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ABSTRACT Frankenstein presents us today with two different stories and two different lessons. The book, especially in the 1818 first edition, tells the story of Victor Frankenstein's neglect of his parental duties and the harms that followed. The more lasting myth that succeeded the novel, however, became popular as early as the 1823 production of the first theatrical piece based on the book, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. This play's different lesson is that Frankenstein dared too much, presumed to divine powers, and thus instigated the harms that followed. Modern bioscience affords us many unprecedented and disconcerting possibilities through, among other tools, genetics, neuroscience, stem-cell biology, and assisted reproduction. Which lessons should we apply to those possibilities, and from which of the two Frankenstein stories? Henry T. Greely argues that we should mainly fulfill the novel's views of our duties of care. We should indeed, in Bruno Latour's words, "Love our Monsters," though we also need to heed the allure to the public ofthe myth of presumption. KEYWORDS: preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD); CRISPR; chimeras; genetic selection; genome editing
on april 28, 2018, exactly two weeks before the Huntington's Frankenstein conference and my delivery of the talk on which this essay is based, I was sitting at a sold-out matinee at the Garrick Theatre in London, watching the Mel Brooks musical Young Frankenstein, a play about Victor Frankenstein's American grandson, Frederick Frankenstein (or, as he prefers until late in the play, and the film from which it is adapted, "Fronkenschteen"). Just over 200 years before, about three miles away, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was first published. I suspect Mary Shelley would have been appalled by Brooks's low humor, but I don't think she would have minded the singing and dancing. I hope she would have been pleased to know that, in a world-and a London-where almost everything has changed, her monster, her dæmon, her Creature,1 is very much alive. And that the crowd loved it. But what, exactly, did the crowd love? I am no kind of literary scholar, and I claim no originality for this point, but we have inherited two different Frankenstein stories. One is Mary Shelley's novel, especially in its first, 1818 edition; the other is the myth that has...