By Filings on
Christian Living
Bioethics
Genetic Engineering
Human Embryos

“The embryos, described Thursday in the journal Cell, were created in part to try to find new ways to produce organs for people who need transplants, said the international team of scientists who collaborated in the work. But the research raises a variety of concerns.” - NPR

Discussion

Fri, 04/16/21

…Belmonte teamed up with scientists in China and elsewhere to try something different. The researchers injected 25 cells known as induced pluripotent stem cells from humans — commonly called iPS cells — into embryos from macaque monkeys, which are much more closely genetically related to humans than are sheep and pigs.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Fri, 04/16/21

….somebody needs to read Mary Shelley’s most famous work and understand how this sort of thing can go wrong.

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.

Sat, 04/17/21

Finally got around to reading “Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus” last year. It was an interesting piece of work. Spoiler alert… Shelley depicts scientific research has having a built-in seductive power, that Dr. Frank happened to have un unusual vulnerability to (grieving a loss, etc.). So he becomes obsessed with finding the secret of life and immortality. Nearly kills himself figuring it out, but ‘succeeds’ only in the act of reanimating an assembled corpse. He immediately hates himself and his creation. But not as much as his creation hates himself and his maker.

I’m sure volumes have been written but it wasn’t obvious to me on a first reading if Shelley meant to be down on science as a whole (quite possible) or down on human ambition and hubris (a better fit with the story). Maybe she meant to say that human ambition and hubris + science ruins both. (In her intro to the edition I read, she seems to deny that there is any ‘point’ to the story at all, but I was reading by audio and driving, and didn’t want to rewind… so maybe I got that wrong.)

Weird as the book is, it was an oddly satisfying experience. Some books are like that. You come away feeling like it did you good, though you couldn’t really explain what or how. (Well, this happens to me, and I think I’ve heard others report similar book experiences.)

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Sat, 04/17/21

Aaron, I feel this way with Hardy books, Daphne De Maurier, and (especially) almost any Russian novel. It certainly is a strange phenomenon. Now I want to read Frankenstein.

Sat, 04/17/21

[josh p]

Aaron, I feel this way with Hardy books, Daphne De Maurier, and (especially) almost any Russian novel. It certainly is a strange phenomenon. Now I want to read Frankenstein.

There are a couple of different editions, and I’m not sure which one is “best.” I guess there’s basically the 1818 and the 1831. I’m not sure which I read. More on that… https://blog.ung.edu/press/editions-of-frankenstein/

There are a couple of audio versions at Librevox, neither of which are great. I think I started out with one of those, then finished with a better one from our library consortium/Overdrive.

I can’t promise it’ll make you feel undefinably improved, but it did that for me… though not as much as some other novels. (None of which I can remember at the moment, ironically! But they’ll be back. I read something not long ago that left me thinking ‘This one is going to be part of me for the rest of my life!’… Oh yeah: it was The Book Thief. It was remarkable.)

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Sat, 04/17/21

For a very interesting podcast on Frankenstein from the BBC, see here.

In a programme first broadcast in May 2019, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Mary Shelley’s (1797-1851) Gothic story of a Swiss natural philosopher, Victor Frankenstein, and the creature he makes from parts of cadavers and which he then abandons, horrified by his appearance, and never names. Rejected by all humans who see him, the monster takes his revenge on Frankenstein, killing those dear to him. Shelley started writing Frankenstein when she was 18, prompted by a competition she had with Byron and her husband Percy Shelley to tell a ghost story while they were rained in in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva.

The image of Mary Shelley, above, was first exhibited in 1840.

With

Karen O’Brien
Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford

Michael Rossington
Professor of Romantic Literature at Newcastle University

And

Jane Thomas
Professor of Victorian and Early 20th Century Literature at the University of Hull

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

Sun, 04/18/21

Aaron- thanks for that. I’ll check them out. I’ll probably get to it sooner or later.

Don-I’m going to have to listen to that one for sure.

Sun, 04/18/21

I was introduced to Frankenstein by my high school lit teacher and have loved the book ever since. One of my all time favs.