Embryonic Stem Cells In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Romanticizing his need for knowledge and infamy, the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, of Mary Shelley 's 1818 novel, Frankenstein, asserts, "No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane...Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds...I should... pour a torrent of light into our dark world" (Shelley 94). In the novel, Victor essentially recreates life, a task normally attributed to God, without fear of the moral consequences. In modern science, many scientists have commenced research that explores the possibility of creating life through the development of embryonic stem cells, but support for this possibly life-changing inquisition is constricted by the unethical qualities of the procedure. Emphasizing the moral constraints behind the pursuit for knowledge, Victor Frankenstein demonstrates an ambitious god-like …show more content…
Throughout history, mankind has had an unimpeded desire for undiscovered knowledge, but the implication of this knowledge has been restricted by ethicality, creating the question, "What is the line between acquiring intelligence and acting upon it?” This idea has become a reoccurring theme throughout literature and myth; like Adam and Eve, Pandora, and Lot’s wife, Frankenstein examines the consequences of curiosity and the desire for forbidden knowledge. In the novel, the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, demonstrates the mannerisms of a God-complex by manipulating his hunger for knowledge into an unfulfillable need to create a new superior breed of humans through