Big issues in Unnatural: the Heretical Idea of Making People

The technique of in vitro fertilisation has been in use for more than 30 years, and there are now four million perfectly healthy people who owe their existence to it. In fact, there are far more than that, since many of the so-called "test-tube babies" have gone on to have children of their own: and that makes many millions of reasons to be grateful to Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, the British scientists who pioneered IVF in the Seventies. The Vatican, however, has claimed that the practice is an assault on "true paternity and maternity", and when Edwards was given a Nobel prize last year, one leading Christian commentator denounced the award as "completely out of order".

What is it about IVF and other forms of fertility treatment that upsets certain pious believers? The old line about "playing God" is not much help, since it could apply equally to anyone who makes conscientious plans about parenthood instead of leaving it all to providence. And once a foetus is growing inside its womb, it seems impertinent for anyone, even God, to peer too closely into where, when and how the union of egg and sperm took place.

In Unnatural, the science writer Philip Ball examines the works of the "theocons" and finds their objections to assisted conception have less to do with holy books or time-honoured moral theology than with pagan myths and Gothic fairytales. The birth of the first IVF baby in 1978 was met with anguished editorialising about "awful knowledge", "baby farms" and a "master race", often illustrated with images of Hitler. A BBC documentary opened with footage of the Hiroshima bomb, and the Sun ran a "Ban the test-tube baby" campaign. There was never any reason to expect IVF babies to be monstrous, deformed or demented but there were rumours about children with horns or wings, and colleagues of Steptoe and Edwards begged them to abandon their research just in case.

The main source of these fantasies, as Ball demonstrates in this fascinating book, is a story hatched in 1816 by an anxious English teenager called Mary Godwin (later Shelley). During a long and sultry summer in the company of the poets Shelley and Byron, she amused herself by concocting a tale about a diligent young scientist called Frankenstein who collects human body-parts, sews them together and then brings them back to life.

His nameless creature turns out to be kind, cultivated, literate and sensitive. But he is also plug-ugly, and his attempts at friendship are cruelly rebuffed. After reading Milton's Paradise Lost he concludes that he must be a monster because he was created by a man instead of a god, and begins his descent through despair and delirium to murder, remorse and suicide.

Ball shows how Shelley's portrait of the scientist who loses control of his creations became the archetype that continues to shape popular attitudes to scientific research, especially when it edges towards the origins of life.

The irony is that Frankenstein, despite his reputation, did not create life out of inanimate matter: he simply recycled second-hand human organs. Steptoe and Edwards were even less ambitious - they worked with perfectly ordinary eggs and sperm, so that any mystery about the sources of life was left entirely intact. If anyone ever succeeds in synthesising a living organism from inanimate materials (and the more we know, the less likely it seems) you can bet that popular discussion will be framed not by the sober principles of science or morality but by the heady fantasies of the young Mary Shelley.