Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Moderator: Kathy Hickock, ISU Professor of English
Wednesday September 5, 2007
Farwell T. Brown Auditorium
7:00 p.m.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a story that examines the definition of life. Victor Frankenstein assembles a man from human matter and finds a way to generate a spark of life. Though materially human, the creature is never accepted as human. This story is particularly interesting to the cloning debate, since a large portion of the discourse is about cloning human cells for raw material. In essence, this vein of rhetoric objectifies human matter as something less than human, and certainly not anything that requires the rights and privileges bestowed upon humans.

Frankenstein’s Footsteps by Jon Turney
Moderator: Barbara Blakely, ISU Professor of English
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Farwell T. Brown Auditorium
7:00 p.m.
In Frankenstein's Footsteps, Jon Turney examines how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein influenced popular ideas about the biomedical sciences. He shows that the debates on in vitro fertilization, recombinant DNA, cloning, and even tissue culture evoked fantasies of Frankenstein's creature. One of Turney's main themes is that Shelley's story influenced not only literature, drama, and film but also the public's perception of science. Turney argues that the popularity of Frankenstein was a response to the Industrial Revolution, which flourished during the Victorian era. The new technology, it was believed, would culminate in the creation of life -- after all, didn't Frankenstein use a dramatic bolt of electricity to give his creature life? Turney begins his innovative book by exploring how science began to take "increasing control over the living world" soon after the publication of Frankenstein and ends with Dolly, the sheep created by a cloning procedure that, like Frankenstein's method, depended on a jolt of electricity to give her life.

Dawn by Octavia Butler
Moderator: Priscilla Wald, Duke University Professor of English
Wednesday October 3, 2007
Farwell T. Brown Auditorium
7:00 p.m.
In Octavia Butler’s Dawn, in a world devastated by nuclear war with humanity on the edge of extinction, aliens finally make contact. They rescue those humans they can, keeping most survivors in suspended animation while the aliens begin the slow process of rehabilitating the planet. When Lilith Iyapo is "awakened," she finds that she has been chosen to revive her fellow humans in small groups by first preparing them to meet the utterly terrifying aliens, then training them to survive on the wilderness that the planet has become. But the aliens cannot help humanity without altering it forever. Bonded to the aliens in ways no human has ever known, Lilith tries to fight them even as her own species comes to fear and loathe her. A stunning story of invasion and alien contact by one of science fiction's finest writers.

*Priscilla Wald will also deliver a public lecture on pop-culture representations of genomic research in the ISU Memorial Union Sun Room on Thursday October 4 at 7:00 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Moderator: Brenda Daly, ISU Professor of English
Wednesday October 24, 2007
APL Board Room
7:00 p.m.
In Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.

Dinner at the New Gene Café: How Genetic Engineering is Changing What We Eat, How We Live, and the Global Politics of Food by Bill Lambrecht
Moderator: Lisa Weasel*, Professor of Biology at Portland State University
Wednesday November 7, 2007
Farwell T. Brown Auditorium
7:00 p.m.
Bill Lambrecht, a reporter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has written an indispensable history of the political storm surrounding GMOs, or genetically modified organisms. Beginning before the Federal Government first approved genetically modified crops (in 1998) and taking us to the present, Lambrecht traces the struggle by Monsanto Company to overcome the backlash to GMOs that has spread from Europe to other continents and to the United States. Lambrecht himself reported on everything from the Starlink controversy, in which genetically altered corn that had not been tested on humans turned up in Taco Bell products, to the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle, which he witnessed firsthand, to the conference on bio-safety in Montreal, where an international agreement to precautionary language on GMOs marked the first step toward a global compromise. He provides transcripts of interviews. with players such as Monsanto chairman Robert B. Shapiro, anti-GMO guru Jeremy Rifkin and Iowa farmer Earl Sime, who tells why farming is in jeopardy and how GMOs can help. Lambrecht talks with farmers, activists and government leaders in Europe, India and Africa, and shows why Monsanto's long-term future lies in foreign markets and why the ultimate success or failure of GMOs rests with consumers.

*Lisa Weasel will also be participating in a public lecture/discussion at the ISU Memorial Union Sun Room on Thursday November 8 at 7:00 p.m, on the topic of ethics and genetically modified food. This event is free and open to the public.

Sequence by Lori Andrews*
Moderator: author Lori Andrews, Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law
Wednesday November 14, 2007
Farwell T. Brown Auditorium
7:00 p.m.
At the start of this debut thriller from Lori Andrews, a lawyer and biotechnology expert with a high media profile, geneticist Alexandra Blake is working on developing a vaccine against infectious diseases for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) in Washington, D.C., when her unit is drafted to deal with a serial killer targeting military bases. Blake's professional life gets even more complicated after her new boyfriend, David Thorne, a maverick Texas congressman, becomes a suspect in the murder of Ted Devon, the ex-husband of Thorne's ex-lover, Gloria Devon (a former senator just named as the FBI's first female director).

*Lori Andrews will also participate in the ISU symposium on the ethical, philosophical, and legal issues of genomic research on Thursday, November 15 in the Memorial Union Cardinal Room, from 8am-5pm. This event is free and open to the public.