#jon turney

More recently, the tendency to conflate science and fictional agendas has been more actively resisted by researchers.

In Hammer's film series, the scientist, now Baron Frankenstein, was a more compelling character than his creation: driven, ruthless, brilliant. Peter Cushing is shown here in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, 1969, the fifth of seven in the Hammer sequence.

The most articulate monster yet: Robert de Niro in Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, 1994.

Eighteenth-century science made part of its public impact through spectacular lecture demonstrations, most famously depicted in Joseph Wright's characteristically-lit view of an experimental philosopher displaying powers of the air pump.

An engraving from 1818 showing electrical stimulation of an executed criminal's corpse – the kind of sensational demonstration which Mary Shelley certainly read about and possibly witnessed.

Boris Karloff's creature in Universal's 1932 movie had – and has – extraordinary screen presence, both as a threat and, as here, through the pathos of his mute appeals to his creator.

Reports of Ashby and Grey Walter's devices, for example, which show the enduring interest in mechanical creatures, call to mind Jacques Loeb's fascination with the selenium-eyed 'dog' built by J.H. Hammond in the 1900s.³⁴

Ambivalence about knowledge is, of course, a staple of myths in many cultures, from Prometheus to the Garden of Eden.