‘Even if they were to leave Europe’: Frankenstein in Tasmania

Since the early nineteenth century, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has served as a narrative model for those writing of science and ambition. For example, a contemporary journalist trying to explain the modus operandi of biologist and science entrepreneur J. Craig Venter, who was involved in the first sequencing of the human genome and was leader of the first team to create a cell with a synthetic genome, turned to the protagonist of Shelley’s 1818 novel as a point of reference for a description of his subject: