Book review: Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People

Philip Ball's study of what he calls "anthropoeia", or the artificial creation of life, is a brave, sane and intellectually nimble account of a topic which only gets more ambiguous with each scientific advance.

Ball covers the myths - Frankenstein obviously looms large, but there are equally pertinent examples from Goethe, Capek, Aldous Huxley and even George Lucas's Clone Wars - as fully as the science, with a tone that ranges from the awe-struck to the bemused to the tetchy.

He is, given his background as a writer for Nature, more at home with the biochemistry: it would have been apposite to include the earliest poem in existence, The Epic Of Gilgamesh, given it features animated stone warriors who guard the secret of eternal life.

It becomes increasingly dispiriting to see the same clichs recycled and anxieties resurfacing with each medical advance.

"Test tube babies" - as Ball wryly points out, test tubes aren't involved in the procedure - may now be unexceptional, but the then-contemporary press brouhaha was indistinguishable from the acres of apocalyptic coverage which accompanied Dolly the Sheep, or stem cell technologies.

But Unnatural is not without its moments of bizarre comedy; such as the cerebral gymnastics of Catholic theologians or the spurious sleight- of-hand rhetoric of "bioethicists".

With a particularly rational rigour, he manages to unpick the logical fallacies and errors, sometimes even taking the argument to enemy territory - as he ponders, wouldn't a child born by a method other than sex actually, strictly speaking, be exempt from Original Sin?

The book does not however offer any phony comforts. We still do not know what life truly is: or rather, we have no definition which includes everything alive and excludes everything not alive.

The common idea that the genome offers a "Book of Life" disguises the fact that we can barely read it, let alone understand it. "Rewriting" it, at the moment, is little more than a toddler's scribbling. The "life" of, say, a book reviewer and the "life" of his cells might be very different things, a case of linguistic similarity occluding metaphysical difference.

Unnatural is fascinating and engaging, and a polemic only for cool heads and open hearts when dealing with issues of such serious and profound complexity.

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 23 January, 2011