Frankenstein's Monster Research Articles

Baseball: The Tenth Inning (review)

Reviewed by: Baseball: The Tenth Inning Frank Ardolino (bio) Baseball: The Tenth Inning. Produced and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. PBS, 2010. 4 hrs. The original Emmy Award-winning, nine-part documentary Baseball, which was broadcast on PBS in 1994 during the players' strike, was seen by more than 43 million viewers, making it the most watched film in PBS history.1 The series covered 1839 to 1992, and it was intended in some measure to provide an antidote to the disenchantment with baseball following the termination of the 1994 season. Baseball may have broken down as the result of the mutual greed and power games of the players and the owners, but Burns unfolded the glorious history of America's game to compensate for the stoppage on the field. After completing his magnum opus, Burns was determined not to deal with the subject again, but when he saw the resurgent popularity of the game during the ensuing sixteen years, he decided to chronicle what he calls baseball's new "golden age."2 But this golden age has an ignominious shadow over it, and The Tenth Inning both extols the beauty of the game on the field and laments the problems raised by some players' use of steroids and related performance-enhancing drugs. Burns prefaces the two-part program with the mantra that "no matter what happens off the field, it's still a great game." Even the opening ad for Bank of America celebrates the healing pastoral powers of baseball throughout the years. However, Burns's consolatory motto contains a false dichotomy: the drug use may have occurred off the field, but its effect is felt on the field. It's impossible to separate the game into two distinct categories because they are inextricably connected. Barry Bonds looks great hitting home runs throughout the documentary, and, on the one hand, we are asked to celebrate his prowess, but, on the other hand, our suspicion that his Ruthian blasts are fueled by drugs undercuts our admiration. To support the positive theme, players are shown making a succession of superlative plays, [End Page 166] and various ball fields are presented in all their green glory. Star players like Ichiro Suzuki, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Omar Vizquel, and Pedro Martinez provide heroic images to thrill fans. Mixed inextricably with these memories, however, is the specter of drug use by the home run titans, Sosa, McGwire, and Bonds. In particular, Burns uses Bonds as Frankenstein's monster, with whom the game will have to deal when he stakes his claim in "the bottom of the tenth" as the greatest player ever. Burns establishes a dramatic pattern to his presentation by invariably following a positive aspect of the game, exemplified, for example, by Cal Ripken's consecutive games record. Ripken's record is cited as the means of restoring fan support after the hateful 1994 strike, with a return to the Bonds mythos of supreme talent and Faustian ambition. The effect on baseball of the rise and fall of Barry Bonds constitutes the principal focus of the four-hour program. The nature and structure of the Tenth Inning is based on a dual temporal perspective: the past events being chronicled and the present from which our act of retrospection takes place. Because subsequent revelations have influenced our perception of the past events, we obviously enjoy a superior perspective, but at the same time through Burns's expert direction we can see even more meanings in these events than the mere passage of time would provide. He assembles a visual and vocal mixture of film highlights; photos; voiceover narration; music; and commentary by broadcasters, writers, players, managers, and fans to create a multi-leveled and connected look at the events he considers the most important. Burns's characteristic pattern consists of a remark by narrator Keith David about the upcoming scene, followed by footage of the event unfolding or a photo that illustrates the point being made, which is succeeded by a comment from Bob Costas, Mike Barnicle, Howard Bryant, George Will, or Tom Boswell, among others, all of whom establish consistent personas in the unfolding events. Costas is the articulate voice of...

The Research Excellence Framework and the 'impact agenda': are we creating a Frankenstein monster?

In pursuit of public accountability, the mechanisms for assessing research performance have become more complicated and burdensome. In the United Kingdom, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) evolved from an initially simple framework to something much more complex and onerous. As the RAE now gives way to the Research Excellence Framework (REF), 'impact assessment' is being added to the process. Impact comes in numerous forms, however, so its assessment is far from straightforward. While HEFCE is initially proposing a relatively simple methodology, the history of the RAE suggests that this approach will over time become ever more sophisticated. Yet if the 'costs' of an elaborate system for assessing 'research excellence' and its impact then exceed the benefits, the time may have come to re-examine whether a dual-support system still represents the optimum way of funding university research.

Robots and Other Cognitive Systems: Challenges and European Responses

Robots have come a long way since the Czech writer Karel Capek first used this term, some 90 years ago, to denote rather frightening creatures—not unlike Golems or Frankenstein's monster, yet workers all the same. Today, more than ever, robots continue to fascinate: they take over activities which humans find too dangerous or impossible. For example, the recent use of robots at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant or in the recovery of the flight recorder of Air France's Rio de Janeiro– Paris flight which went down in deep seas in 2009. They go to war and deactivate mines. And they increasingly come into our homes as children's toys, almost like family pets! In just a few years, technological progress in this area has been tremendous and Europe is one of the leaders in this research and industrial application. Yet, this is just the beginning of the robot history as many challenges remain to be addressed. Refining and improving the mechanics of robots and their sensorial capacities (including ones that living organisms do not possess) has always been of major concern for engineers. Reducing the amount of human intervention in the operation of these machines has been another persistent trend, leading for instance to numerically controlled machine tools. Ultimately, however, this means more than merely automating the completion of a task according to some preset rules. It means that, within certain limits, machines ought to be able to take “decisions” autonomously and independent of external (e.g., remote) control on how to proceed with a given task should new conditions arise unexpectedly. This could be in the form of a roving robot that is supposed to retrieve some object from a distant place but on its way encounters an unexpected obstacle. The ease of use, safety, and partial autonomy are essential if robotic devices are to leave the shop floor and strictly controlled environments and become truly useful Philos. Technol. (2011) 24:355–357 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0037-4

Worst case bioethics: death, disaster, and public health

Bioethics, still in its infancy, is routinely called on by the government to provide political cover for controversial public health decisions involving the life and of Americans. Doomsday or worst-case scenarios are often at the heart of these biopolitical decisions. central feature of science fiction, these scenarios can impart useful insights. But worst-case scenarios, like Frankenstein's monster, can also be unpredictably destructive, undermining both preparedness and the very values bioethics seeks to promote. Discovering a new flu strain, for example, leads immediately to visions of the 1918 flu pandemic, the worst in human history. Likewise, a ticking time bomb scenario leads to the use of the saving lives rationale that permits lawyers to justify it and physicians to carry it out. The worst case charge of death panels continues to threaten meaningful healthcare reform in the US. Fundamental change in American healthcare, Annas argues, will require fundamental change in American, including confronting our obsession with technology and our denial of death, and replacing our over-reliance on the military and market metaphors in medicine. A combination of the ecological and rights metaphors could help us successfully navigate the waters of change. In Worst Case Bioethics, George Annas employs contemporary disputes involving and disaster to explore the radical changes underway in public health practice, the application of constitutional law to medicine, and human rights discourse to promote human health and wellbeing. Worst-case scenarios, especially worst-case bioethics scenarios, distort debate, limit options, rationalize human rights abuses, and undermine equality and social justice. It is, nonetheless, possible to temper worst-case scenarios in ways that promote both the development of a meaningful American bioethics, and a life and liberty affirming global health and human rights movement. Written at the intersection of law, bioethics, public health, and human rights, Worst Case Bioethics will interest not only bioethicists but scholars in public health, public policy, and human rights law, as well as members of the public who want to participate in these policy debates.

Obituary: Cecil Helman

I first met Cecil about 20 years ago and, since I retired, we shared an office we both visited at irregular intervals. His side of the room was a reflection of his polymath personality – the surface of his desk, and the surrounding floor space were totally covered with heaps of articles, periodicals and books on many different topics. I often found myself standing by his chair reading a fascinating article on a subject perhaps vaguely related to medicine. Cecil Helman, humanist, teacher, writer, general practitioner, and medical anthropologist, died at the age of 65 on the 15 June 2009 from motor neurone disease. Cecil was brought up in South Africa. He came from a family of numerous doctors (and rabbis) and finding the gravitational pull towards medicine irresistible, qualified from the University of Cape Town in 1967. His father was a government psychiatrist and in Suburban Shaman: tales from medicine's frontline, he describes how, unlike other children who spent their summer holidays on the beach, he accompanied his father on his trips to various mental hospitals. Shortly after qualifying he left South Africa repulsed by apartheid and the prospect of serving as a conscript in the South African army at a time of increasing civil unrest. He moved to cold and damp London and after a spell as a ship's surgeon eventually became a general practitioner (GP), practising part-time in north-west London for a quarter of a century. However, for Cecil literature and art were as important as the science of medicine. He was fascinated by people, their cultural and ethnic backgrounds, the narratives of their illnesses, their interaction with practitioners, and the role of traditional healers in many different societies. As he said, to be an effective healer, a doctor needs to ‘understand the storyteller as well as the story’. He took a postgraduate degree in social anthropology at University College London (UCL) in 1972 and won a Fellowship in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School in 1982–3. In addition to his work as a GP he also became professor in the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University and senior lecturer in the UCL Research Department of Primary Care and Population Health. Cecil was a leading exponent of the discipline of medical anthropology; he was convinced that it was only possible to make sense of patients’ problems if these were put in the context of their different cultures and social backgrounds and belief systems, even if these beliefs did appear sometimes to be somewhat weird. Culture, Health and Illness was first published in 1984 and became a standard textbook in many countries. It is now a classic, in its 5th edition, and has had a considerable influence on biomedical practitioners, encouraging them to engage with the concepts of anthropology. Other books he published include, The Body of Frankenstein's Monster, Body Myths and The Exploding Newspaper and other Fables. The importance of his work was recognised on both sides of the Atlantic and he received a number of prestigious awards. These include Career Achievement Award of the American Anthropological Association's Society for Medical Anthropology 2004, The Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology 2005 from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland ‘to honour the application of anthropology … to the active recognition of human dignity’ and the George Abercrombie Award 2008, presented by the Royal College of General Practitioners ‘for special meritorious literary work in general practice’. Suburban Shaman: tales from medicine's frontline, was selected by the BBC as a Book of the Week and serialised on BBC Radio 4 in 2006. It also won the UK Medical Journalists’ Association 2007 Open Book Award. I am not surprised that this ‘mosaic of memories’ is so popular. When I read it I imagined myself in the room with Cecil listening to his patients’ stories, absorbing their emotions and sharing his response to this very diverse and sometime bizarre group of characters. I attended a couple of his courses. He was an inspiring charismatic teacher, able to convey his enthusiasm to students who always seemed to arrive eager and on time for each and every session. He was an individualist, whose approach was somewhat different from the more conventional academic GP. He was not an enthusiastic supporter of the medical establishment and sometimes found it difficult to accept the need for university departments to focus on teaching an overcrowded curriculum to large numbers of medical students, and obtaining grants for large multicentre number-crunching research projects. Nevertheless, he considerably enriched our department of general practice, reminding us that we are generalists, committed to the practice of holistic medicine in an increasingly diverse society. We are the poorer without him.

Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (review)

Reviewed by: Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor Edward Dauterich Elizabeth Young . Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor. New York: New York UP, 2008. 308 pp. $75.00 cloth/ $23.00 paper. In the summer of 1816, when a young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin joined Percy Shelley at Lord Byron's villa in Switzerland and participated in a short story writing contest, she could not have known the impact her creation would have in the United States in the present. As Elizabeth Young points out in her introduction to Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor, Mary Shelley's creations (both the unnamed monster and Victor Frankenstein) have been used to describe everything from Chicken McNuggets to former Vice President Dick Cheney (1-3). Considering that both Victor Frankenstein and his monster have been so widely used as metaphors, readers may be surprised at Young's claim that although "Frankenstein and its legacy have been the subject of substantial amounts of scholarly and popular writing . . . little serious attention has been paid to the historical specificities of its place in American culture, and virtually none to its racial resonances in the United States" (4-5). Young has three goals in her Promethean effort to create the groundwork to combat this dearth of critical attention, and she addresses these at the beginning of the book. [End Page 765] Her first goal "is to show how the black Frankenstein metaphor affirms, and at the same time challenges, structures of race and masculinity in U.S. culture" (10). To do this, Young examines prose works by many American authors (Baldwin, Cleaver, Crane, Dunbar, Douglass, and others), films that deal with the metaphor (James Whale's Frankenstein films and Griffith's Birth of a Nation are well analyzed in the book), and other media, including the comic performances of Dick Gregory. Young's second goal is to "offer a study in form" and "explore the formal elements . . . of metaphor-making at several levels" (10). While she acknowledges that some of the versions of Frankenstein she chooses to discuss may be considered "lowbrow works about a low-browed monster," she makes it clear that the less-strict attention to purely canonical works is mediated by her standards for what can be used as an example of the Frankenstein metaphor (14). For a work to be discussed it needs to include three things: "amalgamation, re-animation, and revolt against a creator" (14). In her second and third chapters, Young examines these criteria and the way they work within the metaphor, and she then goes into depth analyzing Stephen Crane's The Monster (1898) and Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods (1902). With Crane's work, Young identifies "an intrinsic connection between the fictional figure of the Frankenstein monster and the literary figure of the dead metaphor, outlining this connection generally and then in historical relation to late-nineteenth-century American accounts of metaphor" (68-69). She argues that Crane's work adapts Shelley's original story by "developing both its implicit racial politics of monstrosity and its aesthetic equation between monsters and metaphors" (107). She analyzes Dunbar's novel with the same goals, but points out that "paradoxically" with Dunbar, "a more clearly antiracist writer constructs a more truly monstrous black monster" (108). In addition to the first two goals, Young also looks at the political side of the Frankenstein metaphor. As she claims in the introduction, "The black Frankenstein monster is a key figure in the history of monsters as politically charged forms, as well as in the history of monstrosity as a constitutive feature of the language of politics" (13). She addresses this goal in all of the chapters of the book, but gives special attention to the political metaphor in the works of Frederick Douglass, the performances of Dick Gregory, and the films that she analyzes. Throughout the book, however, she draws special attention to the ways in which the metaphor has been used politically to demonize slaves and other African Americans, challenge existing hierarchies of race and gender, and influence cultural change in the United States. As Young points out in her afterword, "In a world...

Patenting Nanotechnology: In Pursuit of a Proactive Approach

Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter at the atomic level, it has the potential for energy efficiency, Carbon Nanotubes that have enormous tensile strength and are much stronger and lighter than elements like steel, Nanomaterials that are used in different products to make stain resistant clothes, equipments for defence and many others. Emerging technologies like Nanotechnology are one of the most discussed technologies of the 21st century. The enormous potentials that it possesses have made it invaluable however the same like other new technologies is in danger of being left unexplored because of the predicaments that it has caused in patenting the technology. Patents form an essential part in providing protection to the inventor, however the same turns futile if it is not properly granted or the patents so granted are overlapping with others. The paper attempts to address the issues of lack of knowledge and expertise in the field of nanotechnology which act as possible roadblocks in examining patent applications for nanotech inventions. It has now been an accepted fact that the developments in science and technology are always steps ahead of laws framed for regulating the technologies as a result of which the developments in the absence of a well defined regulatory framework act as the Frankenstein monster having enormous potential for good as well as evil. In the light of this background, the paper addresses the need to adopt a proactive approach as regards patenting Nanotechnology so that it can be used for maximum benefit to all.

Frankenstein reclaimed

According to recent media headlines, ethanol derived from biomass is a 'Frankenstein Fuel', human DNA inserted into a cow's egg delivers 'Frankenstein's Monster', and even the sub-prime mortgage disaster is a consequence of Frankenstein Finance' E& T asks: what exactly does this much-abused journalistic cliche mean?

From Doppelgänger to Monster: Kitano Takeshi’s Takeshis’

Dans le douzième film de Kitano Takeshi, Takeshis’ (2005), le célèbre chanteur/acteur queer Miwa Akihiro qualifie de monstre la grande vedette de télévision et de cinéma Beat Takeshi, alter ego du cinéaste Kitano Takeshi. Comment doit-on interpréter cette référence au monstre, tant au niveau diégétique que non-diégétique ? Si Beat Takeshi ou Kitano Takeshi sont qualifiés de monstre dans ce film, de quel genre de monstre s’agit-il, et quelle en est la signification ? L’origine latine du terme « monstre », « monstrum », signifie « symptôme » ou « avertissement ». Quels symptômes ou avertissements pouvons-nous détecter dans Takeshis’ ? Procédant d’une analyse approfondie des détails visuels de Takeshis’, et plus particulièrement de la représentation du désordre schizophrène de Beat Takeshi/Kitano Takeshi, cet article propose une interprétation faisant de Takeshis’ un symptôme de l’identité multiple des contextes culturels et technologiques de l’ère numérique.

A strand of vermicelli: Dr Darwin's part in the creation of Frankenstein's monster

Although much has been written about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the part played by Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) has been almost entirely neglected. This is odd as, apart from some ghost stories, Dr Darwin is the one influence mentioned in both the 1816 and 1831 prefaces to the book. The present contribution aims to redress that omission. It aims to show that Darwin's ideas about spontaneous generation, his anti-establishment ideas, and his literary genius played a significant role in forming the 'dark and shapeless substance' surging in Mary Shelley's mind during the summer of 1816 and from which her tale of Gothic horror emerged. It is, however, ultimately ironic that Frankenstein, which warns against a too enthusiastic use of scientific knowledge, should have been partly inspired by one of the most optimistically forward-looking of all late eighteenth-century thinkers.

Being There: Gothic Violence and Virtuality in Frankenstein, Dracula, and Strange Days

Being There:Gothic Violence and Virtuality in Frankenstein, Dracula, and Strange Days Jules Law No sooner did that idea cross my imagination, than I became convinced of its truth. —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein This is not "like t.v., only better." This is life. It's a piece of somebody's life. It's pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. . . . You're there, you're doing it. —Strange Days For some years now we have regarded the gothic as a particularly embodied genre. Modern gothic, suggests Judith Halberstam, begins when Mary Shelley discovers "fear to be a by-product of embodiment rather than a trick played upon the body by the mind." Beginning with the crudely stitched epidermis of Frankenstein's monster, gothic literature helps turn skin into the nineteenth century's "metonym for the human," refiguring various social crises and identities in increasingly sexual terms.1 Kelly Hurley, too, finds the various estrangements, alienations, and terrors of late nineteenth-century gothic to inhere in a body made newly uncanny by Victorian science.2 For Hurley, fin-de-siècle gothic is particularly notable for its ability to produce visceral reactions in the reader, though in this respect it is the descendant of mid-century "sensation" novels rather than gothic per se. In both Halberstam's and Hurley's readings, the gothic plays out a dialectic of embodiment and dissolution which makes violence the inevitable corollary of corporealization.3 Implicitly linking embodiment to the logic of specularity, these readings point to the perils encountered by bodies caught up in the violent, gendered field of the gaze, subject to the ressentiments reserved for figurations of the human.4 [End Page 975] But is it embodiment that precipitates violence in the gothic text? What if the drive toward violence in the gothic text were generated not so much by the figure of the human as by the fantasy of transcending mediation (an aspiration designated, at different historical moments, variously as "immanence" or "virtuality"), a fantasy built into the narrative apparatus itself and then displaced onto some rival medium or apparatus? In this essay I will suggest—contra much recent culturally-oriented criticism—that such a double apparatus is constitutive of the gothic genre and generative of the latter's peculiar affinities for violence. I will also argue that the impulse within the gothic to abridge, compress, or transcend its own narrative modality, though represented within the diegesis as the effect of particular scientific technologies, is in the end produced at the level of enunciation: specifically through a constitutive tension between deferral and progressively condensed loops of retrospection.5 Gothic is thus not so much about embodiment as it is about a dangerous desire for transcendence which must be articulated but held at bay. This desire for transcendence is a desire for virtuality—a life without bodies or narrative constraint. And if the threat of violence which presides over this desire can be described culturally in terms of a familiar imperial masculine posture, it is nonetheless generated structurally as an effect of narrative desire. In attempting to refine current cultural-historicist readings of the relationship between violence and embodiment, I will first revisit some older theoretical models articulating violence with literary form and attempt to elaborate these in relation to two classic gothic texts before turning to a contemporary permutation of the gothic in the emergent subgenre of "virtual reality" narrative. We might begin this re-examination by returning to Eve Sedgwick's observation that gothic narratives have an awful lot of trouble getting their story told. According to Sedgwick's now classic account, in gothic texts "[i]t is the position of the self to be massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access." This alienation is mirrored in gothic's narrative structure, where "the difficulty the story has getting itself told" weighs increasingly on the characters, the trope of "unspeakableness" producing a "barrier" that cannot be breached without "violent" counter-response.6 We may further note that the "difficulty the story has getting itself told" is almost always the result of a character's difficulty in recounting a narrative; the gothic narrative is composed both...

Sounds like Horror: Alejandro Amenàbar's Thesis on Audio-Visual Violence

Une analyse rigoureuse de la trame sonore de Tesis d’Alejandro Amenádar dévoile le fonctionnement du film à l’intérieur des conventions du cinéma d’horreur et élucide son interpellation des spectateurs féminins et masculins. Malgré certains éléments novateurs. Tesis maintient une division rigide entre les sexes et réaffirme la hiérarchie traditionnelle entre l’image et le son.

Viol d'apres Titus Andronicus de William Shakespeare (review)

Reviewed by: Viol d'aprés Titus Andronicus de William Shakespeare Mechele Leon Viol d'aprés Titus Andronicus de William Shakespeare. By Botho Strauss. French translation by Michel Vinaver and Barbara Grinberg. Directed by Luc Bondy. Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, Paris. 19112005. In the opening moments of Viol(Rape), the French premiere of Botho Strauss's adaptation of Titus Andronicus, salesmen snake their way through a contemporary Roman crowd hawking real-estate deals for what Americans would recognize as gated communities. " Terra Secura!" they shout, where safety and beauty are guaranteed and women and children need not fear "theft, rape, and kidnapping." Performed in unforgiving shafts of white light among fragments of classical Roman civic architecture rendered modern in dark wood, the prologue immediately situates the action in an urban landscape plagued by violence and fear. For audience members who had recently witnessed nightly news images of rioting French communities, this bleak setting seemed depressingly familiar. The production's location only reinforced its thematic impact. With the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe's historic building under renovation, the production was banished from the terra securaof central Paris andrelocated to a former opera warehouse on the periphery of the city, only meters away from the banlieuesthat had recently been depicted in media images as teeming with hooded youths and burning cars. This adaptation of a Renaissance crafting of an ancient Roman saga, steeped in violence, proved hauntingly contemporary. Structured in seventeen scenes, the first half of Violcontains much of the action of the first twoacts of Shakespeare's play, culminating with Lavinia's rape and mutilation by Tamora's sons Demetrius and Chiron. However, the adaptation veers off-course in its second half. A remorseful Chiron romances Lavinia, who now communicates through her translator, Monica. Lavinia forgivingly invites him to her bed, but Chiron is repelled by her tongueless mouth and icy metal prosthetic hands. While Lavinia leaves in search for an aphrodisiac, Chiron rapes Monica. Titus discovers Chiron in the act and kills him, sawing off his hand and positioning the knife's blade through the mattress, pointing upward. Lavinia returns, and seeing Chiron dead, she lowers her body onto the knife, killing herself. Violence continues to emerge in striking images; in the penultimate scene Tamora plucks her son's hand from a tureen of ragout. She then attempts but fails to stab Titus, who kills her. Violconcentrates its tensions on the experience and imagery of violence, emotional exhaustion, and survival. In a scene strategically placed outside the action and substituting for onstage representation of Lavinia's rape, an unnamed woman describes to an interrogator what she sees in a series of images not revealed to the audience. She portrays the depicted events as if they occurred out of time, somewhere between nightmare and reality, involving but not involving her: rape, genital mutilation, a tongue (whose?) cut out with the jagged top of a cat food can. After viewing the images, the investigator asks her what she feels. "Nothing. I feel nothing. These are incomprehensible phantasms. Nightmares. Everyone has them. Every night. On every pillow," she replies. "They are images of a bestial depravity. How does one live with that?" "Comment vivre avec ça?"The play does not answer the question. Significantly however, the most visually shocking and brutally realistic scene in Bondy's riveting production is not Lavinia's rape, but its aftermath, the moment one starts to "vivre avec." Covered with blood, her clothing in shreds, the extraordinary German actress Dörte Lyssewski as Lavinia crawls slowly out of the toppled garbage dumpster in which she had been left for dead. A blood-stained wad of crumpled plastic wrapping trails from her body, peeling away with a dreadful sound, while discarded aluminum cans and other garbage roll out on the ground with her. Gérard [End Page 313]Desarthe, as a powerfully lumbering and brooding Titus, stands frozen at this incomprehensible sight and then begins washing the blood off her face with water from a puddle. Gurgling blood, a black patch running down her legs, Lavinia moves in shocked silence with halting steps, like Frankenstein's monster...

Theoretical model of restriction endonuclease HpaI in complex with DNA, predicted by fold recognition and validated by site‐directed mutagenesis

Type II restriction enzymes are commercially important deoxyribonucleases and very attractive targets for protein engineering of new specificities. At the same time they are a very challenging test bed for protein structure prediction methods. Typically, enzymes that recognize different sequences show little or no amino acid sequence similarity to each other and to other proteins. Based on crystallographic analyses that revealed the same PD-(D/E)XK fold for more than a dozen case studies, they were nevertheless considered to be related until the combination of bioinformatics and mutational analyses has demonstrated that some of these proteins belong to other, unrelated folds PLD, HNH, and GIY-YIG. As a part of a large-scale project aiming at identification of a three-dimensional fold for all type II REases with known sequences (currently approximately 1000 proteins), we carried out preliminary structure prediction and selected candidates for experimental validation. Here, we present the analysis of HpaI REase, an ORFan with no detectable homologs, for which we detected a structural template by protein fold recognition, constructed a model using the FRankenstein monster approach and identified a number of residues important for the DNA binding and catalysis. These predictions were confirmed by site-directed mutagenesis and in vitro analysis of the mutant proteins. The experimentally validated model of HpaI will serve as a low-resolution structural platform for evolutionary considerations in the subgroup of blunt-cutting REases with different specificities. The research protocol developed in the course of this work represents a streamlined version of the previously used techniques and can be used in a high-throughput fashion to build and validate models for other enzymes, especially ORFans that exhibit no sequence similarity to any other protein in the database.

Achievements of the Soviet biological weapons programme and implications for the future

The military-biological complex of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a true Frankenstein's Monster, with a powerful scientific potential--or good and for ill. This article examines both the direct scientific results of the twin biological weapons (BWs) programmes run by the 'civilian' Biopreparat and by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the public health benefits that sprang, despite the original intent, out of those programmes. The authors will also explore the potential for both crop and livestock destruction and for enhanced agricultural methods growing out of the parallel Soviet programme under the management of the Special Directorate of the Ministry of Agriculture. In the last section of the article the authors discuss the situation in the military-biological complex that arose after former President Boris Yeltsin's 1992 decree abolishing all research and development on offensive BWs. The possibility is considered that expertise, technologies and materials from the former Soviet BWs programme have leaked out of Russia, because the living standards in Russia remain low and the overwhelming majority of scientists have a miserable existence.

Securitization, Frankenstein's Monster and Malaysian education

In 2002 the Malaysian government announced it would reintroduce English as a medium of instruction in all Malaysian primary schools. The reaction of the Tamil, Malay and Chinese educationalists was damning, with the latter referring to the decision as the ‘final solution’ for mandarin education in Malaysia's national education system. The furore created in 2002 led the Malaysian government to threaten Chinese educationalists with its draconian Internal Security Act (ISA); this was not an insignific threat, as the government had detained Chinese educationalists previously under the ISA in 1987. In this article I use the Copenhagen School's notions of societal security and securitization to reveal why the medium of instruction used in Chinese National-type primary schools is regarded as a matter of security by Chinese educationalists. I reveal that while the Chinese educationalists engage in securitization discourse, their aim is to keep the issue at the politicized end of the securitization spectrum. However, when this discourse coincides with the government feeling weak, the governing elite use the language to securitize the situation and crush their opponents – this reveals the appropriateness of Kyle Grayson's analogy between securitization and Frankenstein's Monster. The article therefore both operationalizes securitization and also reveals the perilous state of Mandarin education in Malaysia's national education system.

Mva1269I: A Monomeric Type IIS Restriction Endonuclease from Micrococcus Varians with Two EcoRI- and FokI-like Catalytic Domains

Type II restriction endonuclease Mva1269I recognizes an asymmetric DNA sequence 5'-GAATGCN / -3'/5'-NG / CATTC-3' and cuts top and bottom DNA strands at positions, indicated by the "/" symbol. Most restriction endonucleases require dimerization to cleave both strands of DNA. We found that Mva1269I is a monomer both in solution and upon binding of cognate DNA. Protein fold-recognition analysis revealed that Mva1269I comprises two "PD-(D/E)XK" domains. The N-terminal domain is related to the 5'-GAATTC-3'-specific restriction endonuclease EcoRI, whereas the C-terminal one resembles the nonspecific nuclease domain of restriction endonuclease FokI. Inactivation of the C-terminal catalytic site transformed Mva1269I into a very active bottom strand-nicking enzyme, whereas mutants in the N-terminal domain nicked the top strand, but only at elevated enzyme concentrations. We found that the cleavage of the bottom strand is a prerequisite for the cleavage of the top strand. We suggest that Mva1269I evolved the ability to recognize and to cleave its asymmetrical target by a fusion of an EcoRI-like domain, which incises the bottom strand within the target, and a FokI-like domain that completes the cleavage within the nonspecific region outside the target sequence. Our results have implications for the molecular evolution of restriction endonucleases, as well as for perspectives of engineering new restriction and nicking enzymes with asymmetric target sites.

Frankenstein's Monster: A Review of Recent Literature on the Death Penalty in the United states

Frankenstein's Monster: A Review of Recent Literature on the Death Penalty in the United states

A theoretical model of restriction endonuclease NlaIV in complex with DNA, predicted by fold recognition and validated by site-directed mutagenesis and circular dichroism spectroscopy

Restriction enzymes (REases) are commercial reagents commonly used in DNA manipulations and mapping. They are regarded as very attractive models for studying protein-DNA interactions and valuable targets for protein engineering. Their amino acid sequences usually show no similarities to other proteins, with rare exceptions of other REases that recognize identical or very similar sequences. Hence, they are extremely hard targets for structure prediction and modeling. NlaIV is a Type II REase, which recognizes the interrupted palindromic sequence GGNNCC (where N indicates any base) and cleaves it in the middle, leaving blunt ends. NlaIV shows no sequence similarity to other proteins and virtually nothing is known about its sequence-structure-function relationships. Using protein fold recognition, we identified a remote relationship between NlaIV and EcoRV, an extensively studied REase, which recognizes the GATATC sequence and whose crystal structure has been determined. Using the 'FRankenstein's monster' approach we constructed a comparative model of NlaIV based on the EcoRV template and used it to predict the catalytic and DNA-binding residues. The model was validated by site-directed mutagenesis and analysis of the activity of the mutants in vivo and in vitro as well as structural characterization of the wild-type enzyme and two mutants by circular dichroism spectroscopy. The structural model of the NlaIV-DNA complex suggests regions of the protein sequence that may interact with the 'non-specific' bases of the target and thus it provides insight into the evolution of sequence specificity in restriction enzymes and may help engineer REases with novel specificities. Before this analysis was carried out, neither the three-dimensional fold of NlaIV, its evolutionary relationships or its catalytic or DNA-binding residues were known. Hence our analysis may be regarded as a paradigm for studies aiming at reducing 'white spaces' on the evolutionary landscape of sequence-function relationships by combining bioinformatics with simple experimental assays.

Hot to bot: Pygmalion's lust, the Maharal's fear, and the cyborg future of art

This paper explores the deeply interwound histories of art and robots from their roots in the Greek myth of the sculptor-king Pygmalion to the work of contemporary artists, such as Norman White. By analyzing the myths of Pygmalion, the Golem, Frankenstein's monster, and other notable automata of legend, a framework emerges for understanding how various cultures have expressed desires and fears about technology and the future and defined values with respect to human. This context offers insight into the role of artists in creating metaphors and working models of a posthuman, cyborgian future.