A Mobius strip of scientific imagination. How deep does the relationship between science fiction and science go?

摘要

The 1896 science-fiction horror novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H. G. Wells, tells the story of a shipwrecked Englishman, Edward Prendrick, who ends up on a remote island inhabited by the titular doctor. Moreau has secluded himself away to conduct gruesome vivisection experiments on animals to make them look and behave like humans. Although his experiments have been partially successful, Moreau is frustrated by his beast people's stubborn flesh: "As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep back". Wells was inspired to write the novel by Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. Wells's exploration of morality and the consequences of manipulating traits, such as intelligence, was well ahead of its time. He could not have known, although he might have hoped, that science would someday explain Moreau's observation that the animals' bodies seemed to be programmed a certain way, despite his efforts to break that programming. We now know that the beast people's cells would have been genetically and epigenetically locked into non-human expression programmes.