Monkey Boys from Brazil

In the Minor Cosmic Irony department, the same day that The New York Times reported the monkey cloning story on the front page, back in obituaries the paper reported the passing of Ira Levin, the novelist whose The Boys From Brazil became a fairly successful film. (Levin seems to have had a thing for infants gone bad—he also wrote Rosemary’s Baby.) In Boys, Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck) clones Adolf Hitler to make an army of evil but charismatic boys who will fan out across the globe and foment revolutionary fascist movements.

For the record, the scientific community has spoken loudly against attempts to use somatic cell nuclear transfer for reproduction, and even researchers accomplish the feat, the result will be the rough equivalent of an identical twin, but not necessarily one possessed of the same virtues or vices of the “original.” Through no fault or intention of Levin’s, The Boys From Brazil imagery seems to have become one of a clutch of bioscience fiction tales in the tradition of Frankenstein and Brave New World that—pardon the expression—become monkeys on the back of science. Although difficult to measure, public understanding of novel science does seem to be shaped partly by cleverly wrought nightmare scenarios.

The insight is not new. In The Republic Plato advocates exiling the poets because they are so adept at promoting emotion over reason. Two thousand years later, it remains an open question whether we are capable of resisting darkly seductive artistic images in favor of evidence and reason.

Tags: Media

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