I don’t really have much to say about this one, except to point out that it was (to me, anyway) one of the most interesting and most entertaining staff reports I’ve read.
Thanks, son of dex. I needed a laugh, and a completely off the wall historical analogy was just the trick.
Link to Staff Report: Would Frankenstein’s monster be possible today?
– edited in by Dex, who is quietly proud of his offspring
[Edited by C K Dexter Haven on 01-03-2001 at 05:52 PM]
I agree. Curiously, I was thinking about this very subject a few days ago.
For my part, I always wondered why the monster had a flat head in the movies.
By the way, did anyone ever see “Young Frankenstein” when it was on network TV many years ago? They dubbed in a word in one of Teri Garr’s lines over the word “schwanstucker” (or some such) to make the following snippet of conversation:
Inga: He must have an enormous personality!
Dr. F.: Well, yes.
Eye-gor: He’s going to be very popular.
RR
OOPS! forgot the link. http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mfrankenstein.html
And yeah, I loved Young Frankenstein (frahnk-en-steen).
The vertically enhanced cranium and the platform shoes were needed to increase the height. The monster needed to be huge, but the Mr Pratt,actor portraying him, was only average-sized.
Mr Pratt???
William Henry Pratt, see
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Karloff,+Boris
It’s been decades since I read the book, so I can’t say whether electricity is in it or not, but I am fairly certain that Galvani’s frog experiments were at the back of the conversations that led to Frankenstein being written. To some degree, Hollywood (which willy-nilly had to put something on the screen) got it right, at least as “period detail.”
He blew it.
Transplant technology has reached the point where severed limbs can be reattached, & even transplanted from cadavers.
Corneas, hearts, lungs, kidneys,veins, eyes, bone grafts & many other “parts” can be transplanted. Cadaver donors are increasingly common.
All of this should have been covered, & wasn’t.
**The Real Question:
So, how close to Frankenstein’s creation can we get? What is the largest % of body mass that can be (or, dare I say, has been :eek: ) transplanted?**
I want Igor’s job.
Yeah and that’s nice, but the question wasn’t about transplantation, where a fresh organ is placed in a living body. The question is “Why can’t pieces of people be assembled and jolted back to life?” Transplants are a far cry from imbuing a sewn-together sack of flesh with life.
These procedures are very “Frankensteinian”, if you will.
Transplantation of limbs from cadavers is an obviously similar process.
These operations are pertainent to the OP.
And I still want Igor’s job.
I hesitate to speak for what went on in my son’s mind, but I venture to guess that he viewed organ-transplants as just that – organs from one organism (perphaps a dead one) are transplanted onto a living organism. The Frankenstein model is to create a NEW organism, not to graft stuff onto an already existing one.
My understanding is that the monster is a new being – it’s not like the monster has memories or personality of a prior existence of its brain. In that sense, cloning is perhaps closer to the Frankenstein model than organ transplant; but then we get into the political realm and a broader interpretation of the question than Staff Son of Dex wanted to take.
And if I can comment on what was only a metaphor…
The fall of the USSR due to the lack of a bourgeoisie?
Puh-leeze.
The word is “schwanze” with an umlaut over the A, which means “penis” (of course) in German. Put “schwanze” into Google and boy howdy, watch the XXX websites pop up. :eek:
The modern medical technique of transplanting a limb from a cadaver onto a recipient isn’t quite the same thing as making a Frankenstein monster, because one half of the operation, the recipient, is still alive. The Mailbag question was concerning whether you can take dead body parts, sew them to other dead body parts, and have the results climb off the table and learn to tap-dance. I thought Son of Dex answered that very well.
Ah, Boris was an inch or two over six feet, wasn’t he?
There’s a well-known interview with Jack Pierce, the makeup guru at old Universal Studios, where he discusses his vision of Frankenstein slitting open the top of the skull to pop in a new brain and then clamping it back down, like a pot lid.
“The idea of a square-shaped head for the Monster came to Pierce While he was watching a surgical operation on a man’s head. The abnormal shape represented how the to of of the head would look removed…and a nwe cranium supplied to accomodate the oversized brain.” – Brunas, Brunas, & Weaver, UNIVERSAL HORRORS, McFarland & Co., 1990.
More to the point, in a modern transplant, the transplanted organ/member is still locally alive, even if the donor organism is no longer globally alive.
If what I’ve read wasn’t overly-optimistic, nanotechnology will be advanced enough within 50 years to allow for complete cellular repair.
This means, mainly, that we’ll be able to delay (perhaps indefinitely) senescence of old cells. Restoring shortened telomeres, repairing damaged strands of DNA, that sort of thing.
Granted, we’re still talking about repairing living tissue, but how far is that from reanimating dead flesh? Assuming the dead cells are still in roughly the same molecular configuration, wouldn’t you just need to get the nannites to the cells (and provide chemical energy, and certain molecular “tools”) to make them work their magic?
And couldn’t some sort of fluid be pumped into the circulatory system to provide that energy and send the nannites were they were needed?
Of course, I’m addressing Son of Dex’s claim that it’s “probably not” possible to someday pull a Frankenstein. I recognize it’s not possible now.