Eating people we know to be wrong. Is making people – cloning them, incubating them in test tubes, or moulding protoplasm to amend the human form, rather than relying on a tadpole to find a congenial egg – just as much of an abomination? Begetting a child the old-fashioned way remains a pleasant pastime, but giving birth is hard labour, so those who can afford it can now hire others to trudge around for months with a restive lodger inside their bellies and to spend painful hours in the hospital pushing it out.
In vitro fertilisation, as Philip Ball points out in his history of "anthropoeia" – or people-making – is only the newest form of a heretical activity that has been going on for centuries. Human beings have always experimented with manufacturing replicas of themselves. Art and technology aim to challenge and transcend natural limitations: our ingenious species resents the idea of a creator with the exclusive right to instigate life.
The boldest modern myth is that of Frankenstein, the scientist who stitches together gobbets of corpses on an operating table and reanimates them with the help of electricity. In Mary Shelley's story he is the descendant of Prometheus, the Titan whose creatures were sculpted from mud and infused with a divine spark stolen from the hearth of Zeus. That ancient offence remains unforgiven, so that when Pope John Paul II questioned the ethics of biomedical research, he castigated the "Promethean ambitions" of science. The pope's intervention was absurd and perhaps hypocritical: after all, what sleight of hand smuggled Christ into the womb of Mary, the first and most sanctimoniously virginal of surrogate mothers? A 17th-century Spanish bishop, puzzling over that bizarre event, suggested that Christ's body must have been formed from menstrual blood without the admixture of semen, since God the Father would hardly have cuckolded a humble carpenter like Joseph; Mary's uterus therefore served as one of the hermetically sealed vessels in which medieval alchemists experimentally concocted life. The antenatal Jesus, Ball suspects, was an artificial man, the kind of tiny but perfectly formed freak that alchemists called a homunculus.
Ball's book is a museum of such oddities. The Greek inventor Daedalus – honoured by James Joyce as the patron and symbolic parent of all artists – pandered to the lustful Pasiphae by building an artificial cow that allowed her to mate with a bull. Medieval magicians cobbled together automata from metal, wax, glass and leather, and set them to perform household chores. In the 18th century, a lapsed monk called Vaucanson, who spent his time in the cloisters manufacturing androids, constructed a mechanical duck that gobbled up food, pretended to digest it, then excreted a pre-prepared green pulp. Thomas Edison planned a mass-produced progeny of talking dolls, with miniature gramophones hidden in their guts. In the 1920s, the dramatist Karel Capek imagined a workforce of purpose-built drudges to which he gave the name robot, a neologism adapted from the Czech word for labourer. Their bodies are cold inorganic steel, but they mimic the human prototype by being fitted with tonsils, appendices and unfunctional genitalia: a fussy oddity perhaps, but – as Ball cheekily jokes – God created Adam with a spurious navel.
Stranger than sci-fi, Unnatural deals with the extravagant fictionality of science itself. Advancing through history, Ball notes that the recipes for artificially engendering life act out prevalent theories of what life is. Classical materialists such as Lucretius saw the world as a "fecund matrix", so the ancient model for making life was the spawning of maggots in a dead body or the quickening of insentient metals. The industrial era assumed that the secret of life was electrical: hence Frankenstein's harnessing of a lightning bolt, which in James Whale's 1931 film jolts the monster into motion. Darwin replaced Eden with a "warm little pond" in which chemicals, coming together in a fortuitous jelly, were responsible for the origins of our species. Now we are in what Ball calls "the genomic era", when the book of life has been digitalised and squeezed into the DNA molecule, which contains "some 30,000–100,000 stories, known as genes", roughly as many as the verses in the Bible. Chemicals encode the instructions issued by those genes, and tissues can be cultivated by using a technology resembling that devised for ink-jet printers. Life is today equated with information, although it is good to be told by Ball that nature cannot be reduced to "a librarian or a computer programmer", nerdily fiddling with the algorithms that determine our character and conduct.
Unnatural is an exploration of such metaphors, and it demonstrates that scientific conjecture depends on imagination and that nature is shaped by our creative intelligence and improved by our technical skills. Shakespeare and Goethe are as important here as biologists like Julian Huxley or Francis Crick; Ball's previous books, along with a "biography of water" and an anatomy of the elements in the periodic table, include a study of Chartres Cathedral and a much-admired homily in praise of music. On this evidence, the two cultures of science and art are not antagonists, divergent in their aims and mutually unintelligible: they happily cohabit inside Ball's compendious, eclectic head.
