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From Mad Scientists to Champions for Human Health: Biomedical Engineering and Society

With the coming of fall, my head is often filled with images of beloved seasonal activities like carving pumpkins, buying apple cider, and celebrating Halloween. These images also come with pictures of ghosts around corners, witches on broomsticks, and scientists creating monsters. I love spooky festivities as much as the next person, but as a biomedical engineering student*, I also wonder why science is often portrayed as scary. Where did the mad scientist narrative originate? How does this factor into the amount of people, especially folks of color, I hear say that they are hesitant to receive new medical treatments? As it turns out, these questions lead back to the story of one particular Halloween monster – Frankenstein’s monster.

The novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley was published in 1818 and is considered to be the birth of the genre of science fiction. The plot of Frankenstein focuses on the scientist Dr. Victor Frankenstein who, despite good intentions, creates an uncontrollable monster made of body parts from graves. The monster then goes on to kill many people. Some people interpret Frankenstein as a critique of the Scientific Revolution Shelley witnessed during the time period in which she wrote the novel. Great scientific strides were being made at the time which were unfamiliar, posing the question: “How far is too far?” Subsequently, Shelley’s novel is where the contemporary idea of a “mad scientist” started. This narrative has been echoed since then with classic examples like Dr. Jekyll all the way to the modern work of Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake, which focuses on the potential of unethical genetic engineering. In this way, the media has often portrayed cell and tissue engineering** or genetic engineering*** as scary or otherwise unethical. With that said, the start of all of this, the novel Frankenstein does not condemn scientific progress and inquiry. Instead, the piece focuses on what could happen if scientists do not fulfill their moral and ethical obligations to humanity.

While Shelley wrote a cautionary, fictional tale, the idea that science is unethical can be found throughout the history of science and modern cell and tissue culture. In Rebecca Skloot’s award-winning novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, she tells the story of what is now one of the most famous examples of earned scientific distrust. Skloot follows the story of the late Henrietta Lacks, who was a black woman in Baltimore, and her family. The book explains that Henrietta Lacks’ cells were collected without her consent after she received surgery for cervical cancer. They were then cultured by George Gey’s lab and became the first human cells to become “immortalized,” meaning that Henrietta’s cells could divide indefinitely provided they were given the proper nutrients and environment. This was a significant scientific breakthrough! However, it came at the expense of the Lacks family who learned about this years later when their loved one’s cells (now referred to as the HeLa cell line), were being shipped to labs all over the world. They felt blindsided and wondered how parts of their relative could still be alive when they already buried her. On top of that, while scientists around the world used Henrietta’s cells to develop everything from the polio vaccine to HIV treatments, the Lacks family could not afford health insurance.

What the Lacks family went through was not only an issue of consent but also an issue of health equity and scientific literacy. After the publication of Skloot’s novel, interest in Lacks’ story quickly picked up. Today, the Lacks family has been appointed World Health Organization Goodwill Ambassadors for Cervical Cancer Elimination and sit on the review board governing HeLa’s genome’s release for research purposes. While this certainly is not the end of the line as the family still seeks compensation for the millions of dollars worth of innovations, which were paid in full by the life of their matriarch, it certainly is a step in the right direction as the family is finally part of the conversation.

Biomedical engineering is now being used to advance the health of communities historically left out of research as science and medicine quickly move to a more personalized approach. A primary example of this is the development of CRISPR-cas-9 technology, which can modify someone’s genetic sequence and has been used to cure people of sickle cell anemia. This chronic health condition disproportionately affects the black community, with more than 90% of people with this condition identifying as non-Hispanic black. This application of biomedical engineering is so important because it is a way to give back to a community of people which has long benefited the medical and scientific field without receiving much in return. This just goes to show that when ethical considerations are made, genetic engineering has the potential to advance human health and can hopefully give back to underserved communities.

Overall, the history of biomedical engineering is complex. It may get a bad reputation from stories of fictional mad scientists, like the cautionary tale Frankenstein, and from historical, groundbreaking discoveries that came at the expense of boundaries and ethics. However, the field is beginning to take accountability and shift towards what will hopefully be a more equitable, just, and healthy future for everyone.

*Now before I get into the rest of this blog I know what some of you may be thinking, “what the heck is biomedical engineering?”. Biomedical engineering (BME) applies engineering to medicine and biology to improve healthcare. Biomedical engineers can focus in a lot of different areas from building medical equipment like MRIs or prosthetic limbs to modifying a particular piece of DNA and everything in between.

**Cell and tissue engineering is one part of biomedical engineering. This field typically focuses on making lab-grown tissues in hopes of coming up with new solutions to diseases.

***Genetic engineering is another field under biomedical engineering. Genetic engineering is any instance in which scientists modify DNA.

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