Ruth La Ferla in the NYT:

If steampunk has a mission, it is, in part, to restore a sense of wonder to a technology-jaded world. “Today satellite photos make the planet seem so small,” Mr. Brown lamented. “Where is the adventure it that?” In contrast, steampunk, with its airships, test tubes and time machines, is, he said, “sort of a dream , the way we used to daydream. It’s like part of your childhood’s just bursting forward again.”

For some of its adherents, steampunk also offers a metaphoric coping device. “It has an intellectual tie to the artists and artisans dealing with a world in turmoil at the time of the industrial revolution,” said Crispen Smith, a Web designer and photographer in Toronto, and a partner in a steampunk fashion business.

Now, as in the late 19th century, “we have to find a way to deal with new ethical quandaries,” Mr. Smith said, alluding to issues like cloning, the dissemination of information and intellectual property rights on the Web.

Steampunk style is also an expression of a desire to return to ritual and formality. “Steampunk has its tea parties and its time-travelers balls,” said Deborah Castellano, who presides over salonconvention.com, which organizes neo-Victorian conventions. “It offers an element of glamour that some of us would otherwise never experience.”

///
In 1969, Song of Lawino was published. It is written in the style of a traditional Acholi song. It is an Acholi wife’s lament about her college-educated husband, who has rejected Acholi traditions and ideas for Western ones. Much of Lawino’s anger is directed at her husband’s lover who embodies these Western values and customs, and who she contrasts with herself.

In Song of Ocal, her husband responds to her, decrying what he perceives as Africa’s backwardness, and extoling the virtues of European society and ideas. Lawino and Ocal’s debate reflects the discourse taking place at the time in African societies about the implications of adopting Western culture and ideals. Other works, including Song of A Prisoner (1971) and Song of Malaya (1971) are written in the same poetic style.

Okot p’Bitek has been criticized by other African writers, including Ngugi wa Thiong’o, for not adequately addressing the underlying causes of Africa’s problems. Okot, however, believed that his work, like all good African literature, dealt honestly with the human condition and had “deep human roots.”   More.

——————————

Transalation by Taban lo Liyong:

Lawino is a female voice, taking issue with her husband whom she witnesses imitating a European culture which is destroying a more deeply rooted African culture. The text is a deeply philosophical meditation on the subject of its original subtitle: ‘The Culture of Your People You Do Not Abandon’. The translator is the distinguished Sudanese writer Taban lo Liyong, and colleague and friend of the author. His translation was twenty-two years in the making and began as a collaborative project with the author. Although the text was once translated into English by the author himself, lo Liyong asserts the need for a reworking from the original Acholi, since the author only loosely wrote an English version as a reaction, to satisfy an English speaking audience, and gave prominence to the parts which were most easily rendered into English.

Lo Liyong reproduces the original as faithfully as possible, attempting to convey the intricacies, nuances and thoughts of the whole text in a rhythmic English which suits the original discourse. He further intends his translation of the classic as an assertion of the need to engage with, and reflect upon the primacy of African languages and culture in a new era of cultural and linguistic dominance.  —The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry

Excerpts from
The Song Of Lawino
Okot p’Bitek

1. My Husband’s Tongue Is Bitter

Husband, now you despise me
Now you treat me with spite
And say I have inherited the stupidity of my aunt;
Son of the Chief,
Now you compare me
with the rubbish in the rubbish pit,
You say you no longer want me
Because I am like the things left behind
In the deserted homestead.
You insult me
You laugh at me
You say I do not know the letter A
Because I have not been to school
And I have not been baptized

You compare me with a little dog,
A puppy.

My friend, age-mate of my brother,
Take care,
Take care of your tongue,
Be careful what your lips say.

First take a deep look, brother,
You are now a man
You are not a dead fruit!
To behave like a child does not befit you!

Listen Ocol, you are the son of a Chief,
Leave foolish behavior to little children,
It is not right that you should be laughed at in a song!
Songs about you should be songs of praise!

Read more »

From the sightlines in Berkeley, California, where I lived then and live now, I recall 1968 as a year of horror and bad faith… With the Vietnam War all but rolling back across the Pacific to poison the United States itself, it was as if people turned to spectacular lies and glamorous trivialities to hide from themselves the fact that their imaginations had turned to ice. Truly enormous events taking place elsewhere did not travel. Word of the Prague Spring arrived only in fragments, and no speaker stood up to put the pieces together. News of the massacre of scores – no, hundreds – of students in Mexico City was suppressed so profoundly, it would take 40 years for the facts to come out of the ground. But few if any looked; curiosity withered; people were swept up in their own vanity. The faces of those who said no were smug in their automatic righteousness.

more from The New Statesman here.

Klein combines her critical analyses of the corporate economy with a naive celebration of ‘joyous’ populism, democracy and mass movements. The cynical abuse of democratic slogans by the Bush administration gives her no pause. She defends her idealised picture of democratic movements from critical scrutiny, in the time-tested way, by making sure we cannot see them in action. Anti-immigrant xenophobia, hostile as it is to the free-market model that she, too, opposes, is never mentioned as a genuine expression of democratic populism. Wasn’t there majority white support for the dispossession of New Orleans’ black community after Katrina? And wasn’t there majority Russian support for Putin’s wars in Chechnya? Isn’t the ordinary citizen’s fear and hatred of otherness as malicious a force as the corporate profiteer’s insatiable greed?

She claims that economic ‘reform’ in 1990s Russia was ‘one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy in modern history’, thwarting an ‘authentic democratic revolution’. Here she is making the same mistake of which she rightly accuses Friedman. She is confusing the absence of obstacles with the presence of preconditions. Authentic democracy will not spontaneously emerge simply because tyranny has been knocked down and all the ‘distortions’ have been removed. Klein might defend herself by saying that the ‘democracy’ she apotheosises is exclusively a democracy of protest, never a democracy of governance, and therefore invulnerable to criticism for unfairness, stupidity or abuse of power. But this response would not sit well with her understandable but unrealistic hope that ordinary citizens around the world will soon ‘become the authors of their national destinies, at last’.

more from the LRB here.

So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely “speaking truth to power”.

It is unlikely that the two books under review, both of which present damning criticisms of Said’s book at length and in detail, will change anything. Daniel Martin Varisco is a professor of anthropology who has specialized in Yemeni agriculture. It is perhaps because of this that he takes exception to Said’s “textualism” and his consequent neglect of anthropology, sociology and psychology. Varisco has a multitude of other charges to bring against Orientalism and he is able to draw on an astonishingly long list of witnesses for the prosecution, including Sadiq Jalal al-’Azm, Bryan Turner, Malcolm Kerr, Ziauddin Sardar, Bernard Lewis, Nadim al-Bitar, Victor Brombert, Ernest Gellner, Jane Miller, John Sweetman, John Mackenzie and many others.

more from the TLS here.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

Nathan Myhrvold met Jack Horner on the set of the “Jurassic Park” sequel in 1996. Horner is an eminent paleontologist, and was a consultant on the movie. Myhrvold was there because he really likes dinosaurs. Between takes, the two men got to talking, and Horner asked Myhrvold if he was interested in funding dinosaur expeditions.

Myhrvold is of Nordic extraction, and he looks every bit the bearded, fair-haired Viking—not so much the tall, ferocious kind who raped and pillaged as the impish, roly-poly kind who stayed home by the fjords trying to turn lead into gold. He is gregarious, enthusiastic, and nerdy on an epic scale. He graduated from high school at fourteen. He started Microsoft’s research division, leaving, in 1999, with hundreds of millions. He is obsessed with aperiodic tile patterns. (Imagine a floor tiled in a pattern that never repeats.) When Myhrvold built his own house, on the shores of Lake Washington, outside Seattle—a vast, silvery hypermodernist structure described by his wife as the place in the sci-fi movie where the aliens live—he embedded some sixty aperiodic patterns in the walls, floors, and ceilings. His front garden is planted entirely with vegetation from the Mesozoic era. (“If the ‘Jurassic Park’ thing happens,” he says, “this is where the dinosaurs will come to eat.”) One of the scholarly achievements he is proudest of is a paper he co-wrote proving that it was theoretically possible for sauropods—his favorite kind of dinosaur—to have snapped their tails back and forth faster than the speed of sound. How could he say no to the great Jack Horner?

More here.

From Scientific American:

In research that could give doctors a way to reassign sex in cases of unclear gender, scientists report this week that they have figured out why some children with genes that should make them boys are instead born as girls. The study, published in Nature, explains why some embryos with X and Y chromosomes—which should be born as male—develop ovaries and eventually become girls.

The key is whether a gene called Sox9, involved in formation of the testes, is active. “There are a surprisingly large number of cases where this process goes wrong,” says Robin Lovell-Badge, a biologist at London’s MRC National Institute for Medical Research, who estimates that this phenomenon could effect up to 1 in every 20,000 genetic males. “Maybe one could treat some of these sex reversal or intersex cases after birth by manipulating whether Sox9 is active or not. This is all speculation but it’s possible.”

If Sox9 is somehow switched on in a genetic female—an embryo with two X chromosomes—it causes male gonads to form; if it fails to turn on in males, the cells it controls will become follicle cells, which mature into ovaries.

More here.

By the lights of many in the international art world, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke are the leading painters of our day, though it’s hard to find anyone who will declare them equally great. (I’m an exception.) Their careers are intertwined by biography and circumstance. Both are from the former East Germany: Polke, who is sixty-seven, left with his family when he was twelve; Richter, seventy-six, fled, after fitful success in state-run art programs, in 1961, just before the Wall went up. They met at the seminal Düsseldorf Art Academy and, in 1963, collaborated in a brief, trenchant movement that responded to American Pop art with painted imagery drawn from magazine and newspaper ads and photographs, family snapshots, cheap fabric designs, and other desultory sources, which Richter adapted with deadpan gravity and Polke with sardonic élan. A jokey photographic print by Richter, from 1967, shows them sharing a bed in Antwerp. (Their host for a show there had provided scanty accommodations.) They ascended to prominence in the early nineteen-eighties—stunning American art circles, which had been largely oblivious of creative doings in Germany—as twin masters who dramatically expanded the resources and resonances of painting, an art dismissed as moribund by most of that time’s avant-garde. Each has made visually glorious, conceptually seismic pictures. Both live and work in Cologne. But their differences are profound. Richter, reflective and deliberate, is a family man of temperate tastes and orderly habits. His studio is one of two elegant rectilinear buildings—the other is his house—in a large, walled, lushly gardened compound. Polke, restless and impulsive, is an unreconstructed bohemian, inhabiting cluttered expanses in a shabby industrial building.

more from The New Yorker here.

‘You don’t understand,’ an American history professor once said to me of the 1960s, wagging an avuncular finger. ‘You had to be there.’ Coming from somebody who had spent his life studying the nineteenth century, it seemed a particularly silly thing to say. But then, as Gerard DeGroot points out in a thoughtful introduction to his new book, there are many people for whom the myth of the Sixties has become ‘something sacred’, a totem of high-minded idealism regularly invoked as a reprimand to our own supposedly cynical age. ‘In no other period of history’, he writes, ‘has canon been allowed so freely to permeate analysis.’

Books celebrating the youthful idealism of the late Sixties are ten a penny, particularly across the Atlantic, so it is refreshing to read one that takes a mercifully clear-sighted view of the decade. DeGroot does remember the period, but only just: his earliest childhood memory is of the morning after Kennedy beat Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, when he peered up into the California sky, hoping to see Yuri Gagarin’s capsule over San Diego. Surely too young to have been caught up in the hedonism of the Summer of Love, he has set himself a deceptively simple task. He has no overarching thesis, no axe to grind: instead, he simply gives us sixty-seven independent essays, rich in anecdote and character, many of them elegantly ripping apart the stereotypes of popular mythology.

more from Literary Review here.

In 1904, the Heidelberg chemist Wilhelm Weichardt made a sensational announcement. He promised a utopia in which men would never grow weary, but would be transformed into industrious and tireless machines. Weichardt thought that fatigue was caused by the accumulation of toxins in the blood, and he harvested a concentrated version of this poison from rats that he drove to death by strenuous exercise. As the toxins built up, he observed, the rats descended into a kind of “narcosis” or “stupor,” before slowing to a “complete standstill.” In his laboratory, Weichardt worked on an antibody. He called the resulting miracle drug—his vaccine against fatigue—antikenotoxin.

In The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (1990), Anson Rabinbach explains how, after 1870, the religious discourse against acedia or sloth was taken up and replaced by the burgeoning scientific study of fatigue. Fatigue, Rabinbach argues, was considered both a physical and moral disorder: it “replaced the traditional emphasis on idleness as the paramount cause of resistance to work. Its ubiquity was evidence of the body’s stubborn subversion of modernity.” In the eighteenth century, idleness had been presented by artists such as Hogarth as the antithesis of industry; in the nineteenth century, fatigue was considered a similar failure—it represented the refusal of the body and mind to keep up with the demands of modern labor. Maurice Keim, one of the first of these nineteenth-century theorists, wrote that “we flee [fatigue] by instinct, it is responsible for our sloth and makes us desire inaction.”

more from Cabinet here.

Jared Diamond looks at tribal justice in The New Yorker:

Though we might wonder how Daniel’s society came to revel in killing, ethnographic studies of traditional human societies lying largely outside the control of state government have shown that war, murder, and demonization of neighbors have been the norm. Modern state societies rate as exceptional by the standards of human history, because we instead grow up learning a universal code of morality that is constantly hammered into us: promulgated every week in our churches and codified in our laws. But the differences between the norms of states and of Handa clan society are not actually so sharp. In times of war, even modern state societies quickly turn the enemy into a dehumanized figure of hatred, only to enjoin us to stop hating again as soon as a peace treaty is signed. Such contradictions confuse us deeply. Neither pacific ideals nor wartime hatreds, once acquired, are easily jettisoned. It’s no wonder that many soldiers who kill suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. When they come home, far from boasting about killing, as a Nipa tribesman would, they have nightmares and never talk about it at all, unless to other veterans.

Then, too, for Americans old enough to recall our hatred of Japan after Pearl Harbor, Daniel’s intense hatred of the Ombals may not seem so remote. After Pearl Harbor, hundreds of thousands of American men volunteered to kill and did kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese, often in face-to-face combat, by brutal methods that included bayonets and flamethrowers. Soldiers who killed Japanese in particularly large numbers or with notable bravery were publicly decorated with medals, and those who died in combat were posthumously remembered as heroes. Meanwhile, even among Americans who had never seen a live Japanese soldier or the dead body of an American relative killed by the Japanese, intense hatred and fear of Japanese became widespread. Traditional New Guineans, by contrast, have from childhood onward often seen warriors going out and coming back from fighting; they have seen the bodies of relatives killed by the enemy, listened to stories of killing, heard fighting talked about as the highest ideal, and witnessed successful warriors talking proudly about their killings and being praised for them. If New Guineans end up feeling unconflicted about killing the enemy, it’s because they have had no contrary message to unlearn.

In many ways, Allan Kaprow, father of the “Happening,” was the most important artist of the ’60s — at least as important as his household-branded comrade Andy Warhol. Warhol critiqued the commodification of art from way, way inside, and insisted to the end on the primacy of the image. But Kaprow, emerging from a hardcore New York School abstract-painting milieu, took an almost diametrically opposite path.

Forging a unified field theory out of his seemingly disparate Hans Hoffman apprenticeship, American Povera assemblages and participation in the formative social nexus of the Fluxus movement — John Cage’s legendary late-’50s class in music composition at the New School for Social Research — Kaprow operated as the postmodern missing link, personifying the historically bowdlerized continuity between Abstract Expressionist painting and the farthest reaches of the subsequent avant-garde, leaving behind not only recognizable imagery but the very notion of a tangible art object.

more from the LA Weekly here.

In Der Spiegel Online:

In the early 1990s, the Wall was hacked away by souvenir hunters and parts of it were sold or donated to raise money for charity. Most of it was ground down into 310,000 tons of gravel for building roads to reunite the eastern and western halves of the city. Millions of people have a piece — real or fake — of the Berlin Wall gathering dust in their homes. The United Nations, the CIA and the Vatican all own a piece of Wall.

The rush to tear down the hated landmark in the 1990s was understandable, but Berlin’s government has realized that the city may have been overzealous in ridding itself of what remains its biggest tourist attraction. It has launched an information drive to help keep memories of the Wall alive among Germans and to raise awareness of Cold War division among younger generations who have only known a united Germany.

As part of that campaign, Berlin introduced an interactive multimedia guide on May 1 in the form of a hand-sized computer which traces the path of the Wall and provides GPS navigation to help pedestrians and cyclists find the few intact stretches of the Wall that remain.

The device, similar to those handed out in museums, uses audio and video footage to tell the story of the Wall from when it was hastily erected in August 1961 to stop an exodus of people from Soviet-held communist East Berlin. The Wall turned West Berlin, controlled by the United States, Britain and France, into an isolated enclave inside East Germany.

Kevin McGoogan reviews Reinhold Kramer’s Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain in The Globe and Mail:

Reinhold Kramer, an English professor at Brandon University, has scoured the Richler archive at the University of Calgary. He has made excellent, almost invasive use of letters, notes and two unpublished manuscripts – a 1950s novel called The Rotten People and a 1970s memoir, Back to Ibiza – to show how Richler drew on his own life in creating his fiction.

By adding a few interviews with family members, and drawing on an oral biography by Globe and Mail writer Michael Posner and a scholarly study by Victor Ramraj, Kramer has produced a meticulous, prodigiously detailed biography. As the subtitle suggests, it highlights the writer’s lifelong engagement with Orthodox Judaism and his triumphant emergence as a secular humanist.

Those who followed Richler closely, chuckling at his antics, savouring his victories, will enjoy reliving old favourite moments. Yes, yes, let’s go again to the movie premiere of Duddy Kravitz, when the wife of the late Samuel Bronfman congratulated Richler from on high: “You’ve come a long way for a St. Urbain Street boy.” And the author responded: “And you’ve come a long way for a bootlegger’s wife.”

I’m not so sure if this is any improvement on Dawkins’ definition.  Steve Davis in Secular Web Kiosk:

In 1943 the eminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger gave a series of lectures in Dublin that were later published in book form under the title What is Life? Its success was considerable as it kick-started the new field of molecular biology, but Schrodinger deliberately avoided an investigation into a definition of life, believing that the time was not ripe.

In more recent times, Fred Adams, professor of physics at Michigan University, in The Origins of Existence–How Life Emerged in the Universe, wrestled manfully with this question, but he eventually concluded that “Achieving a universal definition of life is unquestionably of fundamental importance, but no such definition has yet been forthcoming.”[1]

There is a noticeable reluctance among scientists to grapple with this question of life. All are happy to speculate about the conditions that need to exist for life to originate, but none seem inclined to actually define life itself. In The Selfish Gene, for example, Richard Dawkins devoted a page or so to explaining the conditions necessary for its origin, then stated that “At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident.”[2] He then went on to speculate about the further development of this molecule that he calls a replicator, but failed to explain to his readers what life actually is. A strident critic of Dawkins, Professor Gabriel Dover, in his wonderfully quirky but scientifically illuminating Dear Mr. Darwin, described the conditions necessary for life from a galactic viewpoint, but like Dawkins he omitted a definition.[3] Professor Freeman Dyson, another critic of selfish gene theory, in his excellent Origins of Life, did go so far as to provide the characteristics of life, as did Fred Adams, but these characteristics provide a description, not a definition. These approaches seem to typify the attitude of the scientific community to what appears to be perceived as a difficult subject, but as we press on I hope to show that perception to be misplaced.

Zakes Mda in The Boston Review:

When J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians was published in 1980, it marked a literary paradigm shift. Until then conventional wisdom dictated that South African novels could bear witness to the truth of apartheid only through realism. Whereas South African dramatists had developed over several decades a highly stylized and experimental theater that drew from both African performance modes and European models, fiction writers stubbornly stuck to a faithful reproduction of South African experience. Reflecting realist aesthetic commitments, and ignoring the mix of experimentalism and political engagement in South African theater, they held that art was not for its own sake, but a weapon in the struggle for freedom and human betterment.

Then came Coetzee.

Waiting for the Barbarians upset the expectations of many readers and critics who had grown accustomed to documentary representations of South Africa from the country’s interpreters. The novel was seen as the height of self-indulgence: life under apartheid demanded that writers create a translucent window through which the outside world could see authentic oppression. Some critics claimed that Coetzee’s use of allegory was an escape from South African reality because the novel, set in a nameless empire and lacking specificity of locale and period, was susceptible to an ahistorical and apolitical reading. The question of the author’s political commitment was raised not only in response to this novel but all his subsequent ones. Even Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer weighed in that Coetzee’s work, and indeed Coetzee himself, abhorred all political and revolutionary solutions. While acknowledging that Coetzee’s work was magnificent, and commending his superb and fearless creative energy, she rapped him on the knuckles for a mode of storytelling that kept him aloof from the grubby and tragic events of South Africa.

///
Love Song
Julie King

My father is dying, and my mother
has never been so in love. It’s not

over death she’s swooning;
it’s the sweetness that has softened

him. She lotions and socks his feet, shaves
his cheeks so he’s fresh for their evening

date in the dusk-quilted bed, the oxygen
tank murmuring in the background.

As she fine-tunes the tubes in his nostrils,
she smooths his wisps, sighs, “Oh, sweetheart.”

///

From Science:

For most overweight people, excess fat sits in one of two areas: deep inside the abdomen (visceral fat) or around the hips and legs (subcutaneous fat). Researchers have recognized for some time that visceral fat is the greater evil. People with lots of it are much more prone to diabetes, heart disease, and other problems than people with excess subcutaneous fat. But it’s not clear exactly why. Is the fat itself different, or does its location in the body matter?

To probe this question, C. Ronald Kahn, director of obesity research at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, and his colleagues devised a relatively simple experiment. They transplanted fat in 42 naturally plump, healthy mice. The mice were divided into four groups that underwent different types of operations. In some, the researchers added visceral or subcutaneous fat to the abdomen. In others, they tucked visceral fat or subcutaneous fat under the animals’ flanks, the rough equivalent to the hips. Thirteen other animals formed a control group; they were operated on but didn’t receive extra fat.

Kahn’s team found some surprising benefits to subcutaneous fat. Mice with subcutaneous fat transplanted into their abdomen gained only about 60% of the weight packed on by the control group, which, like most mice, continued to expand. These transplant recipients also had better glucose and insulin levels. The mice that got extra subcutaneous fat in subcutaneous areas also fared better than controls, although not as well as the first group.

More here.

Our own Asad Raza writing for Tennis:

This week TENNIS.com will be featuring one of our blog regulars, Asad Raza, who is in Rome for the men’s Italian Open. He’ll be writing here a couple times, on the home page, and over at Pete’s as well—he’s got this thing covered. Here’s his first post.

Hi Steve,

As you know, today is first day of the Internazionali BNL d’Italia, also known as the ATP Masters Roma, the Internazionali del Foro Italico, the Italian Open, and simply as Rome, which is what I like to call it. I touched down a couple hours ago, promptly discovering that Richard Gasquet’s horrow show of a season continues. But you gotta feel great for Luis “Mucho Lucho” Horna, an undersized warrior who always leaves it all out on the court, win or lose. [Insert mandatory reference to Roman gladiators here.] Homeboy Andreas Seppi took out another Frenchman, Fabrice Santoro, but the Roman papers are touting the chances of Simone Bolelli, for some reason (he’s photogenic?).

It strikes me that Rome is currently the second most important tennis tournament to take place on the European continent, after Roland Garros. The fall indoor tournaments, Paris-Bercy and Madrid, take place too late in the year to determine much more than the scuffle for the last few spots in the year end Master’s Cup. That prestigious grass-court tourney, Wimbledon, is actually held on an island just off the coast of France. The other two European Masters tournaments, Monte Carlo and Hamburg, mark the beginning and the end of the clay season’s run-up to Roland Garros, but Rome is its beating heart.

More here.

Philip Ball in [email protected]:

When in the late 1960s Soviet scientists mistakenly thought they had found a new, waxy form of pure water called polywater, one scientist suggested that it could ‘seed’ the conversion of all the world’s oceans to gloop — a scenario memorably anticipated in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, in which the culprit was instead a new form of ice. Super-viruses leaked from research laboratories are a favourite source of rumour and fear — this was one suggestion for the origin of AIDS. And nanotechnology was accused of hastening doomsday thanks to one commentator’s fanciful vision of grey goo: replicating nanoscale robots that disassemble the world for raw materials from which to make copies of themselves.

In part, the appeal of these stories is simply the frisson of an eschatological tale, the currency of endless disaster movies. But it is also noteworthy that these are human-made apocalypses, triggered by the heedless quest for knowledge about the Universe.

This is the template that became attached to the Faust legend. Initially a folk tale about an itinerant charlatan with roots that stretch back to the Bible, the Faust story was later blended with the myth of Prometheus, who paid a harsh price for daring to challenge the gods because of his thirst for knowledge. Goethe’s Faust embodied this fusion, and Mary Shelley popularized it in Frankenstein, which she explicitly subtitled ‘Or The Modern Prometheus’. Roslynn Haynes, a professor of English literature, has explored how the Faust myth shaped a common view of the scientist as an arrogant seeker of dangerous and powerful knowledge⁷.