Book description
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 is a freelance writer and a consultant editor for
Nature
, where he previously worked as an editor for physical sciences. He
writes regularly in the scientific and popular media, and his many books
on scientific subjects include
Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another
, which won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books
.
His latest books include
The Music Instinct
,
Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the
Medieval Mind
, and, most recently,
Curiosity
. Philip obtained a PhD in physics from the University of Bristol.
