Reflecting on Frankenstein

I've been told that the journey of an intellectual is often a lonely one. The pursuit of a large inquiry - we could call it an obsession in some cases - is taken up by few and sustained by even fewer. And while this task may at first seem requisite of such "high-caliber" work, I've always found it interesting that while the path and the process is more individual, a valuable product should be marked by its being geared towards a larger and widespread audience. Thus putting the onus on the thinker, the producer, to put purpose and thought into disseminating whatever information has been found and/or synthesized. Although this idea of purpose and communicating a more widely applicable idea has been instilled within me over my years in emc, reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in my English class has opened my eyes to the mindfulness required throughout the inquiry process.

In case you aren't familiar with the book, it was first published in 1818 by then 19 year old Mary Shelley, and chronicles the journey of a scientist named Victor Frankenstein. Victor is after the secret of immortality and ultimately, seeks to create a human race with superior physiological traits that would make these creatures extremely resistant to the elements (natural as well as in terms of human fallibility). The biggest problem for Victor then, besides major ethical concerns of course, is that he succeeds. And I won't spoil the book for you but in essence, Victor sees before him a creature, the result of his heartfelt and ambitious work, but then walks away from it realizing exactly how much it scares him - he hates it. This, as you can imagine brings with it major repercussions that Victor hadn't exactly imagined would happen. One of the themes though, that we see traced throughout Victor's quest, is that over the time in which he is actually trying to produce the creature, there is without a doubt certain individuality in the sense of a most intense loneliness - and it isn't without self-prescribed isolation. The point is though, after this creature has been produced, Victor, because he has for so long remained holed up in his lab and refused to communicate with much of anyone for the duration of his work, doesn't realize that simply dropping everything and walking away from the creature because he didn't expect it to be so hideous and horrible, doesn't mean it simply goes away. The very act of remaining obsessively and certainly compulsively tied to his experiment, made Victor forget the larger scheme he is a part of. It caused him to disregard the larger consequences of his actions as nonexistent. He did not regard others in his process and was thus so accustomed to such negligence that he missed the second piece of an intellectual - he forgot to assess the value of his product with respect to society at large. Sure, he assessed the monster in terms of his own opinion/response, but not until the results were beyond repair did he come to conceive that he had caused the release of a danger to humanity. And that was certainly, an extremely large burden to bear.

Obviously, Victor Frankenstein is a very extreme example of scientific ambition taken too far and the traditional scientist introversion taken to non-human levels. But I think the concept itself has implications for us in whatever discipline we are pursuing. Personally, it was a little frightening to read about Victor's self-destructive and continually declining journey because his character in the book reflected traits I have always been scared of developing as a result of the topics I like to study and the way I operate. But at the same time, it made me realize that things such as collaboration along the way, and effective communication to the larger audience - the 5 Cs - are a good guard against that. As Mr. Bott likes to say, "the system works." It helps us remember that whatever we're exploring, be it neuroscience, comedy, morality, or ethics in robotics, isn't just about us. And in the best sense possible, I find this to be extremely humbling. You have to remember that you are a very very small piece to the puzzle of your larger topic/discipline, but that doesn't mean you should proceed with any less caution or credence because whatever you produce will without a doubt have an impact. That impact could be on two or three people, or billions. It doesn't matter how many you reach but rather, the way you reach those people.

While it is true that the journey of an intellectual may in fact be lonely, the product of that journey should not be isolated to the intellectual themselves. It comes, I think with a balance of mindfulness - one realizes that much of the path is self-directed without losing sight of a larger purpose that extends far beyond oneself.