Fred M. Sander (ed).

Before becoming half of the legendary team of Gilbert and Sullivan, Victorian author W.S. Gilbert was a brilliant playwright. His most popular play was the 1871 comedy, Pygmalion and Galatea. In it, sculptor Pygmalion has made numerous copies of his wife Cynisca, one of whom, Galatea, comes to life and falls in love with him! What is he to do with a younger copy of his wife when Cynisca returns from a trip?

God is said to have created man in His own image; Mary Shelley described Frankenstein’s creation as his monster; Gilbert can hardly have anticipated cloning in the 19th century when he imbues his first millennial Athenian, Pygmalion with the envy of the gods’ ability to create life. Using Gilbert’s 19th-century play as a catalyst, editor Fred M. Sander has brought together 21st-century scientists, educators, clinicians, and historians to contribute essays on our proclivity to reproduce ourselves not only in art, but psychologically, socially, and, in the future, by biogenetic engineering. This will involve the science of molecular biology using the cloning of stem cells.

Contributors include Carolyn Williams, Chair of the English Dept. at Rutgers; Tom Freudenheim, art historian; Lee Silver, Professor of Molecular Biology and Ethics at Princeton, Bill McKibben, resident scholar at Middlebury College; and others including Fred Sander’s commentaries.

Unique in our era of specialization is the way this book narrows the gulf between the arts and sciences.
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