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A new book on abnormalities, etc. (that will be a 3 parter on TV in a few weeks) and I have stumbled across various reviews and extracts so..............
Author's homepage:
http://armandleroi.com/mutants/
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/scienceandnature/0,6121,1221924,00.html
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0002571137/
Emps
Author's homepage:
http://armandleroi.com/mutants/
Leg count
Judith Hawley appreciates Armand Marie Leroi's Mutants, a scientific investigation of genetic variability that rises above prurience
Saturday May 22, 2004
The Guardian
Mutants: On the Form, Varieties and Errors of the Human Body
by Armand Marie Leroi
431pp, HarperCollins, £20
In a highly quotable dictum in this thought-provoking and aphoristic book, Armand Leroi declares: "We are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than others." The expression recalls, of course, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the subject of the book brings to mind that other dystopia, Huxley's Brave New World, with its nightmarish vision of the manipulation and manufacture of human life. Leroi is sensitive to the exploitation and interpretation of monstrosity, and alert to the ways in which artists and scientists have made use of mutation. He compares the collection of ghastly specimens assembled in the 19th century by Willem Vrolik and now on display in Amsterdam - the rows of pickled infant Cyclopes, human mermaids, and indescribable deformities - to "the demonic creatures that caper across the canvases of Hieronymous Bosch".
Bosch's monsters were the product of his imagination and of his belief in divine punishment. The word "monster" is derived from two Latin words: moneo, to warn, and monstro, to show forth; to Bosch's contemporaries, monsters embodied a warning of God's displeasure at man's moral imperfection. However, Vrolik's specimens, Leroi argues, "are presented with clinical detachment, cleansed of moral value. And that, perhaps, suggests the best description of the Museum Vrolik. It is a Last Judgment for the scientific age."
This is not the first book to interpret the significance of human oddities. Previous studies have tended to view deformity in the shape of fairground freaks, monsters and marvels. Books like this are in danger of becoming freak shows in themselves, arousing in the reader the wonder and revulsion from which the commercial exhibitors of human prodigies - monster-mongers - profit. Leroi is alert to this charge. Though he details the existence of such horrifying aberrations as "a Dutch child born in 1995 [that] had the remains of 21 foetuses (as determined by leg count) embedded in its brain", he stops short of describing some laboratory mice, engineered to manifest profound physical disorganisation, because "it would be gratuitously macabre to detail the appearance of these mutant mice".
The choice of the term "mutants" rather than "monsters" or "freaks", while it has a kind of B-movie ring to it, indicates that Leroi approaches abnormality as a scientist with a serious interest in what mutation can tell us about normal physical development. Yet, by stating of the disorganised mice that "it is enough to say that the deformities of a single litter would embrace the contents of a sizeable teratology museum", he at once frustrates and piques our curiosity.
The Channel 4 television series that this book accompanies, while highly informative, not surprisingly feeds on baser instincts of curiosity and prurience. In one shocking scene, Leroi watches some footage of a piglet dubbed "Ditto" toppling under the weight of its double head while he giggles and flirts with the woman scientist who studies it. The series seems besotted with the image of Leroi himself, and shows him being photographed as he meditates on his own male-pattern baldness, or strides across Amsterdam in golden sunshine, or peers into jars of mutants bathed in the same golden light.
There are three things that lift this book above mere exploitation: the seriousness of Leroi's scientific investigations; the humane concern he manifests for the suffering other; and the sensitivity of his aesthetic appreciation of the wonders of nature. "Beautiful" is a term frequently used to describe some bottled monster. This aesthetic appreciation extends to previous writers on the subject. He describes an account of the progress of a deer embryo by the 17th-century natural philosopher William Harvey (more famous for his discovery of the circulation of the blood) as "one of the loveliest descriptions of a mammalian foetus ever written".
Another 17th-century figure provides Leroi with a model for his endeavour: Sir Francis Bacon recommended the collection or description "of all the monsters and prodigious products of nature, of every novelty, rarity or abnormality", not for their own sake, but for what they reveal about the normal laws of nature. Moreover, says Leroi, Bacon argues, anticipating Huxley, that "once we know those laws, we can reconstruct the world as we wish".
Leroi is appreciative of pre-scientific thinkers and does not dismiss the theories of Aristotle, Bacon, Cuvier or Darwin, though he is aware of the separation of their world from ours. One of the many strengths of this complex but accessible study is its combination of medical history and an admirably clear exposition of up-to-date scientific thinking. Essentially, this book tells the story of the development of an individual from embryo to old age. It does so by exploring what genetic mutations reveal about the growth of different parts of the body, and by combining fascinating narratives with sophisticated science.
Leroi is a prodigious explainer. I listen to Melvyn Bragg discussing big ideas on the radio, but can't claim to have scientific training. Yet, with Leroi's patient unfolding of the mysteries of modern genetics, I found myself able to understand such sentences as "the mesodermal cells of the blastopore edge were the source of ... a morphogen", or "the most common cause of albinism in Africa is homozygosity for a 2.7 kilobase-pair deletion in the P gene". And I feel I can grasp the role of retinoic acid and free radicals, understand what is concealed behind abbreviations such as RNA, IGF, SRY, and get along with oddly named entities such as "noggin" and "sonic hedgehog", while having some insight into the laboratory culture that produces such monikers.
Poetic, philosophical, profound, witty and challenging, Leroi is, as he says of Goya, a "compassionate connoisseur of deformity". He writes as someone moved by the sight of mutation, marvelling at the forces that shape life. But he also writes as a scientist for whom the deliberate infliction of deformity on animals is necessary and acceptable. While he argues that naturally occurring human deformities are important because they can reveal the regular workings of nature, what has been most productive of knowledge is the manufacture of mutants in the laboratory. He might sigh at the fact that thousands of mice have sacrificed their legs to science, but he also describes as "lovely" an experiment that scrambles a chicken embryo in order to prove that the heart naturally falls to the left. The fact that scientific knowledge is derived from chopping up animals is more obvious in the TV series, in which Siamese tadpoles and lopsided salamanders grow before our eyes.
The book's epilogue is deliberately provocative. Leroi dismisses those who are concerned about the risks of genetic experiments on humans as "soi-disant ethicists, dialectical biologists and bishops", who, he claims in prejudicial terms, "speak portentously of a 'human dignity' ... or else mutter darkly about the 'ethical dilemmas that face us all' ".
Side-stepping these ethical dilemmas, he consciously courts others by suggesting that geneticists reopen the question of racial difference. However, far from lending support to racism, he points out that the differences that seem so obvious to the prejudiced eye depend on genetic variations of no more than 7%. At the same time, "each new embryo has about 100 mutations that its parents did not have". We would do well to recognise the fact that we are all mutants.
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· Mutants, a three-part series, will be broadcast on Channel 4 from June 3. Judith Hawley is general editor of the Pickering & Chatto series Literature and Science 1660-1834
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/scienceandnature/0,6121,1221924,00.html
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0002571137/
Emps