De-Extinction and the Genomics Revolution by Amy Lynn Fletcher

Author:Amy Lynn Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030257897
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

I Wish to Try to Resuscitate a Mummy

In 1827, Jane Webb-Loudon published The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century. The novel borrows rather openly from the basic structure of Frankenstein but despite the somewhat overwrought passages scattered throughout, the story speeds along with the narrative verve of a good potboiler. The basic plot concerns Mr. Edric Edmund, a second son who seeks to distinguish himself in science and overcomes his initial squeamishness about touching the dead to travel to the great pyramid of Cheops, there to re-animate the ancient monarch and solve the mystery of life after death. Of course, his wish to try to resuscitate a mummy wreaks all sorts of scary havoc that expands outward to include his family, his romantic interest, and even England. It is also noteworthy that all of this action takes place in the year 2126.

Though more populist than Mary Shelley’s iconic work, Webb-Loudon’s The Mummy likewise reflects that tumultuous era in which science and spectacle began to collide and rigid boundaries between the two spheres had not yet been drawn. Kathleen Sheppard, historian of science and technology, has done significant work on the cultural impact of mummies, noting that public displays of mummified remains date to the sixteenth century, while in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mummy unwrappings could readily shift “between public spectacles which displayed and objectified exotic artifacts, and scientific investigations which sought to reveal medical and historical information.”31 Mummies, of course, also bring with them the mystery and allure of ancient Egyptian beliefs regarding the immortal soul, a worldview in which death, in an elegant turn of phrase by the Canadian Museum of History, is but a “temporary interruption.”32 From a practical point of view, the methods of mummification helped to ensure that some mummy specimens would provide valuable sources of ancient DNA whose analysis has, in turn, strengthened the scientific legitimacy of paleogenomics.

Essentially from the start, then, the multiple sciences historically relevant to de-extinction today have often shifted between the public square and the citadel, which matters because it casts some of the current angst about de-extinction research and how it is presented in the mass media in a different light. Jean Baudrillard noted in Simulations in the mid-1980s that “science fiction … is no longer anywhere, and it is everywhere, in the circulation of models, here and now, in the very principle of the surrounding simulation.”33 This is arguably a more elegant way of expressing what P. T. Barnum had already figured out in 1866, namely that “there is scientific humbug just as large as any other.”34 The edifice of science depends upon a set of professional norms and verification procedures that require extensive effort to master and which are necessary to ensure reliable results. However, in the case of de-extinction, there is so much cultural baggage attendant upon the idea of reanimating life, which some proponents do draw upon selectively at times to engage with the public, that slamming the door shut on non-expert speculation at this stage would seem ill-advised and also impracticable.

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