Immortality (16 page)

That was nearly two thousand years ago, and believers are still awaiting the End Times. The clues Jesus gave for how we should
know the last days—when “nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes” (Matthew 24:7)—are unfortunately rather vague; indeed some might say they are a generic description of the human condition. Thus people of all ages have believed the end was nigh. Some denominations, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, argue they are right now upon us—and have been doing so for some time.

Others, however, have become disillusioned in their wait for the second coming and the resurrection. As a consequence, many have turned to a belief in the soul—which has since become part of orthodox belief for many Christian denominations, including Catholicism. However, not all have given up the ambition of resurrection—but instead of praying for an act of God, these optimists are increasingly putting their faith in an act of science. We are used to technology nowadays achieving what once would have been considered miraculous: in the next chapter we will see that there are those who believe it will soon allow us to raise the dead. And they are paying good money to ensure they will be among the risen. Yet one of literature’s most enduring classics describes what monsters we might create in our quest to overcome death; penned by a teenage girl, it is a story that more than any other captures the fears of our time:
Frankenstein
.

“D
REAM
that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived.” So wrote the seventeen-year-old Mary Shelley two weeks after the death of her first child in February 1815. She went on: “Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits.”

It might have been more common to lose a child in the early nineteenth century than it is today, but as Mary Shelley’s words show, it was still deeply upsetting for the parents. This was already her second experience of the caprice of death: her first happened when she was herself only two weeks old, although she was to feel the loss throughout her life. Her own mother, the notorious radical thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, had died of an infection contracted while giving birth to the daughter who was to eclipse her in fame. Mary Shelley, while still only a teenager, knew that death was always lying in wait, ready to destroy our fragile attempts at happiness.

Throughout her life, she was haunted by the dream of resurrection—of returning the dead to life, like her little baby,
warmed by the fire. It was a dream that the new science promised to make real and that both fascinated and terrified her. A dream that, through her, would come to fascinate and terrify all of us.

T
HIS
was in the time shortly before the breakthroughs in hygiene and medicine that brought about the first revolution in human longevity. The intellectuals of the day knew that something was about to happen—that science was on the verge of remaking their world—and the latest experiments were the talk of the salons. Two such intellectuals were the poets Lord Byron, already by then infamous for his many love affairs, and the young Percy Bysshe Shelley—Mary’s lover and soon-to-be husband. The three spent the summer of 1816 together in the Alps around Geneva, in a self-imposed exile from the censure of British society—Percy Shelley was already married when he and Mary ran off together, and Byron was fleeing accusations of adultery, incest and sodomy. They were accompanied by Mary’s half sister Claire—who was pregnant by Byron—and Byron’s young doctor John Polidori.

This was the “sunless summer” of cold and incessant rain caused by a series of volcanic eruptions around the world. Crops failed across the Northern Hemisphere and a persistent fog clung to the land. Sheltering from the constant drizzle, the outcast writers discussed philosophy, composed poetry and read a collection of gothic tales that suited the gloomy weather. To pass the time, Byron challenged them all to write ghost stories of their own—a daunting challenge for a young girl in the company of such eminent authors. Every evening the party was carried away in debating great questions, but each morning Mary would be asked, “Have you thought of a story?”

But one of the “many and long” nightly conversations seized Mary’s imagination, as she later wrote: “Various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle
of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered.” Byron and Shelley speculated that “perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”

The “galvanism” that so excited Byron and Shelley referred to the work of the illustrious Italian scientist Luigi Galvani, who had discovered that severed frog’s legs could be made to hop by the application of electricity. In 1803 his nephew Professor Giovanni Aldini had toured England to publicize these wonderful powers. In one widely reported demonstration he applied electricity to the corpse of a freshly hanged murderer: according to a local newspaper, “the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened.” Applying the electricity lower down the body, “the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.” The audience was amazed and appalled by the demonstration, believing the murderer was at any moment going to be “fully restored”; science seemed on the verge of harnessing the power to resurrect the dead.

These thrilling ideas merged in Mary’s mind with her own anxieties, the visions of her lost baby and her fantasies of resuscitation. When she went to bed that night she could not sleep, giving herself over to a reverie—a “waking dream.” Her eyes closed, she saw a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together … the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.” In horror at what he has done, the scientist “would rush away from his odious handiwork … He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade.” But it does not; on the contrary. The scientist goes to his bed, exhausted, but is woken by a sudden noise and “behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening
his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”

Mary was terrified by this vision and preoccupied all night. The next day, she announced that she had found a theme for her “ghost story” and began writing. She was eighteen years old. Under the encouragement of Percy Shelley what she had planned as a short story grew within a year to a full-blown novel. The book’s title:
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus
.

Mary Shelley’s most famous work is a profound study of the scientific quest to control nature—and a scathing critique of the hero who pursues that quest, the lone scientist who dares to claim the power of the gods for mankind. In its many forms and retellings,
Frankenstein
has become a modern myth—essential to our understanding of ourselves and the world. It is the first great work of science fiction and a warning that we continually confront anew.

But most of all,
Frankenstein
is an exploration of the fantasy of conquering death—a fantasy that Mary, like all of us at one time or another, had herself indulged. Her tragic hero aspires to take on the power that for thousands of years had been reserved for God alone—to “renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.” In other words, to resurrect the dead.

W
E
saw in the last chapter that early Christianity flourished by promising that God would shortly raise the faithful to live again in eternal happiness. But the wait for the End Times has been a long one, and many have come to doubt whether we can be so sure of God’s good intentions, or indeed whether he is out there at all. The impatient and the skeptical have therefore been working on a resurrection narrative of their own, a secular version of the apocalyptic tradition with its promise of paradise. It is a narrative that has been enormously powerful in driving human progress and shapes
much of the way we see the world today. Its claim is simple: that we do not have to wait for God to raise us from the grave; it is a power that we humans can claim for ourselves. We must only discover “the principle of life,” and then we can conquer death forever.

But we have also seen that the early attempt to make sense of resurrection—the Reassembly View, according to which your component particles would simply be put back together—is deeply flawed. In this chapter, we will explore an alternative theory of how resurrection could ensure that it really is
you
clambering out of the grave and not some doppelgänger. But first we will look at what led Mary Shelley and her companions to believe that science was on the verge of claiming control over life and death, and how this belief has shaped our world.

A
S
Mary Shelley was penning
Frankenstein
, science was beginning to establish itself as the new authority on nature’s laws. In the preceding century, the scientific method of careful observation and experimentation had fully emerged from the obscurantism of the alchemists. Secret meetings had given way to public scientific societies, and coded tomes to published journals. But although the methods had changed, the aims remained the same: the mastery of nature and conquest of mortality.

In her novel, Mary Shelley has the career of her young scientist hero, Victor Frankenstein, reflect these developments: he first dabbles with alchemy and the search for an elixir of life before being convinced instead of the power of physics and chemistry. At college, he learns that the scientists who “pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles,” and “have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven” and “mimic the earthquake.”

This is the language of the new immortality narrative, which claims for science the powers of the gods. In
chapter 4
, we saw that earlier civilizations sought to control their fate through the
performance of ancient, orderly rituals; the early success of science promised a much more active and effective means of taking charge of our destiny. It is a narrative of control and conquest, one that Mary Shelley captures in her description of these masculine scientists as those who seek “to penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places.” Frankenstein is convinced by the new ethos of the age that through force of will and reason, we can become masters of nature.

It is nature, after all, that decrees that we must die—that causes our joints to seize up, our skin to wrinkle and cancer to strike. In order to live forever, we must, like the gods, rise above these natural limits. This therefore is the grand project of science, its answer to the Mortality Paradox: death and disease might be what nature intends for us, but we can master nature and thwart her plans. The founding fathers of the scientific method were quite explicit about this. René Descartes, for example, talked openly of seeking knowledge that would “render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature” and was considered by his contemporaries to be obsessed with the extension of life. And Francis Bacon pursued what he considered this “most noble goal” of life extension to his death—in 1626 from pneumonia, which he contracted when experimenting with the use of snow to preserve corpses. Throughout its history, science has sought to make life unending and death reversible.

In
chapter 3
, we saw that scientific progress is driven forward by the Engineering Approach to mortality, the modern version of the Staying Alive Narrative, which attempts to break down the challenge of death into a list of potentially solvable problems like curing cancer, harnessing stem cells or stopping smoking. We can now see that this is part of a broader ideology of mastering nature—a belief that there are
no
natural limits that cannot in the end be overcome by reason. This belief extends beyond the hope of staying alive to encompass also its Plan B: resurrection.

This drive to mastery of nature is often regarded as the very essence
of modernity. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has noted, with the advent of science, death came to be seen as an insult to our newfound powers—“the last, yet seemingly irremovable, relic of fate in a world increasingly designed and controlled by reason.” Death is a humiliating natural restriction from which we must be emancipated. The young scientist Frankenstein is inspired to break this final shackle and so embodies the arrogance and ambition of this new narrative. His successors today are a growing group of technophiles who, in the words of the leading authorities on science and society Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz, “explicitly embrace the pursuit of immortality, of human perfectibility, of dominion over nature, and of transcendence over the limits that time and space impose on the individual.”