The Pharmaceutical Journal Vol 267 No 7169 p526
13 October 2001

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The Frankenstein touch
Dangerous combination
Fair play for chemists
Food for thought

The Frankenstein touch

In a comment in Nature for 30 August, Howard Segal of the history department of the University of Maine has made some observations on the tendency today to refer to certain scientific experiments with doubtful moral justification as Frankensteinean. The reference is to that rather warped scientist Victor Frankenstein whose sad story is related in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ (1818).

Mrs Shelley’s first and most celebrated novel was written to pass the tedious time during a wet summer in Switzerland where she, her husband Percy, their friend Byron, and Byron’s physician, John Polidori, were isolated by the weather during a holiday. The frightful creature fashioned by Dr Frankenstein from a corpse and brought to life through the energy of a lightning flash became the emblem of the hazard of playing with the elements.

The moral of the story was that any creator of a living being has to face squarely the moral responsibility both for the behaviour of his creation and for the consequences of such behaviour as it impacts upon society.

The modern attitude towards genetic modification has tended to gloss over the important issue that scientists who put their theories into action must always shoulder responsibility before, during and after research and development. They must accept that any outcome, however intentional or unintentional, is their personal responsibility. The parallel lies with the story of Prometheus, the classical Titan who, contrary to the will of Zeus, stole fire because he thought it might prove of benefit to mankind, and was made to suffer as a consequence.

The main worry over the Frankenstein experiment, writes Segal, is the secretive, self-centred and ultimately destructive arrogance of the experimenter. The inventor’s indifference towards the shape of the creation and how it might function once released from the laboratory and loosed upon the world is the crux of the matter. In the event, Mary Shelley insists, Frankenstein’s monster turned out to have a more acute sense of guilt than does its creator, who demonstrates greater arrogance.

In 1818 there were intriguing reports of electrical charges being used to activate parts of corpses and produce the illusion of life that really did not exist. There was speculation, indeed, over the potential of chemistry and electricity between them to create new life from inanimate matter. Such concerns have been revived today, and it will not be wise for the engineers of genetic recombinations to overlook the Frankenstein story as they go about their experiments.

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Dangerous combination

A curious case of poisoning is reported from North Carolina in the New England Journal of Medicine for 30 August. It illustrates how bizarre the practice of drug abuse for “kicks” has become.

The report concerns a man aged 37 who was admitted to hospital in emergency with epistaxis which had persisted for several hours. The patient was found to have raised prothrombin time and partial thromboplastin times, but a normal platelet count, and was treated initially by nasal packing. He claimed to have taken no warfarin or other anticoagulant drug and denied exposure to rodenticides in general. His haemorrhage subsided after plasma transfusion and administration of vitamin K. However, a laboratory investigation revealed a serum concentration of 680ng per ml of the anticoagulant rodenticide brodifacoum. Meanwhile he was prescribed vitamin K 50mg daily by mouth and discharged from hospital.

Several months later the same patient was readmitted with retroperitoneal haemorrhage associated with a serum prothrombin time of 72.5 sec and activated partial thromboplastin time of 42.4 sec. He required a red cell transfusion, fresh-frozen plasma and more vitamin K.

On this occasion he admitted having smoked cocaine base (“crack”) laced with a rat poison in an attempt to achieve an intensified reaction to the alkaloid. The addition of a cholinesterase inhibitor is reportedly adopted to slow the metabolism of cocaine and intensify its neurological effects. Such a combination is regarded as potentially lethal.

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Fair play for chemists

In Nature for 13 September, John Emsley of the chemistry faculty at Cambridge offers some perceptive discussion of the problems currently facing scientists who are trying to give the public their reason for existence through the general media of communication. Chemists in particular are always complaining that they get a raw deal from the media. “Chemical rubbish”, writes Emsley, “gets published while real chemistry goes unreported.” Chemists are blamed for environmental pollution generally, for increasing the risk of cancer and for the contamination of food crops.

Rational argument over advances in chemistry and its associated technology does not affect the public unless it travels on the back of emotion. The degrees of emotional involvement in the news range from the personal to the societal to the global. In the first instance, a threat may be perceived towards a social group with which we feel sympathy, such as helpless babes and mothers. In the second come threats to our food, health and wealth. In the third, deprived populations of developing countries, wildlife and the terrestrial sphere as a whole are seen as menaced.

The publication of an idea that a new drug may have economic benefits by reducing a person’s stay in hospital is less effective than a claim that it will bring benefits in health and improve quality of life. To fail to communicate properly with the public is to allow mainstream science to deteriorate in status, and the scientists to fall in esteem.

One of the barriers that any attempt to publish good news of advances encounters when it impacts on the popular press is that for journalists at large only bad news can make the headlines, and good news is largely ignored. If a news item can be related to the topics of sex, cash and health, if it appears to explain the unexplained, or if it is contrary to all expectations of logic, the general press will adopt it enthusiastically. Otherwise, the advance will be ignored. As a last resort, stirring up fierce controversy will bring a discovery before the public gaze, since it will provide the newspapers with a crisp headline which challenges the reader.

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Food for thought

Real democracy will come only when the solution of national and international problems is carried out by scientific methods of thought, purged of all irrelevant emotion.
— Robert H. Thouless: ‘Straight and crooked thinking’ (1930).

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