Week 4 Nature Finds a Way - Science and
Scientists
Science fiction
presents an arena in which science and scientific development can be taken to
it’s furthest reaches, and yet why is it that scientists themselves are shown
in such a negative light? The geek with thinning hair and poor eyesight
inevitably steps down for the muscular hero to save the day, and scientists are
usually seen as crazy, overzealous and out of touch with the “real” world of
emotions and human relationships. Although science fiction is responsible for
the ideas for some of the greatest developments in technology, (recently the
internet, mobile phones and palm tops), scientific advancement is portrayed as
dangerous, often wildly out of control, and rarely advantageous to the human race.
Beneficial science and scientists are rare, seen as a “magical” saviour if at
all.
Genetic technology
is one of the most controversial areas both in and out of science fiction.
Whereas the discovery of DNA was seen as a great leap forwards, the concept of cloning and genetically engineered
tissues is one which brings great unease, especially with the underlying social
concerns of cloning. These worries are far from new: degeneration of the
species was a Victorian preoccupation, followed by the eugenics movement and
the Holocaust. With these terrifying and horrific events in our past, and the
dominant layman fear that science is “complicated”, is it ever possible to
present science and scientist in a positive way?
Main Texts:
For this week, we
are going to focus on the films and novels of Michael Crichton. I want you to
try to read at least one of his books – they are extremely easy to get into and
should not take too long. Most have been made into a film; watch this and
compare the two. Numerous copies are available in the A/S office
Pick one of the
following:
The Lost World (A/S office)
Westworld (A/S office)
Timeline (2000:Random House)
The Andromeda Strain (A/S office) (1987: Macmillian)
Further
Resources:
(Scientists)
(Genetics)
The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells (A/S office in collected vol, PF 86600 Isi)
Gattaca (A/S office)
Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (A/S office)
Space Seed; Star Trek
(TOS)
The Masterpiece Society, Unnatural Selection; Star Trek (TNG)
Discussion Topics
· How do you view the characterisation of the scientists in Crichton’s novels? Are they appealing or realistic? Does the author identify with them?
· In Jurassic Park, what is the dramatic function of the children? Is the film preaching the message that scientists should not mess with things they do not understand? Is the impact lessened by having scientists as heroes as well as villains?
· Examine your own views of genetic engineering - curing genetic illness, ensuring a healthy foetus by IVF, animal chimeras, animal clones, cloning of human tissue, transgenic transplants, GMOs - where do you draw the line? Are your feeelings ethically or culturally determined (can you tell the difference anyway)? How do/would your grandparents or great-grandparents have felt about this?
Essay Questions
Quotes
“I found the cure for cancer, but I lost it!”
(Sean Connery, Medicine Man, 1992)
“With the exception of the superficial characters of much of science fiction, the dominant picture has been of scientists who recapitulate the unflattering stereotypes of earlier centuries - the evil scientists, the stupid scientists, the inhuman scientists - or as a particularly twentieth century contribution, the scientists who has lost control over his discovery”
Rosylynn D. Haynes in From Faust to Strangelove; Representations of the Scientists in Western Literature, 1995.
“On they march, the fictional scientists. The best are well intentioned but misguided. Some are simply intent on knowledge, blind to the consequences. The worst are striving for power over nature, or world domination. They are murderers, madmen, monster-makers. Intellectually obsessed, morally and emotionally crippled, and politically naive, they threaten to reduce us to their level. Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Caligari, Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Strangelove and their innumerable fictional progeny, all point accusing fingers at the real world of science.”
Jon Turney, Times Higher, June 1995.
“Like Sidney Stratton (The Man in the White Suit) and Bowles-Ottery (A Jolly Bad Fellow) the main characteristic of these (film) scientists is that they are outsiders. This is true even of the generally favourable representations, such as that of Barnes Wallis in The Dambusters. As a result of this and their obsession with their work, scientists are often shown as lacking social skills and an understanding of how the world works. This is very evident in The Man in the White Suit, and in the scientists played by Kenneth Williams in Carry on Nurse.”
Bob Jones, Chemistry in Britain, Dec 1996, page 35.
“Spock is dangerous because he elevates the cult of the rational and dismisses the role of emotion. Real scientists don’t lack emotion, nor are they detached from normal human values. The danger is that this stereotype is very off-putting, especially to young people”
Prof. Helen Haste, Univ. of Bath, BA meeting 1997
“Because it is fun... People like Rupert Murdoch and Paul McCartney have appeared in the Simpsons. I think it is time a scientist was seen. Scientists have a better public image in America. Here they are ignored or portrayed as stereotypes, but in America you can have films like Good Will Hunting. So I was happy to show that science can also have street cred”
Steven Hawking, on his appearance in The Simpsons. The Sunday Times, 1999
“Television drama’s relationship with science is unhappy, unlike its successful alliance with lawyers, the police and doctors. Scientists are either a bit dotty (think Dr Who), bad (think the Frankenstein-like Charles dance cloning human beings in First Born) or just plain boring old brilliant. They are never mediocre, incompetent, avaricious, envious or even - horror of horrors - normal”
Gerard Gilbert, The Independent, 18/1/99
“Michael Crichton, scriptwriter and director, once taught anthropology at Cambridge, but wore his learning lightly here; yet this yarn has proved to be more influential and durable than we might have thought. It gave the old standard technophobic “what if the machines take over” story a new twist by suggesting that we deserve no better: Westworld was created to service and defuse our basest desires, and we can hardly complain if these desires get thrown in our face. It’s no surprise that Crichton went on to write Jurassic Park - a similar idea but without Westworld’s deft touch.
Genetics etc…
“Augescunt aliae
gentes, aliae minuuntur,
Inque brevi
spatio mutantur saecla animantum
Et quasi cursores
vitai lampada tradunt”
Some races increase, others are reduced,
And in a short while the generations of living creatures are changed
And like runners relay the torch of life
Lucretius 94-55 BC
“If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life. Not only did the dinosaurs exercise an airtight monopoly as large land animals, they kept their commanding position for an extraordinary span of time-130 million years. Our own human species is no more than a hundred thousand years old. And our own zoological class, the Mammalia, the clan of warm-blooded furry creatures, has ruled the land ecosystem for only seventy million years. True the dinosaurs are extinct, but we ought to be careful in judging them inferior to our own kind. Who can say that the human system will last another thousand years, let alone a hundred million? Who can predict that our Class Mammalia will rule for another hundred thousand millennia?”
“Humans are proud of themselves. The guiding principle of the modern age is “Man is the measure of all things.” And our bodies have excited physiologists and philosophers to a profound awe of the basic mammalian design. But the history of the dinosaurs should teach us some humility. The basic equipment of our mammal class-warm bodies clothed in fur, milk-producing breasts to nourish out young-is quite ancient. These mammalian hallmarks are as old as the dinosaurs themselves. Indeed the Class Mammalia emerged, fully defined in the world ecosystems just as the Dinosauria began their spectacular expansion. If our fundamental mammalian mode of adaptation was superior to the dinosaurs’, then history should record the meteoric rise of the mammals and the eclipse of the dinosaurs. Our own Class Mammalia did not seize the dominant position in life on land. Instead the mammal clan was but one of many separate evolutionary families that succeeded as species only by taking refuge in small body size during the Age of the Dinosaurs. As long as there were dinosaurs, a full 130 million years, remember, the warm-blooded league of furry mammals produced no species bigger that a cat. When the first dinosaur quarry was opened in 1822 at Stonesfield, England, quarry men found the one-ton Megalosaurus and a tiny mammal.”
Robert T Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies
“Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation; they are ambition fulfilled - they have nowhere to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature. Who, then were the recent lords of creation, that they should expect to remain unchanged?
The living form defies change at its peril; if it does not adapt it will be broken. the idea of a completed man is the supreme vanity; the finished image is a sacrilegious myth”
“Sometime there will come a day when we ourselves shall have to give place to a new thing. Very certainly we shall struggle against the inevitable, just as these remnants of the Old People do. We shall try with all our strength to grind it back into the earth form which it is emerging, for treachery to one’s own species must always seem a crime. We shall force it to prove itself, and when it does we shall go; as by the same process these are going.”
“The essential quality of life is living; the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution and we are part of it.”
John Wyndham, The
Chrysalids
“One of the apparent paradoxes of the eugenics movement is that it always flourishes in self-confident countries which are growing richer, and not in poor and desperate ones. It arose in America in the early years of the century, then became strongest in Protestant countries of northern Europe as they became rich. Now eugenics thinking flourishes in such places as Singapore, where there are special incentives for people with degrees to have children.
What these places have in common is a strong and justified sense of the importance of cultural values in their own success. They are rich because they are harder working and smarter than the competition. They also have a confidence in their own institutions. They believe government can make things better. They end up believing that the hopeless should not breed”
Andrew Brown, Sunday Times, 1997.