Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People

Description

A fascinating exploration of the cultural history of the creation of artificial people - what it tells us about our views on life, humanity, creativity and technology, and the soul. Can we make a human being? The question has been asked for many centuries, and has produced recipes ranging from the clay golem of Jewish legend to the mass-produced test-tube babies in Brave New World. Unnatural delves beneath the surface of the cultural history of 'anthropoeia' - the artificial creation of people - to explore what it tells us about our views on life, humanity, creativity and technology, and the soul. Philip Ball traces the threads that link the legendary inventor Daedalus, Goethe's tragic Faust, the automata-making magicians of E.T.A. Hoffman and Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein. He argues that these old tales and myths are alive and well, subtly manipulating the current debates about assisted conception, embryo research and human cloning, which have at last made the idea of 'making people' into flesh and blood reality.

Philip Ball writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and worked for many years as an editor for physical sciences at Nature. His books cover a wide range of scientific and cultural phenomena, and include Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another (winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books), The Music Instinct, Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything and Serving The Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Science Under Hitler.

Unnatural is a beautifully written, deeply intelligent book that will force every reader to rethink at least some of their preconceptions -- Jim Endersby * Sunday Telegraph * The two cultures of science and art are not antagonists, divergent in their aims and mutually unintelligible: they happily cohabit inside Ball's compendious, eclectic head. -- Peter Conrad * Observer * A brave, sane and intellectually nimble account of a topic which only gets more ambiguous with each scientific advance. Unnatural is fascinating and engaging, and a polemic only for cool heads and open hearts when dealing with issues of such serious and profound complexity -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday * Meticulous, witty and sometimes provocative -- Patrick Skene Catling * Sunday Times * Labelling Ball a science writer sells his writing short, for its value lies above all in a range that dissolves the awkward silences between science and the larger culture of which it is part. -- Marek Kohn * Independent *