Beschreibung
Can we make a human being?
The question has been asked for many centuries, and has produced recipes ranging from the clay golem of Jewish legend to the mass-produced test-tube babies inBrave New World.Unnaturaldelves beneath the surface of the cultural history of 'anthropoeia' - the artificial creation of people - to explore what it tells us about our views on life, humanity, creativity and technology, and the soul.
Philip Ball traces the threads that link the legendary inventor Daedalus, Goethe's tragic Faust, the automata-making magicians of E.T.A. Hoffman and Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein. He argues that these old tales and myths are alive and well, subtly manipulating the current debates about assisted conception, embryo research and human cloning, which have at last made the idea of 'making people' into flesh and blood reality.
Autorenportrait
Philip Ballwrites regularly in the scientific and popular media and worked for many years as an editor for physical sciences atNature. His books cover a wide range of scientific and cultural phenomena, and includeCritical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another(winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books),The Music Instinct,Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything,Serving The Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Science Under HitlerandInvisible: The history of the Unseen from Plato to Particle Physics.
Schlagzeile
A fascinating exploration of the cultural history of the creation of artificial people - what it tells us about our views on life, humanity, creativity and technology, and the soul.
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