The Modern Pandora

Dear Maggie,

I know it has been years since I’ve been in touch. The last few years have been filled with triumph, but more often tragedy. I need to tell someone and, despite the time passed, you are my closest friend and I can think of no better confessor. What I have to tell you is strange beyond your present imagining. I ask only that you read to the end.

As you know, after graduation I took a faculty position at Waterford University. The first six months were a whirlwind, all my attention and energy were focused on learning a new department, setting up my lab, and starting to push out research. Once I had settled in, I began to notice that every so often one of my colleagues would make a remark to or about me that would stick in my mind for reasons I couldn’t then articulate. During that first year, when my colleagues interrupted me during a presentation or posed questions about my research to each other rather than to me, I wrote it off as “paying my dues.” I told myself these were minor concerns, and I’d be a fool to let them derail my work.

After two years, however, I began to change my view of the situation. For most of my life, if you asked me for a list describing myself, scientist would have come far before woman; but in this environment, I could see that woman was the first word on the list and it was in bold. I started to joke with myself that the only way my research, career, or ideas could progress was if they were coming from a different body. To fill the time waiting for lab results, I created an imaginary male version of myself, who dazzled the world with his discoveries. I did not imagine then that my research might provide the very avatar with which I amused myself.

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Just as in medical school, my research centers around the chemical determinants of consciousness. As an undergraduate, my mentor and I studied this with fetuses and infants, trying to determine if there was a moment in utero or after when a child achieves consciousness. During medical school, I began to study anesthesia. I was fascinated by our ability to give or take consciousness without a true understanding of how we were achieving this. At Waterford, I began to examine consciousness in the context of coma patients. We can keep the body alive, make a heart pump and blood flow, but without the last piece, without consciousness, we cannot fully reanimate those lost. My most secret hope was to be able to master this last piece,  not only to return consciousness to patients but also restore them to life.

Once at Waterford and equipped with my own lab space, I was able to fully devote myself to my private studies of reanimation and the progress was rapid. I began with simple animals and advanced to small mammals. After my initial successes, without consideration of ethics or consequences, only of my belief in my great service to science and humanity, I decided to use my treatment on a human. I was conducting a study at the time which necessitated donated corpses and on the day of my error I was in possession of a male corpse. I administered my treatment and the effect was nearly immediate. The patient’s chest started to heave as his eyes blinked. As I watched, his eyes began to wildly rake the room and the magnitude of my actions became clear.

I stumbled into the observation room and shut the door. Through the glass, I saw my monster raise his upper body from the table. He was an average-sized man with brown hair and a strong build. He might have been nice-looking before, but he was now quite clearly dead. (Formerly dead? The terms are difficult to nail down, Maggie, when there are no prior examples.) His lips were blue, his sclera looked yellow, and his skin was ashen. My creature was soon walking around the lab, his tread stiff and leaden. As he approached the observation window, I clicked on the speaker and asked, “What is your name?” He cocked his head at the tinny sound of my voice but did not appear to understand. I suspected, and this was later confirmed, that while he retained basic motor functions, my monster had lost his language skills. It was at this moment that he began to wail -- the desperate, scared cry of a newborn. Whether from empathy or a need to hide what I had done, I opened the door to comfort this creature who I had brought back into the world without his consent.

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I snuck the monster to my car and back to my house, my only stroke of luck was that he was as obedient as a child. As my creature slept, I began to grapple with this new reality. I called in sick to work and spent the next two days watching the man wander around my home and yard. I began to teach him basic speech, which he mastered quickly perhaps due to some residual memory. By the time I went back to work, he could read a little and was able to manage a simple daily routine. I gave him homework assignments to encourage his development while I was at work. After a few months of this arrangement, my creature was making enormous progress. He particularly loved to read history and biology. He read all of my work, and the medical textbooks stashed around my home. He became restless though, yearning to see more of the world than my small house. This is how I came to bring him to work with me in the evenings. I would work in the lab, and he would wander around examining every test tube and computer.

In time he became an excellent research assistant, but things began to fall apart (as I should have known they would) one February evening when we ran into a senior faculty member while leaving the building. None of my colleagues typically worked in the building at night, so I was greatly surprised to see Dr. Jared Wickman. He was a fully-tenured professor who studied genetics and frequently felt the urge to explain my own work to me. I greeted Dr. Wickman, but before we could get away he asked about my companion. There are strict rules about admittance to lab spaces, which added to my panic at having this man stare into the face of my recently dead exploratory study. I introduced my creature as a visiting colleague, spending a year-long sabbatical working with me. Dr. Wickman, curiosity sated, showed polite interest, and then to my horror insisted that my new colleague speak at the department meeting next week.

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We prepped every night for the presentation, and in the end, I was more worried about my monster’s appearance than his talk. He had watched me for months, so I knew he could discuss one of my ongoing projects with ease. However, his wan skin and blue lips were a concern. My own appearance had been so often scrutinized, I could not imagine that my colleagues would miss these details. As it turned out my concerns were ill-founded. My colleagues were very receptive to the work and asked enthusiastic questions. I would love to tell you I felt pride in that moment, that I experienced some pseudo-maternal fulfillment watching as the creature I gave life to succeeded in passing himself off as a fellow scientist. But what I felt was rage. I had presented the same work for years, and was met with complete apathy on a good day or scoffs and questions to my expertise on a bad one. As I watched Dr. Wickman shake my monster’s cold hand, part of me wanted him to realize he had just applauded a corpse. That he had treated a dead body with more respect than me.

And he did notice, but this realization only ended in him inviting my creature out for a strong drink to “warm up those cold hands.” I, of course, was not explicitly invited, but I couldn’t leave my monster alone. That night my creation was puffed up with pride. I tried to keep perspective, after all, we should both be pleased. But as I watched him fit so easily with my colleagues, my anger grew. When, after a few hours, I said it was time to go, Dr. Wickman shot my medical marvel a sympathetic look. And in that moment, I felt the weight of every indignity I had tolerated over the years. All my research was missing was a male messenger, and here he was. My messenger was dead, but apparently, the barrier to respect was my gender, not my state of animation. An idea had begun to germinate, and in my rage, a plan bloomed. I knew what this monster was for.

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The plan was simple, we would present my work together. He would be my co-author on grants and journal submissions. He would give me the cover I needed to have my work taken seriously. At first, we kept to the department, giving talks about other projects. All were great successes, we (he) got useful feedback and one of my colleagues even offered us (him) additional resources. Next, we tried some university-wide talks and then took our show on the road to national conferences. With a dead man by my side, conferences were a whole new world. Our work, my work, was suddenly of interest and described as ground-breaking. Professors invited my monster for drinks and were only a little surprised when he showed up with me in tow. I didn’t care, I had made it into the room.

A year into our project, we won a large federal grant. It was an application I had submitted before as a solo author, but it had been rejected based on criticisms that the project was “too ambitious” for the stated timeline. We resubmitted the same application with him listed as the first author and like a dream (or, perhaps more like a nightmare) were awarded the funds. I used some of the money to fund a position for my creature at Waterford. My monster fit right in and even attended the monthly department poker game. For a time, it was all going exactly to plan.

That all began to change when my creation told me he wanted a project of his own. I can admit I was worried about how this would affect me and perhaps my response wasn’t the best. I told him that I would be happy to help him, but he could not use any of my work or ideas, and that since he didn’t actually have proper credentials it would be difficult to get departmental approval for an independent project. I could tell he was angry that I shut him down so quickly, but I told myself I was just stating the facts. I could not admit that I was operating from a feeling of ownership over him. Our relationship became strained. He still came to work with me every day and completed all his usual tasks, but his mind was elsewhere.

A few weeks after that, he told me he was moving out of my house. He had rented a room in another professor’s condo, because, as he reminded me, he didn’t have the paperwork to get a lease on his own. From there we continued to drift, working together on the grant but no longer signing up to give talks or spending any other unnecessary time together. I could see that I had hurt him, and my carelessness in his creation haunted me. He didn’t have an official identity or a family, no life outside of what I had given him. I wanted to give him freedom. I knew it was fairly easy to take the identity of any unclaimed patient who died in the hospital so I got my monster a birth certificate and an ID. His new name would be Robert Brown, originally of Kansas City, Missouri. Robert Brown could be whoever he wanted, wherever he wanted. I thought my creature would be grateful and forgive me for creating him and then using him for my own purposes. But when I gave him the ID and told him that he could start over, he was furious. He shouted that all I wanted was for him to disappear so that I could take credit for all our work. He had no intention of giving up this life and made it very clear he didn’t need me anymore. And that was it, he started working in his roommate’s lab and avoided me at every turn.

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About a month later I saw that my monster was going to give a talk to the department about new work that had recently been accepted by a prestigious journal. I was curious and on the day of his presentation, I took a seat in the back of the room. His betrayal was a shock. Since his creation, my monster had helped with my work restoring consciousness to coma patients. I was nearly ready for human trials around the time of our falling out, but I was weighing the risks of taking my work public. Once out of the bag, people might figure out how to take the next step, as I had done, and bring back the dead.  

He had submitted this work under his own name. My colleagues were floored by “his” brilliant work and my monster concluded to thunderous applause. I had toiled for years with no audience or praise, and now here was my life’s work for all the world to see, and yet my name wasn’t on it. I confronted him afterward. He barked that this work was just as much his as it was mine, maybe even more since he had undergone a form of the procedure. I filed an official complaint with the journal and university ombudsman, and neither believed me. I had been virtually unheard of before my monster’s arrival, no one remembered me talking about this work, and he was the first author on all our projects together. It was clear to all that I was jealous that my collaborator, who had brought so much to me, was on the rise and I couldn’t accept that it was natural and right that I be left behind. They all sent me on my way.

Nearly a year after this, I saw that a human trial of the coma treatment had been approved. During his talk, my monster refused to elaborate on how the treatment worked, claiming he wanted to protect his intellectual property until official publication. But the truth is he didn’t know how to do the treatment; he had watched me but had never done it himself. And this is why it wasn’t a surprise at all when, the night before his first human trial, my creation begged for help. He wept as he apologized and pleaded for me to save him from the embarrassment. He would do anything, he would even tell everyone the truth about whose idea it all was. To this day, I don’t know if he meant it. I told him I would help, but I had no such plans. He had betrayed me, and now everyone would see what he was without me.

The next day, I smiled reassuringly at him as he administered the treatment I coached him through the night before. It was a fake, one that I believed would have no effect on the subject. But I was wrong. Almost instantaneously the patient woke and began to scream. Her body convulsed violently as her fingers clawed at the blankets and then at her own wrists as with a final spasm she pulled the IV from her arm. The patient’s pain lasted about two minutes before the screaming stopped and she fell back into the coma. I can still hear the screams and see my creature’s face as he looked at me in horror. Maggie, please believe that my intention was only to humiliate him, I didn’t know what was going to happen.

But I am responsible for it all, for him and for that patient’s suffering. In my anger with him and with the world, I had breached every medical oath and humanist ethic I ever believed in. I resigned from the university and now barely ever leave my house. Last I heard the human trials were indefinitely suspended, but my monster has taken my job and has not given up trying to replicate my treatment effects with non-human subjects. I worry about what he will find, and how far he will take it if he does figure it out. Maggie, I have made terrible mistakes. I am not sure how I can rectify anything I have done or how I can stop him. I’m not even sure how to end this letter. Maybe you will read this and think I am just a crazy, failed doctor. Maybe it’s better for you if you don’t believe me. But if you do, I hope you will try to judge me softly. I created a man from my rib, Maggie, and I am sorry every day.