A review of Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts by Emily Anthes
256 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

An unusual cat lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Named Mr. Green Genes, he looks like your average orange tabby. But under dark light, he has a neat parlor trick: his eyes, nose, and ears glow green, Rudolph-the-reindeer style. This is because scientists tinkered with his DNA to include a jellyfish gene for fluorescence. Although a silly outcome, it was a serious study monitoring how the glow gene would express itself in foreign species.

In recent decades, other house cats have been subject to seemingly strange science experiments. They have been cloned, surgically altered to include microphone implants, and given pirate-peg-leg-looking prosthetics limbs. These feline Frankensteins offer a taste of the wild things people are doing to animals these days in the name of science, wildlife conservation, medicine, national security, consumerism, and animal love. In her riveting first book, Frankenstein’s Cat, Emily Anthes explores these colorful cats and a menagerie of other animals—from dogs to goldfish, dolphins to seabirds, goats to grizzly bears—at the forefront of this animal biotechnology explosion.

But more than a list of animals and their crazy stories, this book digs deep into the scientific breakthroughs, applications, and ethical quandaries of the umbrella field that is biotechnology. Anthes has previously written about these lines of research in the New York Times and Boston Globe, as well as various science magazines including Popular Science, Wired, and Slate.

Over the course of eight chapters, Anthes ambitiously tours a sampling of biotechnology subfields—gene therapy and manipulation, cloning, prosthetics, tagging animals with tracking sensors, and bionic (or machine implant) brain and body manipulation. Although the types of scientific fields are distinctly named, the author moves through them seamlessly, both with vivid, engaging language and by drawing connections between the science, scientists, animals, and moral boundaries of these sensitive subjects.

Despite working with intensely complicated material, Anthes is a master of breaking down the science into small, digestible pieces. In a chapter on cloning, she describes the technique used to create the famous cloned sheep named Dolly as one that involves “extracting the DNA from an unfertilized egg and replacing it with instruction for making a clone. (The procedure is not unlike removing the custard from the middle of a Boston cream donut and refilling the donut with jelly.)” While these descriptions do not always leave the reader knowing exactly how the science works—and this can be frustrating for the more science-inclined—you will leave with a strong visual sense to follow along.

In every chapter, Anthes brings up the ethical questions haunting this novel animal research: “Is there something about editing DNA and remixing biological material that is just inherently wrong?”; “If we think these creatures aren’t capable of feeling much pain, will that give us license to alter and exploit them in even more profound ways?”; or “How many animals (and humans) will suffer if we turn out backs on breakthroughs like a genetically engineered chicken capable of spreading the flu?” Many of these questions are never answered. Instead, they are posed as open-ended answers for the reader to reflect on.

Throughout the book, Anthes takes a firm pro-science stance and often uses her technological optimism to distinguish her from other journalists covering the topic who have jumped straight past any good implications of biotech research into catastrophic prophecies. In fact, Anthes offers examples of sensationalist headlines about the very work she is describing. In the chapter on creating glowing pets, Anthes refers to a related New York Times article with the headline “When Fish Fluoresce, Can Teenagers Be Far Behind?” Occasionally, Anthes goes a little overboard in attempting to convince the reader her opinions are original. Driving this point home at the end of the book, she says, “There are enough journalists, politicians, and ethicists out there speculating about the worst-case scenarios—the glowing teenagers, the resurrected Hitlers, the killer cyborg armies…After my time in the land of cloned creatures and bionic beasts, I’m ready to imagine an alternative future, one in which biotech brings hope and promise rather than anxiety and alarm.”

But Anthes’ optimism is not entirely original. While newspaper articles have often leaned towards the sensationalist and doomsday conclusions, many books published in the last decade offer pro-science stances on biotechnology. For example, in the 2005 book More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, scientist Ramez Naam, argues the benefits of using biotechnology to make humans healthier and stronger. And in the 2007 book After Dolly, journalist Roger Highfield teamed up with scientist Ian Wilmut to offer a positive argument for cloning. But unlike other authors who have focused their discussions on a specific type of biotechnology, such as cloning or the narrow implications of this technology on only animals or humans, Anthes’ book is unique in its wider overview of the science and who is affected by it, animal- and human-wise.

Of all the animal stories offered in the book, there was one particularly creepy scene with a cockroach that put me on edge. One morning, Anthes joined some scientists who developed a do-it-yourself, control-a-cockroach kit. She watched them prep the insect for experimentation. The researchers took a numb cockroach out of a cooler of ice water and cut off its antenna with a pair of scissors. Then, the scientists inserted some wire into the antenna. With a push of a button, the wire sent remote-controlled electrical signals to the insect’s nervous system, allowing Anthes to steer a cockroach left or right around the sidewalk like a toy. Soon other breakfast goers are taking a try. The entire time I was reading the scene, which is written in simple, even cheerful language, I just felt dirty. How could people be so happy and playful while controlling the helpless bug? It was the only time in the book that I spiraled into the land of scary “what ifs.” But Anthes is prepared for this—and it was one of the few instances where no outright opinion was offered on the matter. Instead, the author admits this area of science is scary and uncomfortable, and then throws the ball back in our court. The section ends with a question asking the reader how he or she wants to handle this emerging technology.

For me, the main take away message of this book was not that this radical new technology is happening under our noses and that we should embrace it with open arms. The author appears more concerned with ensuring that readers have all the facts before they decide where they stand on the spectrum—and explains how many of us have seemingly contradictory opinions on animal welfare depending on the situation.

For example, I own an adorable pudgeball of a cat and will dish out more money than I would like to admit for his welfare. I consider myself an animal lover. But I have no problem with a cow being slaughtered for my dinner, or other animals—mice, rats, and others—being tested on for medicinal purposes. This “land of contradictions,” as Anthes calls it, is why we need to have an open discussion about the issues before accepting or rejecting them wholesale.

As a character within the book, Anthes includes some hilarious self-descriptions (once, she refers to herself as “nerdtastic”), as well as witty personal reactions to the scientists or situations she encountered during her research. For example, after describing a company working to clone household pets, she noted, “After all, you can’t put a price on love. (But if you had to, it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,300, plus a yearly storage fee. All major credit cards accepted.)” In the wrong hands, this inclusion of personal opinion can be distracting from the overall content of the book, but I thought Anthes was appropriately sparing with such details.

Anthes also proves she was not above embracing a few obvious puns, calling a project attempting to resurrect the long-extinct Woolley mammoth a “mammoth task” and referring to a recent trend of fitting male dogs, post-neutering, with fake testicles as “nutty.”

On that note, if you are in the mood for a short, easy read with digestible science and hilarious animal anecdotes, then this is a purr-fect book.