Responsible Frankensteins? The trouble with the idea that we can play God, but ethically

There are few novels that have been more interpreted and re-­imagined than Frankenstein, and it has become something of a cliché in ­bioethics — especially in debates about embryo research and reproductive ­technologies — to invoke Victor Frankenstein’s hubris in “playing God” by creating a person out of inanimate matter. And yet, reading the story again two hundred years after its publication, we find that its moral teachings have been stubbornly ignored, or even inverted, by the scientists and ethicists who have the most to learn from it.