inside, set it in a meadow where the bull normally grazed.” Minos’s wife wound up getting pregnant by the bull.26 Nine months later, when she gave birth, the result was the Minotaur.

  Minos’s wife nursed the monster during its early years until the beast started eating people in the household. Minos was understandably concerned, but since he had already wronged the gods by keeping the white bull as a pet, he was not eager to anger the gods again. The ever-helpful Oracle at Delphi confirmed that his instincts were correct and that he would indeed be in serious trouble if he plotted the death of the Minotaur. This left Minos in a bind. He could not kill the beast, but letting it roam the palace where it could eat everyone was out of the question. To solve his problem, Minos had Daidalos build a maze underneath the palace where the Minotaur could effectively be imprisoned.

  Minotaur. Greek, Attic bilingual eye-cup. c. 515 BCE. Art Resource, NY.

  With the Minotaur stuck in the labyrinth, one might think the story of the monster safely concluded, but the beast continued to cause trouble. The Greek poet Callimachus described it making “cruel bellowing” from its labyrinthian jail, and so to keep the monster calm, Minos arranged to have it fed foreigners on a regular basis. Dozens of hapless people met their fate in the maze, but eventually Minos made the mistake of sending the Athenian hero Theseus inside. Using a ball of string given to him by Minos’s love-struck daughter Ariadne to leave a trail behind him, Theseus killed the Minotaur and escaped the maze.

  The idea of a Minotaur is firmly in the realm of fantasy and myth. There are no animals alive today or found in the fossil record that combine the traits of humans and bulls in any way. Moreover, even if such a creature did exist, the biology would not work. Unlike, say, humans and bears, which have teeth and digestive systems that can manage both plants and meat, bulls are obligate plant eaters and cannot chew or process meat. Since there are no fossil mammals that suggest the merging of a bull and human skeleton, it is more likely that the concept for a beast that was half man and half bull stemmed from Greek interpretation of the culture found on Crete between 3000 and 1100 BC.

  The people of ancient Crete, the Minoans, were ahead of their time. Women are depicted in paintings as having been leaders. The cities had intricate plumbing systems. Tools of war are almost entirely unseen in the archaeological record. Paintings of dolphins and bulls abound with art revealing Minoans engaging in games with bulls, grabbing them by the horns, and vaulting off of bulls’ backs. They are somewhat reminiscent of Spanish bullfights except that no works of art have yet been found showing a Minoan attacking or slaying a bull. Archaeologists speculate that Minoans were engaging bulls for sport and that the art depicts a favorite activity of the culture.

  By the time the Greeks emerged as a strong and healthy civilization, the Minoan world had effectively collapsed. The reasons for the collapse are debated. Some suggest that invaders with iron weapons overwhelmed them while others posit that a tsunami or severe earthquake wiped out the society. Regardless of the cause, it is possible that the mythmaking Greeks heard stories, passed along by word of mouth, of a people on Crete “who were one” with bulls. Some artwork showing humans and bulls grappling may have further inspired the idea of a half-man, half-bull monster.

  But the Greeks were not the first to merge man and beast. Ancient paintings in the Chauvet cave of southern France, where some artwork on the walls is nearly thirty-two thousand years old, depict a creature that is clearly half woman and half bull. Whether this was a monster is a mystery, but we know these ancient humans were not bull leaping like the Minoans. What seems a more probable explanation for this drawing is that early humans saw the power of wild animals and believed drawings that mixed animal and human features imbued some strength of the wild upon them. The same ideas may have been present in Greece and played their part in the rise of the Minotaur.

  Even so, these arguments at best only partially explain the story of the monster. Why go to the effort of inventing the labyrinth, and what about the “cruel bellowing” that Callimachus describes as having come from belowground?

  If it truly existed, exactly where the labyrinth was built is a matter of intense debate among historians. Sir Arthur Evans, the first person to excavate the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete, proposed that the extensive ruins of Knossos itself, which have numerous tunnels and passages carved into the ground, was where later Greeks believed the labyrinth to be. Others argue that the labyrinth was associated with either the Skotino cave complex on the island, a short journey east of Knossos near the modern resort village of Gouves, or a series of tunnels about 45 miles south of Knossos at a site known today as Gortyn.

  Regardless of the precise location of the labyrinth, there is no question that the Minotaur was specifically being placed underground and that its “cruel bellows” were coming from some subterranean location. To fully understand what this means, a bit of geology is required.

  Shaken and stirred

  Earthquakes have been common on Crete for more than a hundred thousand years. The reason is because Crete, and many of the other Greek islands, are sitting above some very active sections of Earth’s crust.

  Not all crust is created equal. Some crust forms the continents and some crust forms the ocean floor. At first glance they look the same, but they are chemically and functionally quite different. Continental crust is relatively light and buoyant, while oceanic crust is relatively dense and heavy.

  In areas called subduction zones, like those around Japan, Indonesia, and Washington State in the United States, heavy oceanic crust moves toward the coasts and runs into buoyant continental crust. When this happens, the ocean crust’s weight draws it under the continental crust and it begins a long journey deep into the earth. During this journey, the oceanic crust cracks, causing earthquakes, and experiences ever-increasing pressures and temperatures that cause it to melt. Because heat rises, some of this molten rock comes up toward the surface and eventually gets blasted out of volcanoes. These regions are almost always marked by a series of big volcanoes laid out in rows aligned with the subduction zone.

  On Crete, the geology is different. South of the island there is an enormous plate of continental crust that makes up most of Africa, and attached to the north side of this plate is a bit of old ocean crust. Crete itself is sitting on a small plate of continental crust, known as the Aegean Plate, that makes up both the floor of the Mediterranean Sea and the islands in the area.27

  Unlike other subduction zones, where the ocean crust is doing the moving and sliding under immobile continental crust, in the Mediterranean, the continental crust of the Aegean Plate is sliding southward onto the bit of oceanic crust sitting along the northern tip of the North African Plate. Moreover, it is moving at the very fast28 rate of 1¼ inches (33 millimeters) a year while the North African Plate is moving northward at the sluggish rate of 1/5 of an inch (5 millimeters) a year.

  With these differing speeds and movements, Crete ends up in an unusual situation. The oceanic crust attached to the North African Plate is not subducting in the way that ocean crust normally subducts in other parts of the world because there is not very much of it, it is not very heavy, and it is attached to the enormous chunk of continental crust making up North Africa. It is still melting and ultimately forming volcanoes far north of Crete, but rather than going down at a steep angle as oceanic crust usually does, it is staying stubbornly shallow and forcing the Aegean Plate upward. Indeed, Crete exists as an island specifically because the North African Plate is constantly pushing it up and out of the sea at a rate of 1/5 of an inch annually. While a ri
se of 1/5 of an inch doesn’t sound like much, it is a lot for an island to grow in a year.

  As for earthquakes, Crete’s position is a miserable one. Because the ocean crust on the northern tip of the North African Plate is subducting (admittedly in an odd way), this causes earthquakes as the old crust cracks during its shallow descent. In places like Japan and Washington State, which have large earthquakes, this would be the end of the geologic story, but in Crete, there is more. The Aegean Plate’s rapid movement up and over the North African Plate is causing tremendous tension to build up quickly and leading sections of both plates to crack more often than they would if one plate was just slowly descending below the other. This makes Crete much more prone to earthquakes than most other parts of the world.

  Could regular earthquakes be the origin of the Minotaur myth? Such tectonic activity could have left ancient inhabitants of Crete searching for stories to explain what they were feeling beneath their feet. Certainly, the sound of an earthquake could be described as the “bellowing” of a beast somewhere underground. But it seems more likely that there must have been some unbelievably severe earthquakes that wreaked such terrible havoc that an explanation, like that of the Minotaur, was needed. And written accounts reveal that horrific earthquakes are a part of Crete’s past.