The Post Modern Prometheus

The Post-Modern Prometheus

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, raises many ethical issues that are relevant to today’s society. In the novel, Victor Frankenstein is portrayed as God as he is able to create a new species by reanimating dead tissue. Today, scientists aren’t able to perform such experiments as fictional as bringing back the dead, but they are able to perform other serious experiments like cloning organisms for example. Cloning and growing organs, a sub-branch of cloning, are scientific achievements done out of acts of utilitarianism: to help patients gain happiness by “intended pleasure and the absence of pain” (Cahn, 2011, p.93) through replaced organs and replicating organisms for other purposes.
In the introduction of Frankenstein, the first four letters are documentations of Captain Robert Walton’s voyage to the North Pole written to his sister Margaret, where he comes across a frozen and weak Victor Frankenstein in search of his beast of a creation. After recovering from the harsh conditions, Victor “then told [Captain Robert] that he would commence his narrative the next day when [he] should be at leisure” (Shelley, 1818, p.18), telling his whole miserable life to Walton. Victor starts off by stating his jovial childhood growing up in Geneva, where his “mother’s caresses and [his] father’s smile of benevolent pleasure while regarding [him] are [his] first recollections” (Shelley, 1818, p.22). The turning point of Victor’s life is when he witnesses “a most violent and terrible thunderstorm” (Shelley, 1818, p.29) at the age of 15 that involved lightning striking and shattering an oak tree; he “never beheld anything so utterly destroyed” (Shelley, 1818, p.29). Before going off to the ...

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...r medical purposes where “cloned embryos are sometimes destroyed to create stem cells” (Foht 2013). Reproductive cloning is simply cloning to produce a human being, which “raises the specter of the eugenic control of human reproduction, and the pursuit of extreme mastery over children by their parents, who would be seeking to define in advance the precise genetic properties of their offspring” (Foht 2013). Cloning also makes the child lack a genetic mother or father made by an egg donor and required a gestational surrogate to conceive them (Foht 2013). Many disapprove of this practice because the cloned child would lack the healthy normal relationship between parents, both the biological and social factors of the relationship. There are enough physical, mental, and social problems amongst foster and homeless children, having cloned children would add on to the list.