The Importance Of Life In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

The idea of creating life or prolonging it has been around since the beginning of time and survival was the main key to living longer. In religion creating life has been around since the world and life was created. In evolution life was created through an explosion we call the Big Bang Theory. In 1818 Mary Shelley completed a fiction book of horror, of the demonstrative effect of us creating life could be. Shelley's protagonist victor Frankenstein obsessed with the ability to control the outcome of life. After creating the creature he becomes overwhelmed with the grotesqueness it has and runs away from the responsibility it gave to him. Many years after Mary Shelley's book was written the term artificial life was created in 1986 with three
main points. In Shelley's novel it focuses on the Synthetic Biochemistry of creating life.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Victor Frankenstein succeeds at creating a life; in today's modern day technology we get closer and closer to achieving the first step in creating synthesized cells capable of performing the functions a cell has as well as the process of mitosis.
The science involved in unraveling artificial life or synthesized biochemistry mainly relies on deoxyribonucleic acid or better know as DNA, is the most fundamental building block in all life. Each DNA molecule is composed of chains important information of who we are and what we look life. These DNA molecules are our genes encoded by combinations of four amino acids, adenine ,thymine , guanine and cytosine (American Decades). Every person looks different and has different genes unless you're identical twins, but scientists found they could splice genes together with someone else's DNA. This lead to experiments that would allow the development of different drugs that could help those who didn't have a specific type of cell to have a substitute for what the cell's job was. Synthetic Biochemistry is a field in which scientists combine the principles of biology and engineering, to produce a biological function in organisms that may or may not occur naturally. In the establishment of synthetic biochemistry the true realization unfolded that we could do what Mary Shelley only thought could happen in her story. In 1972 microbiologists found that they could take a fragment of DNA from one organism and splice it together with DNA from another organism. This technique developed steadily over the next decade. Then first target was to develop a tool that would split DNA. DNA is a double molecule, two chains joined together and wound into a double helix. By being a molecule its size is around 2 nanometers, a nanometer being one billionth of a meter, far too small for even the steadiest hand to slice with a mechanical tool. In order to achieve this goal a technique was developed in 1970 to cut DNA, the technique was the use of a restriction enzyme, a protein that would fragment the DNA at a specific site. Some restriction enzymes cut both sides, but at slightly different sites, leaving the end of one hanging off. Since each of the four amino acid bases can be mated to only one of the other four, a strip beginning with the same sequence of bases. The result become a recombinant DNA, a type of DNA not found in nature: one part belonging to one of organisms and part to another(American Decades). Synthetic life experiments attempt to probe the origins of life or study some of the properties of it.
The main goal of synthetic life is to recreate life from nonliving components. Synthetic biology attempts to create new biological molecules and even novel living species capable of carrying out a range of important medical and industrial functions. From manufacturing pharmaceuticals to detoxifying polluted land and water. In medicine, it offers prospects of using designer biological parts as a starting point for an entirely new class of therapies and diagnostic tools (Nature). One of the aims of synthetic biology is to understand the many interactions in living cells and by fabricating biological systems and understanding how they function. Since natural biological systems are so complex, scientists in this field start by making simple synthetic systems and then studying what factors affect that fabricated system. In this way, the "design" of future synthetic systems can be continually improved as well as gaining a deeper insight to the complex interactions within those biological systems. Thus, the idea is to understand the complex interactions in living systems by building and designing them from bottom to top. Originally, this was the aim of the field of systems biology, which aims to understand the complexity of living systems by taking all the biological interactions as a whole and then putting forth models in order to describe how they give rise to intricate
functions. Synthetic biology has the same goal, except these interactions are studied by the attempt to reproduce them (nature). Future advances in this field also have a great potential to discover new drugs and methods by which to cure disease. Looking into the fiction novel Frankenstien
We may not be close to creating life in the significance Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in, but each day we get closer and closer to the goal of creating a self sustaining cell that can reproduce. From that we can hope to prolong life or create life one day. Victor Frankenstein's creature may not be the outcome we receive when we succeed, but the importance in creating a synthesized life that further