‘On a dreary night of November’: Frankenstein for Today.
Talk by David Guston at the Joint Research Centre (17th November 2016)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has endured in the popular imagination for two hundred years. Begun as a ghost story by its intellectually and socially precocious eighteen-year-old author during a cold, rainy summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, the dramatic tale of Victor Frankenstein and his stitched-together creature can been read as the ultimate parable of scientific hubris. Although the novel is most often discussed in literary-historical terms, Mary Shelley was keenly aware of contemporary scientific developments and incorporated them into her story. This presentation will discuss numerous ways that Frankenstein — through exploring questions of creativity and responsibility — is and can be relevant in our era of synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and climate engineering.
About the Speaker:
David H. Guston is Founding Director of and Professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the newest transdisciplinary school at Arizona State University. He is also interim co-director of the Institute for the Future of Innovation at ASU. From 2005 to 2016, he served as principal investigator and director of the NSF-funded Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS-ASU), and he directs its associated Virtual Institute for Responsible Innovation (VIRI). He is co-leader of the Frankenstein Bicentennial Project, which includes a new edition of Frankenstein to be published by MIT Press (May, 2017). He is a fellow of the AAAS (2002), served as co-chair of the GRC on Science and Technology Policy (2008), and was founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Responsible Innovation (2014–2015). He holds an A.B. from Yale and a PhD in political science from MIT.
Contro Corrente is a series of seminars with renowned scholars and practitioners of science and technology studies, aiming at raising awareness of science and technology studies and how these types of reflexive activities can help with scientific practice at the Joint Research Centre.
