Frankenstein At The Circus

What glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render man invulnerable to any but a violent death!-Victor Frankenstein

A high school english teacher friend of mine is reading "Frankenstein" with her class. She also assigned it to a handful of her English major friends. Most of us had read the book in high school, and we agreed it would be interesting to reread it and have a little online discussion. English majors do this kind of thing. I brought the book to read on a trip to Boston last month to attend Bio-IT World's 2006 Life Sciences Conference & Expo.

"Frankenstein" turned out to be a fortuitous assignment. By the time the conference keynote speaker, Ray Kurzweil, spoke, I was imbued with Mary Shelley's romantic rebuttal to the writers of the enlightenment and horrified by the consequences of "natural philosopher" Victor Frankenstein's attempt to circumvent nature by manufacturing human life. This was perfect preparation for a talk by the author of the books "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology" and "The Age of Spiritual Machines."

In a nutshell, Kurzweil says we will achieve Frankenstein's ambitious goal, which Kurzweil calls singularity, by the year 2045. He describes singularity as a merging of human biology, information technology (IT), and nanorobotics in such a way that humans conquer disease, turn back the aging process, and basically beat biology.

Kurzweil, a prolific inventor credited with developing, among other things, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, points to the exponential advances in information technology and the flood of data unleashed by the decoding of the human genome. He sees these things coming together in such a way that our knowledge of the human body and its diseases doubles yearly, more or less at the rate that knowledge is currently advancing in information technology.

The health care IT crowd in Boston was surprisingly enthusiastic about Kurzweil's vision. I was troubled, especially by his scientific, purely rationalist view of what is at stake and his dismissal of anything like Shelley's romantic vision of what makes us human. (Hint: It has nothing to do with having an opposable thumb.)

Not surprisingly, Kurzweil quoted Thomas Hobbes's famous line about life being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. In full context, Hobbes wrote that empowering individuals without the governance of a rationalist elite makes life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Kurzweil suggests now that nanorobots, rather than paternalistic leaders, will save us from our lot.

Well, I'm not sure robots will work any better than rationalism, which did not elevate human nature or significantly improve the most important elements of life. We are more comfortable and we live a lot longer, thanks to 20th-century science, but the 20th century also gave us chemical warfare, nuclear weaponry, and global warming.

In Kurzweil's view, however, the real game comes down to living longer still, even if it means that we have robotic red blood cells and microchips in our eyeballs. It would seem to me that singularity promises a life that is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and long-on a very polluted and overcrowded planet full of unemployed young people and poor old people who look really good.

Ethical questions abound, not least of which is the question of who gets Kurzweil's treatment. He too glibly dismisses his vision's suggestion of a new kind of elite. And as a business writer, I expect that any marriage of IT and life sciences would follow a rather long and awkward engagement.

Then there is the limiting factor of politics. Given the divided public opinion on abortion, stem cell research, cloning, and even in vitro fertilization, I'm pretty sure any foray into turning humans into cyborgs will bog down in something like a red state/blue state standoff.

The English major in me sees an even bigger problem. Let's go to the literature. "Frankenstein" is not so much a cautionary tale about science as it is an explication of man's fall from grace as a consequence of overarching ambition. Shelley illustrates this with references to Western literature's two great examples: Adam and Eve's ouster from the Garden of Eden in the Bible and Satan's fall from the ranks of the archangels in John Milton's "Paradise Lost." Strictly on a literary level, these stories are compelling, especially the story of the Garden, as it illuminates the brilliant but naive Frankenstein's crossing the line that can't be crossed.

It's clear what Kurzweil is up to: P. T. Barnum-style showmanship. He is popularizing a very important concept-the fact that medicine, with the decoding of the human genome, has become a matter of information technology. The circus act is a goofy distraction, for the most part. It was unnerving, however, to see how the technology-savvy crowd in Boston-I chatted with a lot of them at a cocktail reception after the talk-were unquestioningly enthusiastic about $1.00 microchip brains and other facets of Kurzweil's Ponce de León-like dream of our future. The technology will be there, they argue. Just a shiny red apple, ripe for the picking.

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.