Read Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters Online

Authors: Matt Kaplan

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Looking at Chimera is, in effect, not much different from looking at a human who has two heads, a scar running across one eye, or a missing limb, and this adds to the monster’s fear factor.

Chimera itself does not feature much in modern books, films, or television, but many of the fears that it embodied are alive and well. When H. G. Wells wrote
The Island of Dr. Moreau
in 1896, he was looking out upon the dawn of a scientific era when surgery and veterinary science were beginning to suggest that biological tampering might make it possible to merge human and animal features. The scientist, Dr. Moreau, uses his knowledge of physiology to make animals more human, effectively creating creatures that are neither man nor beast. These beast folk strive to throw off their animal instincts and struggle to follow a strict code of laws in their primitive society.
They are forbidden from hunting, chasing, walking on all fours, and lapping up water with their tongues, and they continually repeat the mantra “Are we not men?” Yet as the story unfolds, animal instincts prove difficult for the beast folk to control, and the island slowly collapses into dangerous disorder with the question “Are we not men?” resoundingly answered with a no.

Wells makes a clear argument that tinkering with life by using surgery to try and make animals more human is something dangerous. Prendick, the shipwrecked protagonist, finds the beast folk horrific, and many of his encounters with them in the jungle interior of the island are the stuff of nightmares. If the idea of humanized animals brings to mind ancient monstrous creatures that merged human and animal features like the Sphinx and the spine-tailed Manticore, that should only further drive home the point that mixing human and animal traits creates creatures that have terrified people for millennia.

Yet in
The Island of Dr. Moreau
there is an intriguing contrast to the mixed monsters of ancient history. While Chimera, Cerberus, Manticore, Scylla, and others were monsters created by the gods, the beast folk of Dr. Moreau’s island are entirely the result of a single man recklessly wielding science. Indeed, just as
King Kong
is clearly a monster movie with a monster that is not so easy to vilify because of human cruelty toward the giant ape,
The Island of Dr. Moreau
is a monster story where the monsters are really rather pitiful victims of the doctor’s scientific work. That Dr. Moreau is a villain is readily apparent.
22
But where exactly the monster in the monster story resides is hard to say, since the two key elements found in monsters—a visage of horror and a willingness to harm others—are somewhat divided.

Unsurprisingly,
The Island of Dr. Moreau
has found its way onto the silver screen three times since it was first written, and in the latest
(and not particularly good) adaptation, released in 1996, it embraced the rising use of genetics. Shifting from Wells’s original suggestion that the doctor was surgically humanizing beasts, the recent version describes the doctor as using drug therapy and gene manipulation to accomplish the same result. Along the same lines is Rupert Wyatt’s 2011 film,
Rise of the Planet of the Apes,
which links the testing of a newly developed Alzheimer’s drug on primates with the development of human intelligence among the apes themselves. Like
The Island of Dr. Moreau, Rise of the Planet of the Apes
again raises the question of who or what the monster actually is. Humans certainly have their moments of villainy in the story, but the apes, with their disturbingly human facial characteristics and ability to so effectively slink through the shadows once they escape from captivity, definitely are frightening. Are they the heroes? It certainly feels that way when a valiant gorilla sacrifices itself to save the leader ape, Caesar, from gunfire. Indeed, there is much here that is similar to
King Kong,
with sympathy building for the creatures that would typically be identified as monsters. That there is a lot of ambiguity is unquestionable and, based upon where modern science is headed, understandable.

The creatures of Wells’s imagination are not as far from reality as they might seem. Numerous mice, rabbits, sheep, fish, and birds have already been genetically engineered to carry and express the genes of other animals, including the genes of humans. The methods that are used vary. Some techniques directly insert genetic material from one animal into the area where the genes of a developing egg cell are found. Some labs are engineering viruses to carry genetic material and inject it into the newly developing cells of an embryo. Perhaps the most widely known technique adds genes to stem cells, which have the ability to become other types of cells in the body. By altering stem cells in this way and then adding these altered stem cells to a developing embryo, the added genes become expressed as the embryo grows.

Such techniques have already made it possible for teams to create a mouse with the liver of a rat. This might not sound like a big deal, since mice and rats are closely related, but giving one species
the ability to grow and live off of the organs of another is not that far from what Wells was writing about.
23
Indeed, the journal
Nature
published an editorial in 2011 titled “The Legacy of Doctor Moreau,” arguing that even though the blending of animal and human characteristics will likely be viewed by modern audiences with the same level of horror as Victorian audiences greeted Wells’s beast folk, such horror must be overcome for the sake of science and properly managed by a well-established framework of rules.

A mouse with a rat liver does not inspire horror among the public, but what about a rodent born with furless human skin? The skin is, in fact, just another organ and, genetically speaking, creating such a rodent in the lab is something researchers are on the verge of doing. This will likely be met with widespread revulsion,
24
but for the sake of finding treatments for life-threatening skin diseases, like skin cancer, should such revulsion be overcome?
Nature
certainly argues for this, with the caveat of careful government oversight. But what of a monkey being born with a human brain?

Based upon how far research has progressed in recent years, such a creature is now no longer outside the realm of possibilities. Although it will not be created in a lab tomorrow or next year, in the coming decades an animal of this sort may well become very real. But what would such a creature endure? We would have to apply all ethical regulations afforded to humans to a monkey with a human brain, but the mere possibility of such an organism being created and the terrible questions that such scientific work raises are understandably frightening. Could it ever learn to speak? Would it go insane? Might it resent its creators and plot revenge?

To help keep the nightmares at bay and maintain some level of ethical control, the Academy of Medical Sciences in London has set
out a number of rules intended to guide genetics work during the years ahead. Among other things, it clarifies the practices that should be considered reasonable during the introduction of human stem cells into animals that lead to the creation of “chimeric” embryos.

Chimera, still very much alive, still generating fear, and most certainly coming soon to a cinema near you (probably in the form of a vengeful monkey with a human brain).

16
 And in some regions by snakes too!

17
 The result of triplets that end up connected to one another in the womb.

18
 Honestly, instead of featuring as a monster in Greek mythology, it would have made more sense for such a creature to have played the lead role in one of Sophocles’ or Euripides’ tragedies.

19
 Predator/prey interaction fossils are very occasionally discovered, and they are fascinating. A fossil of a
Protoceratops
struggling for its life against an attacking
Velociraptor
was found in Mongolia. The predator has its claws wrapped around the prey and the prey was clearly doing everything it could to throw off its assailant, but the battle ended with both dinosaurs dead, as either a sudden sandstorm quickly buried them or a sand dune collapsed on them as they struggled. It is one of the most impressive fossils ever discovered, mostly because such interactions are exceedingly uncommon in the fossil record. (FYI—You can buy a re-creation of this for $9,500 (plus shipping!).
www.bhigr.com/store/product.php?productid=464
.)

20
 The University of California, Berkeley, has a very large collection of these sorts of fossils excavated from tar pits in Southern California but is unable to store them with the rest of their fossils in the university’s paleontology museum because of the stench and the dangerous nature of the petroleum fumes. The university now keeps them in the bell tower at the center of the campus where they can “de-gas” in peace.

21
 According to Hesiod’s
Theogony,
the Sphinx, Chimera, and Cerberus were siblings. One has to wonder if their sibling status was invented to explain them all being found in a similar location or in a similar fossilized state.

22
 Heroes don’t usually say things like “Each time I dip a living creature in the bath of burning pain, I say, ‘This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!’”

23
 Remember, humans and chimpanzees are actually more closely related to one another than mice and rats.

24
 And fiery protests that will make all the battles fought over stem-cell research look like a picnic in the park.

3

It Came from the Earth—Minotaur, Medusa

“Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?”

—Indiana Jones,
Raiders of the Lost Ark

While walking along the sun-baked hills of the Greek islands and staring out over the sparkling blue water, it is hard to think of anything other than paradise. There are no dark forests, no tar pits, and no fierce beasts, just the gentle sea breeze. It is hardly the sort of place where one would expect to find a monster, yet on the island of Crete, one of the earliest and fiercest of monsters came into existence, and not on the surface of the island but in the subterranean world below it.

Half bull and half man, the Minotaur lived deep in an underground labyrinth and captivated the ancient Greeks who frequently portrayed it in their art. Some drew it with the head of a man and the body of a bull, making it look kind of like a Centaur. Others presented it as a man with a bull’s head. Many artistic depictions of the beast show it attacking and eating people.

The myth, as described by Apollodorus, tells of a man named Minos on the island of Crete who sought to become king: “Minos aspired to the throne, but was rebuffed. He claimed, however, that he had received the sovereignty from the gods and to prove it he said that whatever he prayed for would come about. So while sacrificing to Poseidon, he prayed for a bull
25
to appear from the depths of the sea, and promised to sacrifice it upon its appearance. And Poseidon did send up to him a splendid [white] bull.”

Yet Minos proved greedy. After becoming king, he decided he liked the bull so much that he kept it as a pet rather than sacrifice it. This angered Poseidon, who “devised that Pasiphaë [Minos’s wife] should develop a lust for it [the bull]. In her passion for the bull she took on as her accomplice a genius architect named Daidalos… . He built a wooden cow on wheels, . . . skinned a real cow, and sewed the contraption into the skin, and then, after placing Pasiphaë inside, set it in a meadow where the bull normally grazed.” Minos’s wife wound up getting pregnant by the bull.
26
Nine months later, when she gave birth, the result was the Minotaur.

Minos’s wife nursed the monster during its early years until the beast started eating people in the household. Minos was understandably concerned, but since he had already wronged the gods by keeping the white bull as a pet, he was not eager to anger the gods again. The ever-helpful Oracle at Delphi confirmed that his instincts were correct and that he would indeed be in serious trouble if he plotted the death of the Minotaur. This left Minos in a bind. He could not kill the beast, but letting it roam the palace where it could eat everyone was out of the question. To solve his problem, Minos had Daidalos build a maze underneath the palace where the Minotaur could effectively be imprisoned.

Minotaur.
Greek, Attic bilingual eye-cup. c. 515 BCE. Art Resource, NY.

With the Minotaur stuck in the labyrinth, one might think the story of the monster safely concluded, but the beast continued to cause trouble. The Greek poet Callimachus described it making “cruel bellowing” from its labyrinthian jail, and so to keep the monster calm, Minos arranged to have it fed foreigners on a regular basis. Dozens of hapless people met their fate in the maze, but eventually Minos made the mistake of sending the Athenian hero Theseus inside. Using a ball of string given to him by Minos’s love-struck daughter Ariadne to leave a trail behind him, Theseus killed the Minotaur and escaped the maze.

BOOK: Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters
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