The fears about genetic engineering were stoked when experiments took off in the 1970s. From lab leaks and disease epidemics to the ability to make “Frankenstein creations,” many of those fears are still with us today. We talk to author Surekha Davies about her latest book, why she thinks of monsters as category breakers, and why blurring boundaries can be so terrifying for us, but maybe doesn’t have to be.

Credits

Host: Alexis Pedrick
Executive Producer: Mariel Carr
Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez
Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan
Audio Engineer: Samia Bouzid
Music by Blue Dot Sessions

Resource List

Davies, Surekha. Humans: A Monstrous History. University of California Press: 2025.

Transcript

Alexis Pedrick: Hi, I’m Alexis Pedrick and this is Distillations. 

This season we’ve covered the history of genetic engineering. We talked about the fears that were stoked when experiments took off in the 1970s, and how we’re still grappling with some of those fears today. They were about lab leaks, disease epidemics and the ability to make quote unquote, Frankenstein creations. But there have also been fears about unlocking the ability to enhance humans, the ability to create superhumans. In a way, a lot of our fears have been about making monsters. 

So, to cap off our season. We’re talking to author Surekha Davies about her latest book, Humans: A Monstrous History. It explores why humans invent monsters and what those monsters tell us about ourselves. We talk about why she thinks of monsters as category breakers and why blurring boundaries can be so terrifying. 

But maybe it doesn’t have to be.

Surekha Davies: My name is Surekha Davies, and I’m a historian of science, art, and ideas.

Alexis Pedrick: That’s pretty cool. That’s actually a great title.

Surekha Davies: Oh, well, actually, I’m a historian of science, art and ideas, and I’m also a monster and historical consultant.

Alexis Pedrick: Oh, okay, even better title! Actually, that’s pretty good. Awesome. Awesome. Well, we are thrilled to have you here. How would you describe what you do or what you study?

Surekha Davies: Sure. I’m particularly interested in the history of categories. So, how societies think about what kinds of stuff exist in the world. You know, there are people; there are animals. Maybe there are gods, machines, perhaps extraterrestrials. But what’s the boundary between all of those and I guess I—that interest in categories and how we figure them out comes from a childhood watching too much Star Trek.

Alexis Pedrick: Is there such thing as too much Star Trek? I don’t know.

Surekha Davies: I mean, oh well. Well, you know, you know.

Alexis Pedrick: I think you were on the right path. So, is that why monsters? Is that what made you interested in this idea?

Surekha Davies: Perhaps indirectly, I guess. I, you know, I first went up to college to become an astronaut, and my original major was theoretical physics, because, too much Star Trek. But, you know, I wanted to discover extraterrestrials. And then by the end of the first year, you know, we’d had a quantum mechanics course. And I realized, well, there isn’t going to be warp drive in my lifetime. So, why was I doing this? I don’t even go camping; you know? Was I really going to sit in a horrible little capsule and, you know, orbiting the Earth? I don’t think so. So, I became a historian of science and started doing my research in the history of exploration. And so that really is another “too much Star Trek” effect. 

But I noticed that in European travel writing, you know, about the Americas, which is what I was studying, and in European illustrations, in prints, on maps, often there was this idea of monstrous peoples. And my first book was about the ways in which the idea of what it meant to be human for Europeans in the 16th century was shaped by mapmakers trying to figure out where on earth the climate was so harsh that people became, quote unquote, monstrous. 

And so the second book grew out of, like, this whole backstory I’d worked on, on the history of the boundary between, quote unquote, normal humans and these monstrous ones in climates that are harsh, which is, of course, no different from how astrobiologists today think about life in other galaxies.

Surekha Davies: I mean, they and we don’t expect life in other galaxies to look like life on Earth, because the climate is different. You know, we don’t think they’ll look like us. So it was a, sort of, a very rational way of thinking about what life might be like in places where the climate is different. 

And, the combination of my interest in the history of exploration categories, you know, my being a college professor and noticing that students were really interested in the history of monsters, the cultural history of ideas about monsters, it was a natural next progression to write a book for a general audience about the history of monsters. 

But what, you know, made this really a book that in my head was really maxed up to an “I want to write a big book about big ideas?”

Alexis Pedrick: Yeah?

Surekha Davies: …Was this random thing that happened when I was in Washington, D.C., finishing up my first book, and I was at the Library of Congress, and there was a conference on astrobiology happening downstairs. So this is the study of life in other galaxies. What would it look like? How would we find it? How might we prepare, just in case extraterrestrials get to Earth? And, I was in this panel called “Preparing For Discovery.” It was about what to do and how to prepare for the, albeit unlikely, possibility of hostile aliens or dangerous alien pathogens. And all the scientists could talk about was weapons! The only way to deal with hostile aliens and whatever might come from hostile aliens being on Earth was weapons, and it seemed to me that they were missing something.

Surekha Davies: You know, if extraterrestrials get to Earth or dangerous pathogens get here, humanity is going to need to be prepared, as a global society. Will we be able to work together? Will people panic or start looting or have nervous breakdowns because their religion doesn’t leave room for life in other galaxies? So part of preparing for discovery is thinking about what human societies will ideally be like in order to deal with whatever may come, whether that’s a deathly pathogen or unfriendly, intelligent life.

 But as I started to kind of lay out my question, the chair of the session, you know, got cross and cut me off and he said, that’s the wrong question. And I thought actually, that’s the right question. And what you’ve just shown me is that even I, as this historian of 16th century exploration, has something to say to scientists, to science policy. And there are really basic elements of, you know, being an expert in the humanities that are fundamental for shaping society and policy today. 

And so that really was the final piece for the ambition of the book, which is that it’s something that policymakers and scientists will find relevant, not just because it’s fun and it’s full of like sci-fi stuff, but also because of what it says about society, because science cannot be disentangled from society, and the decisions that scientists and policymakers make are also decisions about society.

Alexis Pedrick: I want to back up, because we’ve been saying monsters, I’ve said monsters, you’ve said monsters, and you have a really interesting way of thinking about, like, what a monster is. So how do you define “monsters” when people open this book? How are you thinking about monsters?

Surekha Davies: Well, let me start with how people often think about monsters. They think about monsters as either imaginary or serial killers. You know, monsters are in the spooky corners of the bookcase. They’re in fiction. And people also use the word monster to mean people who really break the social contract; sociopaths. 

But I use a much broader, older meaning of monsters, which is very simply just “category breaker.” So anywhere you have separate categories, say, if you have wolves over here and humans over there, and those are your nice tidy categories—a werewolf, if you found one, would break those two categories. And so a werewolf would be a monster. 

So, in the book, I look at all the different ways in which societies have talked about category breakers. So where is the boundary between “human” and all the other stuff in the world? Human and animal, human and God, human and extraterrestrial or machine? That boundary is policed, if you will, by imaginary or real beings at that boundary. 

So sometimes stuff exists in the world in a continuum. You know, like animals in the course of evolution. You know, our very distant ancestors were the same ancestors as blue whales or gorillas.

Surekha Davies: So we may know what a human is in geological space, but even scientists don’t know what a human is in geological time. So that’s one of the kinds of monsters that I look at: ideas about where the boundary is. 

And sometimes you can only make a boundary by saying, “This is this, that is that,” and the ones that turn the boundary into continuum are exceptions. That’s sort of like the “science-y,” you know, set of boundaries. And there are, you know, two others that are about how societies draw boundaries within humanity. So, how boundaries between, say, men and women or different nations or people of different faiths are defined is also tied up with stories about monsters. 

And finally, the parameters of the normal human individual in terms of shape or ability is tied to ideas about monsters. I mean, words like “genius,” “freak,” “prodigy” and how what counts as normal or doesn’t over time changes all of those kinds of quote unquote monsters, or rather, category breakers, are part of the stories in the book.

Alexis Pedrick: Would you say, then, that monster-making is sort of part of what makes us human, like, humans we like to make categories? Is monster-making part of that process? Part of what we do, kind of?

Surekha Davies: Well, classifying things and categorizing things is, I think, part of most life forms’ ways of like, being in the world and either, you know, not getting eaten, not eating poisonous berries, only finding the good berries. So this is, you know, a very general statement, but I think processing sensory information and making decisions about what things are is maybe something that all life does. Big claim there! 

But I guess there are also ways in which to respond to what your senses and your knowledge tells you, and that’s up to us. So, for example, we today have categories like new species. So if a new species of octopus is discovered, no one runs around screaming because we already have space for the things we don’t know. So I think processing and synthesizing information is something that is, you know, especially complex life has to do, and obviously people do all the time. 

Whether or not you worry, whether something that seemed like a bunch of discrete categories is a continuum or not—that is very much not universal. You know, there are societies that are more or less comfortable with non-binary people or mixed-race people, just for example.

Alexis Pedrick: Why are we so interested in monsters? Like, are we really scared or disgusted or like, what is it that makes us so…? You say that word to someone and they sort of perk up and go, “Oh! Oh, monsters? Okay.”

Surekha Davies:  Well, I think what makes people interested in monsters depends on the kinds of monsters we’re talking about, and also the stakes of those monsters for them. And the most common reactions I get to saying I’m writing a history of monsters is, kind of, people think I’m writing about fictional monsters, and so they’re excited because, you know, they have so many kind of favorite novels or movies that are about monsters. 

And I guess they hold for science, whether it’s through real science or science fiction, the promise of understanding something new and fundamental about the world. So, the very word “monster,” you know, in ancient Latin, comes from the word “monsterare”—to show or to warn. So, monsters show us things. They reveal things about patterns in the world.

Alexis Pedrick: It’s interesting because on the design of your book, on the front cover, there is a mirror.

Surekha Davies: So much to say about the cover and are we all monsters? 

So monsters don’t have to be seen as anything horrible or threatening. Because if we recognized how everyone is a unique individual and kind of wondrous in that sense, you know, monstrous in the positive, amazing sense, then no one is a monster. So, in one sense, we are all monsters, and we should own it. You know that we are all, different and lean into all of the possibilities we have for change. 

So, as for the book cover… so the press asked me to fill in various questionnaires before publication. I was very diligent. I wrote a novella for each one, doing my best. And you know, I sent them various suggestions of illustrations in the book itself that I thought they might find useful for designing a cover. And they said, “Well, do you have any covers that you like? And they may be for fiction books, and they may be album covers.” And I suggested a couple of thrillers whose covers captivated me. Stephen King’s Holly, for example. And then there’s Daniel Krauss’ Whalefall, that’s a real history of science book. 

And so what? The amazing designers at the University of California Press seem to have done is metabolized everything I sent them and come up with something totally different, which is this, you know, the shadow puppets of monsters from fiction. You know, there are, you know, “cyborg robot types.” There’s ET, there’s Spider-Man all around the outside. And then there’s this mirror that makes you wonder, “Wait, wait, this is a book about humans and monsters and there’s a mirror, and I’m looking at it, and it’s a sort of blurry mirror.” And it does invite us to ask where the boundaries between “human” and “monster” and what that means for us. And, you know, it’s up to us whether to worry about whether we’re monsters or to celebrate uniqueness. 

And in the monstrosity there, there is beauty in monstrosity.

Alexis Pedrick: You had this great point in the book where you talked about how boundaries and genes are connected. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because it just was a way of thinking about our genes that I have actually never considered.

Surekha Davies: So the category of what “the human” is, is partly about our genes. You know, although most of our genes are identical with bananas and tomatoes and apes, we’re actually not the same. 

But the weird thing is, any individual human doesn’t stay fixed in space and time with their genes either, because genes get turned on and off by environmental stresses, by great shocks, you know, to our lives. You know, we have these folk sayings like, “Oh, you know, after that happened, they were never the same again.” And that just sounds like some kind of made-up thing in how people describe someone and know how they changed maybe, personality-wise after trauma. But in fact, there are, you know, bits of our genes that get turned on and off by how we feel, the kinds of stresses we are under over a long time. 

And so what that means is any individual human being is not fixed in stone, like, you know, a lump of metal or a rock. So if your definition of a human being is one in which humans are fixed, then none of us fit that definition. Not only are we all a day older every morning, but, you know, even at that cellular level, our genes turn on and off. Our genes are affected by viral infections, whether they’re simple colds or something more complex. 

So we are incredibly volatile as beings. And yet the way in which societies and their sciences try to organize the world to make order out of chaos is one that is predicated on lots of like, fixed things. And that’s simply anapproximation, and it’s important for people to realize it’s an approximation to, you know, just get on with life.

Alexis Pedrick: Right.

Surekha Davies: But it doesn’t… if you’re too rigid about that, then you’re not really responding to reality.

Alexis Pedrick: It actually makes me think… So viruses are a really good example of, kind of, how blurry that boundary is. Can you talk about what you mean by that?

Surekha Davies: Sure. So viruses, are they even dead or alive? They fall into this blurry category because they don’t behave fully like a stereotypical life form. They need to live inside the cells of other animals in order to, you know, reproduce. They inject their DNA into our cells. And then that kind of changes, you know, our own bodies. 

So if our bodies can be shaped by something as alien, quote unquote, alien as these kind of viruses, you know, they have no; they don’t run around with hands and limbs and eyes and, you know, we can’t even see them. And yet our bodies are what they are as a species, as individuals, because of how these microorganisms are turning things about our bodies on and off. 

And, you know, often after viral infections, you know, people will sometimes become intolerant to different kinds of foods… So bodies change. And we really don’t stay the same at all. We are these, you know, “volatile beings.”

Alexis Pedrick: You were talking about genes. You were saying… You had this question: how many versions of a person are there? That’s what that makes me think about. That it changes us in ways where, yes, we are fundamentally different, but not like when I had Covid. I mean, I came out of that journey feeling like maybe I had changed in a substantial way, but I don’t… I still think of myself as Alexis. I don’t think of myself as a different version of myself. And yet I kind of am.

Surekha Davies: Yeah, exactly. And the interesting thing is, there are all kinds of ways in which people change where, you know, people don’t run around screaming about the fact that it happens and they don’t run around screaming about the fact that other people around them change.

Alexis Pedrick: Yeah. So it’s like we are maybe more porous than we tend to define ourselves as. At one point, you say that society is concerned with different things than the body is at a biochemical level. And you also point out that, like, for example, like a microbiologist is looking at a human as sort of like “a walking zoo,” I think is how you described it. So that’s also like a very different way of, sort of, looking at humans.

Surekha Davies: Yeah. So, every one of us uses the wrong pronoun just automatically, where are “we?”? Because we have a microbiome full of, you know, stomachs full of microorganisms that shape our personalities and our needs. And yet we are this kind of human suit full of these, you know, tiny beings that control our needs for coffee and cake.

Alexis Pedrick: Yeah.

Surekha Davies: And that makes, you know, kind of, all humans, collective organisms. And so if you think of the human as like these macro individuals who call themselves “I” because it’s one of them, then none of us fit that category. Then “me, myself and I” suddenly means something different.

Alexis Pedrick: You keep nudging us back to this idea about, sort of, how we choose to define ourselves, or how we choose to sort of look at that definition of monster or of category-breaker. And you were talking about geneticists sort of mapping the full genome of like, humans and chimpanzees. And, you know, usually we separate, you know, what is a species by like reproduction, right? But you note that our genes suggest otherwise.

Surekha Davies: Yeah. We can say that we are a different species from chimpanzees because there are no hybrids. And even animals that are kind of closer together, like lions and tigers, they can interbreed, but then their offspring are sterile. Two beings are different species if they either can’t have offspring at all or their offspring are sterile because that’s what keeps them apart. That’s a very basic definition. But of course, over evolutionary time, suddenly, we become one with chimpanzees and all kinds of beings because we evolved from the same earlier species. 

And so it’s one of those “both, and” situations of two things that are completely the opposite, which is we’re separate from chimps and we’re not separate from chimps. And it just is both because we’re not separate from them as a species in the past, because we weren’t there in the past two separate species. And of course, in our DNA, there is Neanderthal DNA and DNA from a couple of other species in the historical record. 

So we can see there that some kind of interbreeding has happened. So if we were capable of interbreeding, then we weren’t that separate to begin with. So those branches of the evolutionary tree were close enough that Neanderthal DNA, that Denisovan DNA could enter the human gene pool.

Alexis Pedrick: I have a couple of questions about when we think about monsters as “good” versus “bad.” Uh, you were talking about Bruce Banner becoming like the Incredible Hulk, right? Because he gets these, like, gamma rays that alter his DNA. And so I think about that, like, about, like how we are porous: we can take all these things in and they can change us, right? They can literally, in this science fiction scenario, alter our DNA. But he’s a superhero. Or is he a monster? Right? Like, where do we draw that line?

Surekha Davies: I love that question because it gets us to a slightly different definition of monster from the one that usually enters people’s minds. 

So if you think about what are the normal talents of a regular human being, there are people who are very skilled, say, Olympian athletes or amazing pianists, who expand the category of the human by expanding their possibilities. You know, Olympian world record holders, for example, so they can do stuff that almost nobody else can do. So in that sense, they’re monstrous through their extraordinary ability. But we typically don’t run around hating on them. You know, we want to be like them, and they’re inspiring. And that really is the kind of sensibility that, you know, it would be great if people felt that more often, that kind of curiosity and interest in the kind of possibilities that people who are different from them are able to show them. 

And so, to return to Bruce Banner: he is both a superhero and a monster. He’s monstrous because his body has crossed a line to become something that nobody else is. But I love the volatility of Bruce Banner. He turns back into a regular human, then he becomes the Hulk. And what prompts the shift when he becomes the Hulk are his emotions. And that really also matches… You know, it’s a parallel with how bodies respond under stress. You know, our various stress chemicals go up if we’re stressed for too long; that might also shape which genes are turned on and off. 

So, I love how, like, the ridiculous kind of fictional example is simply an analogue of the way human bodies are. And, you know, and if you say the Hulk is a monster…. Well, is he a bad monster or is he simply a category-breaker?

Alexis Pedrick: Now, I want to ask you about early public reactions to genetic engineering. People literally called early recombinant DNA research “Frankenstein experiments” or compared them to science fiction books like The Andromeda Strain. What exactly do you think they were worried about?

Surekha Davies: I guess when people fear gene editing, they may fear one of a variety of things. I mean, one, the “Frankensteinian” possible futures of gene editing is that we all become like something different that’s somehow horrible. And, you know, in Star Trek, there is talk of these Clone Wars that happen in the backstory where there was so much genetic modification that people were doing that individuals became, you know, very dangerous, erratic, unsafe for society and then genetic modification of people was banned because it just wasn’t something that we could handle safely. 

So it’s important to think about whether there are kinds of research whose risks are so great that there’s no justification for going there, and there need to be people who aren’t… Whose careers aren’t tied up around getting those technologies greenlit, but who are, you know, informed and, you know, understand how society and science kind of interact… Who are part of the decision-making process.

Alexis Pedrick: So I think my last question for you, hopefully, is a fun one. What’s your favorite fictional monster?

Surekha Davies: My favorite fictional monster is the character of Boo in Monsters Incorporated. Yes. So she’s a two-year-old girl. So why is she a monster? 

Well, the movie Monsters, Inc. is set in a parallel universe, which, you know, looks like New York, but is actually populated with our kind of cartoon-style monsters. You know, giant furry beings and slimy people. Like, every cartoon monster. And, you know, we follow the action of a couple of protagonists who work at this energy factory called Monsters, Inc. 

And the way this monster city, Monstropolis, is powered is by the power of children’s screams. So every night, monsters go in through these portals, also known as children’s closet doors…

Alexis Pedrick: Of course.

Surekha Davies: ..Frighten children, collect their screams, and this is what the city runs on. 

And at the same time,  monsters fear children, who they think are incredibly poisonous. You know, if they touch you, you might die. So, for the monsters, human children are the monsters. And one of them, this two-year-old kid called Boo, escapes, ends up in Monstropolis, and all hell breaks loose. 

And what I love about her is that she’s very tiny and incredibly brave. Almost nothing scares her. The “horriblest” monster in Monstropolis is the one assigned to scare her because nobody else is scary. And so I love the way she takes charge of a world in which she is the smallest person on earth. 

But you know, that movie came out just as I was beginning my dissertation. And, you know, she became my role model of an indomitable person capable of instilling fear where needed.

Alexis Pedrick: Oh, I love it! I love it. Well, thank you so, so much. This was absolutely fantastic.

Surekha Davies: Thank you so much for having me on.

Alexis Pedrick: Distillations podcast is produced by the Science History Institute and recorded in the Laurie J. Landau Digital Production Studios. 

Our executive producer is Mariel Carr. Our producer is Rigoberto Hernandez. Our associate producer is Sarah Kaplan, and our sound designer is Samia Bouzid. This episode was produced by Sarah Kaplan.

Support for Distillations has been provided by the Middleton Foundation and the Wyncote Foundation. You can find all of our podcasts, as well as our videos and articles, on our website at sciencehistory.org. And you can follow us on social media @scihistoryorg for more news about our podcasts and everything else going on in our free museum and library. 

For Distillations, I’m Alexis Pedrick. Thanks for listening.

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