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On the Brain in the Vat: The Voyeur's Place in Science By Lilah Rahn-Lee
It was quite sometime ago when, in an effort to procrastinate, I opened a copy of the college newspaper, The Bi-Co, to the center fold and found an article entitled, "Eewww! Philadelphiaıs most disgusting landmarks". Instead of doing my calculus homework, I was suddenly sucked in by the photographs of slightly deformed, uncomfortable looking skeletons, into an article about the Mutter Museum. Apparently, the Mutter Museum was begun in 1859 as a medical museum and now boasts a wall of sculls, Grover Clevelandıs jaw tumor, John Wilkes Boothıs ribcage, a giant colon and an army of deformed fetuses in various states of limblesness and malformity. My first thoughts were 'how sick and disgusting can you get?' These were followed very closely by 'I've got to get there!'
This is, most likely, not a unique reaction; in fact it probably goes through the mind of every patron that keeps that old archive of anatomical delights open. I am, nevertheless, ashamed to have this reaction. Where did this deep longing of the obscene and grotesque come from? It should be indicative not of an informed young college student but of the nineteenth century young gentlemen's mentality that harbored circus shows with bearded sopranos, two-headed freaks, giants, and midgets. This attitude, however, didn't originate with the Mutter Museum and other Victorian-era attractions. As evidenced by the popularity of Siamese twins, the elephant man, Renaissancian dissections and surgeries and medieval court dwarfs and deformed jesters for royal amusement, this particularly disturbing brand of voyeurism has been around for a long time.
And now that I think about it, the Mutter article was not my first taste of this attitude. In the library of the University of London, along with many ancient original texts, including original Beatles lyrics scrawled by the fab four themselves on a table napkin, there is the man who donated the money for the library. This man is dead, but he sits everyday in a glass case, his bones stuffed into clothes, walking stick in hand, his brain in a jar by his feet, watching those scholars who are taking advantage of his kind donation and are adventurous enough to venture down into the deserted basement were the kind benefactor is stored.
The truth, sad as it may be, is that the perverse desire that drives this sort of exhibit is not something limited to the social underworld or the obscene counter culture. Human nature is curiosity. It is this curiosity which has brought us to understanding everything from the first few seconds of the universe to the last few complex reactions before instant cell death in a cancer patient; from the vast implications of a change in pH of lake water on an entire ecosystem to the probability that a subatomic particle will split along the event horizon of a black hole. It is also this curiosity that drives us to stare at deformity and make a show of dissection. Science will never be separated from spectacle.
The question is, where does that leave us? Harvey when he discovered the circulation of blood, Newton when he invented calculus, Mendel with his statistical study of pea plants, Darwin and his finches, Watson and Crick when they built the model for deoxyribonucleic acid, Salk when he produced the polio vaccine, Ian Wilmut when he cloned Dolly the sheep, were all these scientists just indulging a secret desire to look at cut up pieces of dead things? What of noble motives, what of the desire to help people, what of the value of knowledge?
Granted this is a bit unfair to some of these scientists, and, although curiosity must be a consuming drive in science, it does not exclude better motives and does not always manifest itself in its most grotesque forms. But what about pseudo science, people working outside scienceıs mainstream. Where does that put people like the infertility doctor who used his own sperm, or Heisenberg in Russia doing desperate, dangerous nuclear work in a wine cellar with nothing but a lump of cadmium for emergencies, or groups of biologists, formally trained or not, who vow, in advance of appropriate knowledge or technology, to clone humans? Are these scientists more curious than the rest of us? Does their curiosity overpower their natural senses of safety or morals? If curiosity is such a grotesque and dangerous thing, should we try to limit it in some way? Do extra curious people need to be locked up, or put through counseling to blunt their inquisitiveness?
Curiosity by nature makes us cross boundaries. Whether it's watching dead people be cut open, staring at deformed skeletons, or being so excited about subatomic particles that you forget to take proper safety precautions the causes are all the same. However, in defense of the voyeur in me, the little voice that said 'I wonıt have lived till I've seen the colon that's two feet in diameter' I must conclude that curiosity isn't all that bad. Even the most perverse of ancient scientific spectacles have led to a detailed modern understanding of anatomy that has saved many lives in sophisticated surgical techniques. To speak for myself, I would rather live in a world of scientific knowledge than one free of the perverse curiosity that necessarily accompanies it. And it would be comforting to think next time I wander into the basement of the University of London, or later this year as I admire the wall of one hundred sculls or Grover Cleveland's jaw tumor, that I am saving hundreds of future human lives by contributing in some small way to the body of future scientific knowledge.
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