What is the science in The Island of Doctor Moreau? Is the book critical of science? Of course it is. The question is which meaning of “critical” is involved: investigation or condemnation?
It could add up to a thriller plot: crazy science produces abominations, with the subset of cruelty to animals thrown in for extra moral censure. Everyone is familiar with the default science fiction story in film, in which scientific experimentation proceeds without regard for morality or consequences, people suffer due to the outcome, heroes (who know it should never have been done) struggle to survive in difficult circumstances, the results are uncontrollable and dangerous to others, something happens that is disgusting or spectacular or both, and the meddling scientist is punished. The scientist has as well one or another social disorder wrapped up in his motivations, in some combination of pure knowledge, the greater good, intense idealism, wounded ego, and viciousness, which focuses his attention to the point of passive or active cruelty. That’s the assumed and expected plot: bad scientist, don’t meddle!
I can understand why a person might think that “don’t meddle” is the point that the novel is making. These issues are invoked in the story, in fact in so many words, but each detail—the crazy scientist, the violation of natural law, the ensuing disaster or retribution—turns out to be reversed in some way, or off-message enough to throw the whole model into question. Unfortunately, as with Frankenstein, expecting this plot has a way of subverting the experience of reading, causing the fiction itself to be missed.
Moreau is terrifying in his determination, but he’s not barking mad and has no interest whatever in defying, outdoing, or being God. He’s actually unswervingly religious in standard late nineteenth-century intellectual terms. His fixed idea (monomaniacal, to be technical) lies only in his adherence to a higher state for humans as distinct from nonhumans, which is to say, what most people believe anyway, which puts a rather different light on his “mad” science. He isn’t the main character, even by implication, and is killed early relative to the in-story chronology and its climactic events.
His project is not limited to an engineering or invention project, “do it just to do it,” but he is investigating a valid theoretical point: whether the ordinary processes of the body as observed in nonhuman animals are capable of functioning as a human being. He’s not seeking to improve upon human beings, or to emulate evolution as such, but to evaluate, as he correctly calls it, “the plasticity of the flesh.”
Its design isn’t so good, lacking controls and a defined performance variable, but the techniques work: the nonhuman animals are transformed successfully. I know this is a bold claim, to be developed in Part III of this book in detail, but for now, consider that the Beast People’s appearance is disturbing but not outrageous, with one exception; they are not covered with fur and do not have protruding fangs or animal heads, and everyone who meets them, even up close and unclothed, thinks they are people. Their actions are interpretable and responsive, not random uncontrolled urges. Most of the “beastly” behavior in the story is evidenced by the people, not the Beast Folk.
There’s a lab accident, but it poses no general, society-shaking danger, and is better understood as a personal act rather than an accident as such. At the end, the Beast Folks’ regression is not a vengeance-driven outbreak of frenzied bloodshed and doesn’t deliver retribution to anyone.
Something’s missing from the “don’t meddle” plot—where’s the danger-filled disaster? Where’s the retribution? Where’s the lesson? They’re not there.
The subversion of the novel Frankenstein into the “don’t meddle” story is at least partly understood, and coming under more and more scrutiny. However, the same subversion of The Island of Doctor Moreau remains culturally unrecognized, so that the novel’s content is frequently misrepresented as this exact anti-science story. Here, I aim to outline and compare the issues of abomination and other specific plot points in the films to show what the novel is not. Seven versions have been made.
•1913: Ile d’Epouvante (The Island of Terror)—I’m still looking for this one, but sadly, it might be a lost film, like the first film versions of Frankenstein in 1911 and 1915. It was produced in France by the Société Générale des Cinématographes Éclipse and was directed by Joë Hamman (not to be confused with the 1970 Italian film of the same title produced and directed by Mario Bava, which is not based on Moreau).
•1932, released 1933: Island of Lost Souls—this is a Paramount film directed by Erle C. Renton, with Charles Laughton as Moreau. It’s played the same role as the 1931 Frankenstein in establishing the story’s content in popular culture, even more completely if that’s possible.
•1959: Terror Is a Man—this is a Hemisphere Entertainment film directed by Gerardo de Leon (billed as Gerry de Leon), with Francis Lederer as Dr. Charles Girard, produced in the Philippines by the famous filmmaker Eddie Romero.
•1972: The Twilight People—this is a Dimension Pictures (Four Associates Ltd.) film, the first version of this story in color, also produced in the Philippines, produced and directed by the same Eddie Romero, with Charles Macaulay as Dr. Gordon.
•1977: The Island of Doctor Moreau—this is an MGM film directed by Don Taylor, with Burt Lancaster as Moreau (first name Paul).
•1996: The Island of Doctor Moreau—this is a New Line Cinema film directed by John Frankenheimer, with Marlon Brando as Moreau, famous for quirks arising from its disorganized production history as described in the documentary Lost Soul (2014).
•2004: Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain—This is a Full Moon Entertainment film directed by Charles Band, with Jacob Witkind as Moreau. It is definitely not a mainstream item and did not receive a theatrical release.
Across the films, the fundamentals of the plot differ from the novel in consistent ways: Moreau, by whatever name, makes monstrosities and the monstrosities go nuts, serving as both rampaging monster and retributive villagers at once, and kill him as he richly deserves. The details that deviate from the novel and make this plot into “don’t meddle” are quite consistent:
•The project’s goal is typically more grandiose, including improving upon humanity rather than arriving at it, outdoing or overcoming evolution, and in at least one case, eradicating evil.
•Beyond straightforward questions of ethics, something is psychologically very wrong with Moreau, in some combination of hubris, sexual perversion, active or inadvertent sadism, bullying, and impulsiveness in his experiments; there’s always a kick-the-dog moment or revelation of past wrongdoing at the very least.
•His demeanor varies, but always along the mad-scientist scale, whether psychopathic coldness or dysfunctional paternalism.
•He often turns toward Prendick as a research subject.
•The work is explicitly called abominable in various phrasings, which to be fair, happens in the novel, too, but here it’s a simple identifier that I infer to be authoritative and to which Moreau has no meaningful reply.
•The subjects’ agony during their transformation is downplayed from the novel, and their unjust treatment afterward is ramped up; in the three mainstream films, the Beast People are exploited and miserable, treated as a colonial village and subject labor force.
•They are physically obviously nonhuman, especially in the later films, when they are effectively bipedal versions of the various animals.
•Related to the visual effect, they speak in movie Tarzan-talk, with limited vocabulary and broken grammar.
•They are often baffled by simple tasks or are easily fooled, similar to “natives” in movies with racist and colonial tropes.
•They experience inexplicable rages and surges of violence; apparently their native animalism involves injuring creatures around them for no reason; in the 1977 film, they kill and presumably eat Braddock’s companion in the first moments of the story.
•There are no ordinary, run-of-the-mill female Beast People; either they are absent or one is present who looks very much like a human.
•The concept of “animal” is synonymized with rapist in at least two of the films.
•In the 1996 film, some female Beast People are present in addition to the single human-looking one, but are extremely incidental.
•The Law is invented and imposed by Moreau, and it is nothing but another form of pure cruelty, arguably not perceived much beyond pure programming by most of the Beast People.
•Some do express dismay at the hypocrisy behind the Law.
•They are miserable in their lack of natural identity, including self-recognition as “Things! Things!” as expressed in Island of Lost Souls, or “Father, what am I?” in the 1996 film, similar to the “We belong dead” line in Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
•The taste of blood prompts the rebellion, which results in the vengeful rampage at the end.
•The fully unleashed “animal” is a raving berserker, corresponding to the term being employed as derogatory, so the ending rampage is an orgy of frenzied vandalism.
•This can be a bit tricky, too, because the rampage is “bad” but the vengeance is “good” when it targets Moreau.
Since this story is about Moreau, Prendick becomes a bit superfluous, which is probably why he has such a different personality in each film. He’s never the scientifically informed, moderate progressive, as in the novel. In the earlier films, he’s a hard-assed engineer, although with a streak of romance, upgraded in the Philippine versions to a genuine tough guy. In the later films, he’s generally an ineffective character. Moreau’s assistant Montgomery turns out to be more important, with extremely different characterizations and plot roles.
I don’t want to give the impression that I hate the films. I freely admit that I own them all. Each does successfully generate a gray area for the moral capabilities of one or more of the Beast Folk, usually limited to the parameters established for Frankenstein’s creation in the 1931 film: only human enough to further establish the cruelty and irresponsibility of the scientist. Some of the performances and ideas toward that gray area are remarkably good. Movies are irresistible discussion topics, so throughout this book I’ll point to them when it seems helpful or interesting to the current topic, but these discussions will appear in boxes to keep the movie talk from overwhelming things.
In Island of Lost Souls (1932), science is torture, and it won’t work. Moreau is openly sadistic and more than a bit of a pervert, especially creepy because throughout the first half of the movie, the content of his dialogue is picture-perfect intellectual, but delivered with the mannerisms of a criminally misbehaving schoolboy. These get more and more intense until the net effect is pathological hypocrisy: the heights of averred intellectual achievement motivated by sadism, megalomania, and a nasty smugness in getting away with it. The progression hits its peak at the precise halfway mark of the film, when Moreau first lounges on one of his own operating tables like a Roman sybarite, then gloats over his “failures” slaving away on the pedal-operated generator, and caps it with self-congratulatory blasphemy, in his “Do you know what it means to feel like God?” line. A big part of the plot is manipulating the hero into a triangle between his fiancée and Lota the Panther Woman, and in connection with this, several of the Beast Folk are interesting characters and very well acted, making their drama more interesting than Moreau’s fate.
Terror Is a Man (1959) focuses on the romantic triangle among the hero, here named Fitzgerald, the single Beast Person (a male panther), and Dr. Girard’s estranged wife, and it’s the single Moreau film that stays with the castaway’s personal drama rather than on the researcher’s fate. Girard is also unique in film versions of Moreau because he’s completely sane, as the hero acknowledges without sarcasm, only matching the “don’t meddle” scientist profile in his callousness regarding others’ safety and lives. The research is apparently going poorly in that the subject repeatedly escapes the lab to wreak havoc on the islanders, but the later part of the story steadily improves the panther man’s moral standing over the other characters, even the hero. Unlike all the other films, he becomes (slightly) less savage as the story proceeds, rather than more, and Girard’s techniques are at least implied to be sound. It’s from an era of slower paced filmmaking that doesn’t translate well today, but I like its seriousness and find the panther man’s fate moving. It also features the cheesiest promo gimmick: the soundtrack rings a bell prior to the surgery scene in order to warn the “squeamish and weak of heart” not to look, which was advertised with relish.
The Twilight People (1972) is a fine example of a grindhouse film, and like many of them, it includes some good ideas and moments in all the jaw-dropping excess and catch-as-catch-can special effects. However, the experiments and the quite hideous Beast People are not very important to the story, except as spectacle. The main characters are all humans, and their conflicts are again a romantic tangle, so the research subjects are not there for much more than mayhem. The main villain is the assistant, here a sadistic mercenary, and the main problem is solved when the hero marshals the Beast People to slaughter him and his henchmen. Even Dr. Gordon isn’t very engaged in the problems of the plot and comes off as numbed and exhausted, although this is livened up a little because he meets his end at the hands of his wife, one of his subjects.
In The Island of Doctor Moreau (1977), Moreau is initially harsh and cold, sinister in his intellectualism, but is then abruptly revealed to be deranged by fear of his own creations, including shouting at and whipping them for no conceivable reason, as well as the classic turn of shooting his own minion when he gets too assertive. The story includes the 1932 version’s plot point of setting up the hero for sex with the beast-woman, this time successfully (it’s the 70s now, after all). Here the mirror-effect of beast-to-human versus human-to-beast is at least mentioned, but significantly, the reverse procedure doesn’t work. Also typical of 1970s cinema, the content is spectacular but scattered and contradictory, including Moreau’s odd Christ-like posture in death.
In The Island of Doctor Moreau (1996), Moreau is a cultist-paternalist, deranged in that he is oblivious to the grotesque misery of his creations. His personal style aside, Moreau’s plot role is almost identical to that in Island of Lost Souls, as the research is straightforwardly unsuccessful, the basic dysfunctional relationship among the humans and transformed animals breaks down, and the former get what’s coming to them as the rebellion becomes a rampage. It lacks the romantic subplot entirely, therefore losing intriguing aspects from the earlier films, and the narrator has no agency throughout the story. It may be a mess, but it shouldn’t be dismissed. During its complicated production, someone took a few ideas seriously, especially about religion as a form of social control; it’s also clearly influenced by The Twilight People (among other things, the slight name change from Ayessa to Aissa) and Brian Aldiss’s novel Moreau’s Other Island/An Island Called Moreau (the modern context of political strife, the rifle and guerrilla revolution, and some other military implications); and someone misread the ending of the novel at least enough to reference it.
Doctor Moreau’s House of Pain (2004) comes from the same tradition and aesthetic as 1970s grindhouse, although its venue is home viewing rather than exploitation-film theaters and drive-ins. It is explicit and excessive. If you like this sort of thing, this film definitely fits the bill, and if you don’t, it will cement that opinion into place for good. All that said, Moreau’s goal is one of the more similar to the textual version in film, given a twist toward the ruthless insofar as human organs constitute part of his techniques, and in considering the hero as mating stock. It’s the only film in which Moreau is not killed by his creations. The story includes thoughtful conceptual punches, including the creations holding Moreau prisoner and demanding further work upon themselves so they can join human society. Although the experiment has “gone out of control,” it does so toward the end of wondering whether it has actually sort of succeeded.
In Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws, she suggests that lower-budget films made outside mainstream distribution typically address disturbing content more directly and with more thematic follow-through in their endings, and should not be dismissed due to their excess. I find her case to apply well here, especially regarding the 1959 and 2004 versions.
The term “manimal” is absent from the novel and all the films except for Dr. Moreau’s House of Pain, although I often see it misattributed in collective references to the novel and its adaptations. It may have come from the 1980s TV show Manimal, which has nothing to do with Moreau, or from the US rock band the Manimals, which uses many motifs from Island of Lost Souls.
Ultimately, the issue boils down to one question: Is the science frightening because it violates natural law, or because it shows that something we believe is not as rock solid as we thought?
Movies didn’t invent the “don’t meddle” story, whose formal origin was probably Presumption, Peake’s adaptation of Frankenstein, in the early 1820s. This is the version that introduced the corpse or near-corpse automaton concept for the creation, as well as the comedic element of Fritz, better known as Igor.1 Apparently there was quite a genre of theatrical versions in the late 1800s. Movies certainly embraced the story immediately, with two versions of Frankenstein and one of The Island of Doctor Moreau in the early 1900s, almost as soon as commercial filmgoing was invented. The defining longer-feature version came with Dr. Rotwang in Metropolis (1927), which introduced the mad scientist’s connection with ruthless industrialism, but the ur-example is the Universal Studios film Frankenstein (1931), which set the template for so many, many movies afterward. Not only is the creation a walking corpse, constructed from stitched-together bodies, it has the brain of a psychopath; although it’s the tiniest bit sympathetic in receiving only abuse, its rampage is a foregone conclusion, and the villagers’ revenge on Frankenstein is nothing but justice. Frankenstein himself takes the theatrical version’s hubris to the point of pure mania.
In these stories, science as a process bears no resemblance to reality, and I’m not talking about picky details, but its absolute identity. The debate among members of a community, the professional context of journal publishing—all are absent. Research is funded either out of one’s pocket or is institutionalized at the extreme forms of privatized product or government conspiracy. It’s all engineering research, as the only activity seems to be invention, that is, science isn’t a process at all, only product. Similarly, scientific results do not yield insight or contribute a nugget to a more complex debate, but rather boil down to this widget or project either working or not working. Everything else is mere technobabble, accurate or otherwise, and always gaudy with dangerous details. “Testing” doesn’t mean testing at all. Ooh, glowing, smoky, genetic stuff! See what happens! Bonus points for trying it on yourself.2
Movie scientists as people are a little closer to reality. Real scientists’ education retains many features of the medieval guild, defined by mentor-journeyman relationships and patronage, and this leads to the content seeming arcane to everyone else. Most scientists aren’t employed like normal people; typically they work for one institution, like a university, but their research is funded by another, like a federal agency, and their work is assessed by yet a third, the journal-publishing mechanisms of club-like scientific organizations. It’s genuinely impossible to explain to people “what you do” in terms of activities and payment, and why one both does and does not have a boss or work colleagues in the usual sense of these terms. The work itself is both public, funded mostly from the federal budget and technically accessible to anyone through publication, and private to the point of being cloistered, being professionally invisible and intellectually obscured. They’re strange beasts politically, too, considering the role of scientists in high-profile technology like the Manhattan Project and the spy fever that swiftly followed, and the vocal presence of scientists in activism—including militant activism—in later decades, for example in Earth First! The significant yet mysterious social role for the scientist that prevailed during the writing of Frankenstein persists today on a larger scale. They are both insiders and outsiders, the servants of untrustworthy power and the untrustworthy nonconformists subverting or threatening the normal or reliable status quo. Fear aside, these perceptions are quite accurate—science simply doesn’t fit into the familiar frameworks of employment-based identity and political loyalty.
Two stereotypes emerge, reflecting the uneasy, mixed perception. One is the loopy, speculative geek, associated either with a university or a very cloistered government program, and the other is more of a company man, with industry or with some practical branch of government. The latter is an important historical construct, as it was deliberately built and reinforced during the early Cold War, especially from the writings of C. P. Snow—the scientist as a patriotic, clear-eyed visionary of the future, with aggressive engineering being the world’s only hope.3
Moreau does not indulge in one of the fictional scientist’s famous habits, self-experimentation, but it’s more common in reality than one might think. Some of it was inadvertent, as when organic chemists tasted their concoctions as a means of analysis until modern instrumentation became available. Some of it was deliberate and as loony as anything on film. In the time the novel was written, Max Josef von Pettenkofer drank cholera bacteria in 1882 and Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard injected himself with testosterone in 1889. More recent examples include Albert Hoffmann self-testing with LSD in the 1940s, and Barry Marshall drinking Heliobacter pyloris, as published in 1985.
The “don’t meddle” story turns all these things up to the point of pathology. The scientist’s professional isolation often includes physical isolation, in turn identified with his or her psychology: at best socially awkward, whether eccentric to genuinely nuts, painfully friendly to painfully rude, or some combination of endearing, sinister, and pathetic. At worst, this grades into sociopathy: abusive treatment of animals and assistant, dismissal of danger to the public, and open defiance toward such considerations. He or she is always curious regardless of consequences, sometimes to the point of being too dumb to live, with weird blind spots, such as a curious infusion of fact-faith dogmatism into the dizzy speculation. For someone whose work effectively consists of inventing something new and pushing the “go” button, he or she is strangely unprepared for surprises.4
If these observations were merely whining about failed depictions, scientists could join the long list of misrepresented film professions, which is sociologically interesting but probably not very important. However, these details factor into something odd about the “don’t meddle” plot that never changes. Taken literally, its various criticisms of science tend to cancel out. If it’s not cruel, is it still wrong? Or if the scientist isn’t a weirdo? Or if it’s not misused? Or if there are no accidents? If it produces the intended results? Since these components are usually blended, it’s impossible to tell what’s actually wrong with it, aside from being a destructive or disgusting spectacle. Where’s the moral failing: in the science itself, in human applications, or in the dangers of the procedures?
For example, look at that so-common accident, with its subset of unanticipated results or misuse by somebody. Notice that the scientists must be distinctly morally blind in conceiving and carrying out the project, because the designated sane character in the story instantly sees its inherent wrongness. To a decent person, the project is obviously wrong, against Nature, and he or she knows that this wrongness must “out.” Therefore the accident is not a mere procedural risk that could happen to anyone, but a retributive backlash. Even if the scientist were to run the procedures exactly right, harm no one, hurt no creature, spill nothing, indeed cover every imaginable base, the universe will come along with its coincidences and punish him for doing it, with collateral damage guaranteed. If it’s not already obvious how the disaster arrives, then it will anyway, because it must—Nature itself, offended, accepts no less.5
This principle is especially obvious in Jurassic Park, whose plot is a perfect blend of Frankenstein (1931) and Island of Lost Souls (1932), and in which the scientist is especially feckless in his naiveté. Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) is presented as the mathematician and the allegedly objective scientist, but he is scripted and played as a clergyman in all but name, who flat-out says that God’s plan for the dinosaurs was extinction, so therefore the scientists should have known not to resurrect them. Not only is such an act evidently wrong, but it cannot work—even its brief appearance must yield a corresponding catastrophe, through the operation of literal natural law.
I rather appreciate the film’s honesty in this regard: it’s a spiritual criticism, about the intentions of the universe and our proper place in it, and has nothing to do with danger, ethics, or motivations. The project doesn’t merely undergo a snag, but was intrinsically blasphemous from the start and therefore must result in backlash, as the universe responds morally. I stress this point: the “don’t meddle” story is about dealing with the abominable. It isn’t about science at all, but sorcery. It’s rooted in and relies on absolute fear.
Yes, it’s trouble. Scientific work is not socially or morally neutral. It constantly provokes moral and political confusion, both personally and regarding institutions of power. But none of that is being substantively addressed as long as people talk about “uncontrollable forces” and “things man was not meant to know.”
Scientific thinking is an ordinary, easy to understand human activity. We all interact with the physical world all the time, and some of that interaction involves trying to figure it out. If you tinker with any of it and consider how whatever you did interacted with whatever it is, then you’re being scientific—even more so if you’re thinking about general or underlying principles (“how plants grow”), rather than merely your current bit (“my tomatoes”). Scientific thinking is so normal that people forget to recognize it when it’s not dressed up in professional trappings and technology.
Science means more than the thinking and reasoning process. In a given society and period, sometimes—as now—thinking this way is formalized into institutions, professions, and ways to assess and record it. It’s about the topics of study, how they’ve changed, what’s been produced, what conclusions and general principles have become ordinary knowledge, and what technology is under way. Referring to a scientist is talking about a social status, a set of educational requirements, a range of jobs, means of funding, and many other embedded features. Modern scientists cannot help but have defined, albeit squishy, relationships with other societal institutions and roles, like education, commerce, and manufacturing.
At first glance, their role may seem to be simply contributive. However, science is genuinely disruptive. Its output consistently changes two things: the concrete technical nuts and bolts of living, and the explanations for everything about living. It’s as if you took art or writing of any kind, with all of its individual, unpredictable political potential, and maximized its direct impact on people’s lives. It seems all bound up in societal institutions and social norms, but its emergent effects cannot help but sooner or later turn around and challenge them.
The most obvious and relevant case is technology, which is a constant side effect of scientific thinking, and which gets into society and affects people there (Figure 3.1). You can see three kinds of science at work. Basic research is sometimes called “idea-based,” because a given project typically examines a theoretical point. Basic researchers continually comb historical science for claims that don’t make sense or for claims that might, but were overlooked. Many of them collect information about areas and types of creatures that haven’t been studied yet.
Figure 3.1 Science, technology, and society.
Applied research is carried out in the context of an acknowledged human problem, often medical but also ecological, and always economic. Not enough is understood to start working on a direct solution, so anything and everything that might be relevant gets studied in order to generate a better understanding of the background of the problem. Applied researchers’ work can sometimes take them a long way from the immediate problem, because contrasting species or systems, or a counter-example like a desert instead of a swamp, can contribute immensely to the discussion. They also draw heavily from existing basic science, often putting it in a new perspective.
Engineering research is what non-scientists understand best: you invent a pill, a widget, or any other similarly understandable object, often for sale. The examples fill the popular understanding of science: light bulbs, powered flight, firearms mechanisms, industrial agriculture, the Manhattan Project, space flight, the birth control pill, the Internet, and so on and on. As with applied work, engineering researchers draw opportunistically from the whole range of existing scientific literature, and often a given project emerges from prior work with no make-a-device content at all. Their work is usually carried out in terms of ownership, state policy, marketing, and commerce.
These distinctions show how unconstructed science is. No one does the whole thing! A given researcher does not work on the entire trajectory of basic to applied to engineering, fueled by an individual vision. Such trajectories are typically identified only in retrospect, across many different scientists, often across generations, and in the context of a spirited debate about every step and idea. You might find the best work was done by someone whose immediate conclusion was wrong. You can find “skips” of different kinds, such as when a given idea was considered loony or insignificant until someone went to the trouble to rehabilitate it (such as the catastrophic demise of the dinosaurs), or when a project’s whole reason for being gets revised retroactively in the face of new evidence (such as the Human Genome Project). Even more important, no one can anticipate what basic information turns out to be most relevant to applied projects, or from applied projects to engineering ones. Each level or type is a big fermenting intellectual mess, with people scooping old and new stuff out of there all the time.6
One might think that technology always comes from engineering research, but in fact, most scientists are not inventors in that sense. Instead, they jury-rig a lot of imaginative practical devices as some means to get the research done. Many of these then effectively become inventions, often retooled to different purposes. So it doesn’t matter whether people are trying to invent things; if science is happening, then new technology appears more or less steadily. This is why the technology arrow comes out of that whole box, not specifically out of the engineering category.
When technology gets out of science and into the hands of commercial owners, it undergoes more changes, for instance, when a competing company puts out its own version of a new widget, just different enough not to violate the patent, and then the first company upgrades its original version, and they go back and forth like that.
When people in the larger culture make contact with the new technology, by definition, it alters their options—often very important options. Think of anything we already do, and consider doing it more easily than you did before, or without worrying about this other thing happening, or through some alternative that you could not do before at all, and so on. Not only is the effect personal to you, but it changes everything about the activity, such as how many other people it can affect, who can and cannot use it, how cheap or expensive this particular way to do it is, and its indirect effects on you or on the environment. In this case, the technology “attacks” social relationships, altering the physical dynamics that everyone had been using as a baseline for their positions. It doesn’t merely introduce a problem or solution to an existing situation, it changes the whole situation.
Consider the birth control pill, which first appeared as a consumer product in 1960 as the Pill (capitalized), referring to the product Enovid in the United States. It was invented and produced in a mash-up of policy issues, some obsolete and some still with us, including sex education, women’s rights in general including abortion (itself soon to undergo legal review), competing birth-control technologies, population control, and the general relationship of the Roman Catholic Church to US politics. In America and the Pill, Elaine Tyler May describes the idealistic or horrific proposals that people raised concerning the existence of an easy-to-use, reliable, and female-controlled contraceptive technology. Few of these came to pass as hoped or feared, and more to my point, what did in fact happen was not in that mix of debates: perhaps unbelievably to modern eyes, no one anticipated that having the Pill around meant that a lot of women would want to have a lot more sex.
May cites the 2004 report from the US Department of Health and Human Services: 98% of women who engage in heterosexual activity to any extent use contraceptives, 82% being oral contraceptives, 79% including their first sexual experiences. This is a big change from 1960! Sex is different. Love is different. Careers are different. Being a “woman” is different. Being a mother is different. Parenting is different. Even not using it becomes a variable in the context of its existence. The new standards and practices weren’t and probably could not have been predicted, but they are the new parameters of many people’s life experience. This is about values, because new technology changes the game so much that the social discourse of right and wrong is literally thrown into a new environment.7
Consider the rate of such changes, across technologies and throughout society. Historically, modern institutional science coalesced in the late decades of the 1800s, with an additional boost in the 1940s and 1950s—squarely in the context of the Industrial Revolution, the world population explosion, the rise of the modern state, and profound changes in labor types, education at all levels, and urban living. Science became professionalized, an option for middle-class wage earning and specialized vocational training. It also became embedded in distinct forms of institutional memory, university accreditation, and state funding. In this context, the ongoing production of new technology is institutionalized, commercialized, and mobilized in a constant state of accelerating fast-forward, and with broader and more significant impact.
In 1970, the journalist Alvin Toffler published a popular book called Future Shock. Its specific content seems quaint to me now, but the underlying concept is valuable: that historically, new technologies were culturally absorbed through a certain buffer of time, but now, the rate and breadth of introduced technologies will overwhelm the adjustment process altogether, throwing people into a state of constant values-violation and confusion. His model is too rosy about past historical adjustments being so easy or positive; still, allowing for some sensationalism about how scary (or cool) this is, and recalling that our current population and industrialization levels are historically unique, I think some degree of future shock is with us today, and that it provides fertile ground for the sorcery reaction to become an embedded, constant feature of modern society.
What makes biotechnology different? Arguably, not very much at all. From the UN Convention on Biodiversity in 1992, biotechnology is defined as
[a]ny technological application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or processes for specific use.8
This definition applies in full to the earliest forms of agriculture (gardening), brewing, food preparation, first aid, and domestication of animals. It applies to the Pill as just described. In fact, all medical technology is biotechnology and always has been.
The issue is therefore not biotechnology, but biotechnology, meaning what we could do with it just yesterday, which kicks off the reactive, frightened response right now. Let’s take cloning. Imagine for a moment everything you ever heard or knew about cloning. What’s the big deal?
Cloning can be done in several ways, but I’ll focus on the technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCINT. Here are two examples, one fanciful and one real.
Let’s take me: a somewhat healthy middle-aged adult human male. Lots and lots of living cells compose my body, and I won’t notice if you take some. However, I am not an embryo, and my cells aren’t going to act like embryonic cells very easily. You should go after some of my epithelial tissue, which is at least a bit similar because those cells are constantly dying and being replaced, so a lot of ready-to-use but not yet active cells are waiting their turns. Grab one of these and put it in a jar.
Meanwhile, two individuals whom we shall call Phil and Betty love each other, very very much. They have been performing some anatomical acts that make it likely that sperm cells from one of them will make contact with an ovum cell of the other. One sperm cell fertilizes the ovum, so it’s now called a zygote. Once this happens, you come along and grab that zygote.
Here’s the technological part: you nip out the nucleus of that zygote and throw it away; then you nip out the nucleus of one of those cells from the culture plates, which contains the same 46 chromosomes I’ve been using all my life in every one of mine. Pop its (or rather my) nucleus into that momentarily empty zygote, which can be coaxed to continue operating as such. (Hilariously, one of the techniques at this point is to zap it with electricity.) The point is that the zygote, even without its nucleus, isn’t actually empty; it’s full of proteins and structures that know how to act like a zygote in ways that my little original cell could not have done (Figure 3.2).
Figure 3.2 Cloning using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCINT).
We’re using SCINT to get a new zygote using the genes of an adult animal, because the hypothetical “me” in this example apparently wants a twin brother that he didn’t get in the initial go-round.
Now, the music swells majestically or sinister, as you please: this zygote undergoes a few cell divisions, just as it would in Betty’s reproductive tract, and it is then returned there, or, if she prefers, to some other woman’s, although we will keep it simple and say that she is still involved. If you can get it to implant into her uterine lining just as if it had not made a trip to the laboratory, it will do what a zygote does in its accustomed place: develop into an embryo.
In due course Betty’s pregnancy comes to term and she delivers a baby. This is my clone. He shares 100% nuclear genetic identity with me. Biologically speaking, this is arguably one of the most boring things we could have spent money on—humans already occasionally produce identical twins. There is nothing in any of the biology involved which isn’t something that cells, organ systems, and individuals aren’t doing anyway. The difference is simply and only a matter of timing: without this technology, genetically identical twins are born from shared pregnancies, and therefore are sociologically siblings as well as biologically—whereas in this case, we aren’t.9
That is precisely what triggers the alarm: the baffling social factor. Is he Phil and Betty’s son? Is he mine? Or is he my brother, and if so, are my parents his? Who is his next of kin? Are Betty, Phil, and I now to be considered legally related? Do we share obligations toward the child? If so, should we come to some parting of ways, who has custody? I like to ask these questions directly in class and watch the students’ faces. They always reveal the same thing: at first the turning mental wheels, and then the dawning recognition that they don’t know. The reactive crisis arises specifically from the fact that no one knows how to classify such an individual socially.
What is this person’s relationship to me? To Phil and Betty? Does he even have a family? Is he legally a person? I’m saying that I, my students, you, and everybody else on this planet, at this instant, have no idea. We simply don’t have the vocabulary, the precedents, the cultural history, or to employ a vague but useful term, the value system to answer these questions. I do think they are important questions, due in part to extreme issues like whether I can harvest this person’s organs to replace mine at will, but especially mundane next-of-kin issues such as inheritance or custody.
When you can’t classify direct evidence into existing social and economic categories, your mind goes into self-defense mode, constructing fabulous connections to justify the contradictory content or walling parts of itself away to process different details in more comfortable isolation. If these constructs are challenged, then your mind typically goes into what Leon Festinger called “cognitive dissonance,” an uncomfortable state that may feel like a hostile attack upon you, from somewhere or by something. You’ll demonize a certain set of the information, giving it properties it doesn’t have but which carry a lot of emotion, and you defend this imagery with some heat. Under further pressure, you’ll feel threatened, fearful, and angry, and you’ll interpret the surrounding reality as filled with enemies in league with the demons or with insanely stupid people.
Fortunately, due to long years of refinement of my class discussions and exercises, these latter effects don’t show up among my students very often, but I do ask them about it, and they do acknowledge the instant potential for the conversation to go right off the rails.
And that is where the “don’t meddle” story comes from: because people have encountered products of science specifically as a shock to their value system and social norms, and can slot the provocative input right into the mental bucket called “sorcery.” By the time anyone has even begun to speak, they are already in the grip of cognitive dissonance and its associated defense mechanisms, and, for example, see no contradiction between technology they are used to or benefit from, and this new thing, which must be obviously and villainously different.
Anything in the sorcery bucket doesn’t merely hold the potential for accidents or wrongful use, it simply is wrong, shot through and through with abomination. And as such, everything about it may now be tagged as wrong, either obviously so or, despite a benign appearance, lurking in wait. From there, perceiving sociopathic motives, lone-madman characterizations, large-scale conspiracies, or imminent moral and social catastrophe is an easy step. Logic has nothing to do with it; logic is long out the door once this reaction and articulation are established.10
In the films, the Prendick character is always altered from his identity as a fellow scientist who differs in subcultural and political history, usually to a practical, everyman identity, with more extreme political and national coding.
In Island of Lost Souls (1932), Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) is a hard-nosed, very American engineer, in contrast with Moreau’s Australian, colonial character.
Terror Is a Man (1959) features a similar character, William Fitzgerald (Richard Derr), contrasted with the French Dr. Girard.
The Twilight People (1972) features an extra-tough, American warrior type in Matt Farrell (John Ashley), and the ambiguous, possibly British Dr. Gordon.
In The Island of Doctor Moreau (1977), both characters are British, with a more sensitive but also tough Andrew Braddock (Michael York).
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1996) features Edward Douglas (David Thewlis), who is a generally ineffectual British diplomat with implications of idealism (he was involved in “the peace talks”), whereas Moreau and Montgomery are American.
Doctor Moreau’s House of Pain (2004) features Eric Carson (John Patrick Jordan), an American boxer, against the very British Moreau.
In all cases except possibly the 1959 film, the hero unequivocally and correctly judges Moreau to be despicable. Standout moments include Parker punching him and Douglas’s line, “Has it occurred to you that you’ve completely lost your mind?”
Now for the real example: Dolly the sheep, born in 1996 due to the research efforts of Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell, who has endured more textual attention than any other sheep in human history and serves as the veritable poster child for cloning. Everything I said about Phil, Betty, me, the possible surrogate-womb woman, and the kid applies here, trading out the humans for sheep. I won’t even bother to re-present the diagram. Do remember that part about using a cell from an adult sheep as the donor for the new zygote, though; it’s important.
Let me reveal one thing I don’t see much in the oceans of references and blog posts: that Dolly was well worth the scientific publication space, but not biologically incredibly interesting. Or rather, that the technology was impressive, concerning a specific logistic point: that the nuclear donor cell had come from a relatively differentiated cell rather than a stem cell. This isn’t trivial—it means that you can do what I described earlier for myself, get a twin for a sheep who is already grown up. But it’s—you know, just a twin.
Dolly wasn’t even the first technologically cloned animal; if you count early embryo splitting technique, then that honor goes to a nameless newt back in 1901! If you want more intracellular methods, then look to a similarly nameless carp in the early 1960s, and for SCINT mammals, to Masha the mouse in 1986, whose legacy might be understated in certain venues because she was a communist. Nor was Dolly even the first SCINT cloned sheep; the same lab cloned two others named Megan and Morag using embryonic donor cells, understandably, considering that you want to get the technique right first before messing with it further. Dolly was the first SCINT cloned sheep whose donor cell was from an adult animal, and biologically, that’s all. The project that produced her successfully overcame a logistic difficulty, and technologically, that’s all.11
And yet, what outcries were raised! Gina Kolata’s breaking-news article in the New York Times is a perfect example of factual statements in sensational context, which I suppose was her job, after all. To their credit, Drs. Wilmut and Campbell provided accurate and levelheaded quotes for all their media statements. Kolata also quoted a single line from Dr. Lee Silver: “It’s unbelievable. It basically means that there are no limits. It means all of science fiction is true.” The full interview shows that Silver was contrasting scientific and popular narratives and was not actually proclaiming this statement, but the single line made headlines.
The coverage and cultural identity of Dolly then underwent a meaningful shift. Since she inconveniently looked like a run-of-the-mill Finn-Dorset sheep and therefore failed badly to play her part as an abomination, other images juxtaposing humans and industrial labware swiftly crowded her out to illustrate the required narrative. The transition was explicit, from Time magazine’s close-up of two sheep’s’ faces captioned “Will there ever be another you?” to Newsweek’s charming image of happy human babies in scientific beakers, captioned “Can we clone humans?” You can look up whatever you’d like from there; the prose swiftly leaves the range of purple and goes into ultraviolet.
Once the sorcery button was pushed, we the public were treated to way too many confirmations that the academic degree process isn’t perfect, like the physicist Richard Seed promising to clone humans and thus make them, or us, for reasons that remain obscure to me, closer to God; the chemist Brigitte Boisselier and her Raëlist associates, who claimed to have already cloned a human and named her Eve (they hadn’t); and veterinarian and genetics researcher Hwang Woo-Suk, who published fraudulent claims to have cloned human stem cells in the prestigious journal Science. You want to know the funny part? The Dolly technology didn’t bring us “closer to human cloning,” because Masha already did the heavy lifting to make SCINT work, and mice are more closely related to humans, that is, primates, than sheep are. That means that every one of these claims, some or all of which helped to jack the stem cell issue into the political red zone, was hot air.
At the very least, you’d think the notable absence of hordes of SCINT-cloned sheep using adult donor cells, and the confirmation of low success rates for other species since then, would imply that even with the technology, we aren’t exactly ready for the champagne yet.12
Biotechnology is uniquely vulnerable to being coded as unnatural when it challenges existing values, and it is similarly difficult to drag out of the sorcery bucket once it’s there. I think that’s why the novel The Island of Doctor Moreau has been so little processed, both culturally and academically. It is indisputably about biotechnology, but it’s important to separate that word again. I am arguing that it is not a fear-based novel of the unnatural violation of biology (i.e., don’t meddle), but a reflection-provoking novel administering the technological shock to existing values. The difference is profound: in the first, the proposed science can’t be done, because it’s unnatural, and you try to stop it, or if you can’t, to kill it or escape it, and regardless, it will all collapse into ruin without fail. Whereas in the second, it most certainly can be done, in accord with existing natural principles, and you are forced to confront your existing values with the evidence that they are not as established as you thought.
I suggest that The Island of Doctor Moreau is the second type, and it deserves a fair reading, with the “don’t meddle” model set aside. The characters are vivid if you let their voices speak in your mind, and their decisions matter, changing the situation rather than playing through an obvious and familiar plot. Moreau’s work does not go “against Nature,” but rather manipulates it well enough to accomplish what he does—the question is whether he can see it, which he cannot, and whether Prendick can, which he does all too well as far as he’s concerned.
Unlike thrillers, science fiction and otherwise, which ultimately confirm the audience’s values and sense of equilibrium, this particular kind of science fiction uniquely does the opposite: to expose a taboo, to disturb one’s equilibrium and even identity. It will repay you beyond any novel I have ever read or know of.
Abigail Burnham Bloom, The Literary Monster on Film (2010), analyzes transitions from literature to cinema for five Victorian novels, generally concluding that the nuanced and personal conflicts in the former are converted to more general threats and fearful imagery in the latter.
A long-running analysis of science on film begins with George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, and Nancy Signorielli, in “Scientists on the TV Screen” (Society magazine, 1982), suggesting that its presentation negatively influences exactly those people who are otherwise most favorably inclined toward science; see also their more complete article “Science on Television,” Issues in Science and Technology (1987), which includes the statistic that television scientists get killed far more frequently than any other profession or designated social role. Other useful analyses are found in Sidney Perkowitz, Hollywood Science (2010); David A. Kirby, Lab Coats in Hollywood (2013); and Christopher Frayling, Mad Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema (2005).
Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things (1994) and To Engineer Is Human (1992), provides a crucial, non-idealized perspective on human invention and technology. I can’t say that Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) is all that deep, but it is a pop culture classic and worth reading to see where the meme came from. See Elaine Tyler May, America and the Pill (2011), and Jonathan Eig, The Birth of the Pill (2014), for readable introductions to the history of this invention. The concept of cognitive dissonance was introduced by Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails (1956), and is reviewed in Joel Cooper, Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of a Classic Theory (2007). I find that these three bodies of work produce a powerful effect in combination, more so than any of them alone.
The best discussion of Dolly comes straight from the scientists, Roger Highfield and Ian Wilmut, After Dolly (2006). Of others’ popular accounts, the better-researched include Gina Kolata, Clone: The Road to Dolly, and the Path Ahead (1997); Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures (2007); and Stephen Levick, Clone Being (2003). Plenty of people have provided thoughtful reflections on cloning and SCINT cloning, but we have little or no societal mechanism to bring such reflection forward and into the decision-making sphere, as opposed to more electorally valuable, decision-freezing hype.
Dr. Lee Silver has written extensively on the interplay of technology and values; his Remaking Eden (2007) outlines the shock to values presented by biotechnology in more detail than I address here, and his Challenging Nature (2007) demonstrates that the aversive reaction to such technology can be found across the full range of the American political spectrum.
1.In her discussion of Frankenstein (Frankenstein and Radical Science, 1993), Marilyn Butler explains why Victor Frankenstein does in fact feature a few “mad scientist” tropes, similarly emerging from its effectively invisible practice just as it does today.
2.The “don’t meddle” story is less common in science fiction literature, but became more so during the 1980s when the genre became politically more mainstream and book publishing became tied more tightly to film production. Special mention goes to Michael Crichton, who specialized in presenting the “don’t meddle” story over and over for whatever fear of science de joeur reigned at the moment. Crichton had the opportunity to defend his views at length to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1999, which is available online at http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/crichton/story.htm. I leave the assessment of his argument up to you. Not all stories that criticize science or depict it in scary ways are of the “don’t meddle” type. It makes perfect sense to use technological imagery to exaggerate current issues into fantastic shapes, the better to bring those issues into the foreground, especially when they are taboo or too-well embedded in marketing or political power to be addressed literally. Politically dissenting stories, or psychological dramas, or anything like that put into science fiction terms are fine and fascinating things. But such stories are not “don’t meddle” policy statements. The horror in GATTACA isn’t biotechnology, it’s discrimination. I even admit that some “don’t meddle” stories are pretty good, especially when a bit excessive. Great examples include Shivers, Re-Animator, and Altered States.
3.In the 1980s, Gerbner suggested that the depiction of scientists is gradually improving and that the negative image is being rehabilitated, but I don’t see it. What I see is that the positive scientists are of a specific, task-oriented type who know their place and never meddle.
4.I like to ask my students which of the two primary characters in The X-Files is the scientist. Most answer “Scully,” based on the show’s own terminology or claim, which provides the opening for my observation that she responds to mysterious events with a marked aversion for observation and analysis, preferring to refer to texts as bodies of established and completed facts. In this issue at least, the show therefore manages to provide a sympathetic view of active scientific thinking by coding Mulder as the non-scientist in cultural terms.
5.Philosophically inclined readers will recognize this notion of intrinsic blasphemy in the family of concepts collectively called the “naturalistic fallacy,” especially in the virtual identity posed between the concepts of nature and God.
6.A little sting lies in the tail of the novel’s history. At the end of The Island of Doctor Moreau, Prendick turns to two scientific topics he considers sufficiently pure and abstract to be of no danger to anyone: chemistry and astronomy—the very two that would become atomic theory and relativity, and therefore within a few decades, would yield nigh inconceivable technological atrocity.
7.I suggest that the sexual revolution threw every social group in the United States and elsewhere for a loop in the 1960s, specifically including the counterculture and feminism.
8.UN Convention on Biodiversity, published by the United Nations, 1992 (available at https://www.cbd.int/doc/legal/cbd-en.pdf).
9.A SCINT clone isn’t even a particularly “identical” identical twin, because the only identity between the two individuals lies in the nuclei. Non-technological identical twins share cellular identity, from their initial zygote’s first cellular division, including all sorts of proteins and maternal mitochondria in the cell, and at the organismal level, the profoundly important environment of the pregnancy. This little baby doesn’t share any of that with me. He is likely to look like me in a number of variables, but to expect him to develop into an anatomical and physiological copy of me or to call him “Ron Two” would be impressively stupid.
10.A single episode of the TV show Farscape, “DNA Mad Scientist,” is “don’t meddle” to a remarkable degree, and bears watching as a near-perfect example. The background of its production merits investigation, as this one episode’s content diverges sharply from the otherwise enthusiastic characterization of scientific thinking throughout the rest of the series.
11.Cloning and genetic engineering are two different things. Neither Dolly nor my hypothetical human example includes genetic engineering.
12.I also uncharitably point to the 276 failed attempts accompanying Dolly’s successful implantation and birth and the 242 failed attempts that accompanied Megan and Morag. All SCINT cloning is plagued by lousy returns, for reasons at several levels. The nuclear transfer is severely intrusive to the cell, such that only a fraction undergoing the procedure survive; in those that do, apparently the genes themselves suffer damage to varying extents; and of the very few animals that develop from the cloned cells, even the lesser levels of genetic damage they’ve incurred typically induce a number of physiological disorders. All of this was known already, well established by the work on mice.