I saw - with shut eyes, but acute mental vision - I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powered engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.
THIS is how Mary Shelley in her introduction to Frankenstein describes the waking dream that in May 1816 led to the writing of her most famous novel.
Nowadays, most people readily associate the novel's title with the screen image of the mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein, and the terrifying Creature that he brings to life.
Popular notions of science and scientists are bound up with the dark, mysterious laboratories, the demented, obsessive stare of the male scientist consumed with dangerous ambition that are the legacy of many film depictions of Victor Frankenstein's abortive project. The irony is that the origins of Mary Shelley's novel lie in the intense interest in science shared by many writers in 19th century England.
The famous chemist Humphry Davy had been a visitor to Mary's house during her childhood, and while she was composing the novel in October and November 1816 she read Davy's Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) and A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry (1812).
Her partner, later to become her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, provided in part the model for the ambitious, overreaching hero. Shelley was passionately interested inscribed in chemistry in particular and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg described, in a vivid image one of Shelley's "fluid" or electrical experiments at Oxford turning round the handle very rapidly, so that the fierce, crackling sparks flew forth and presently standing on the stool with glass fret, he begged me to work the machine until he was filled with the fluid, so that his long, wild locks stood on end."
Lord Byron, a close friend of the Shelleys, shared their interest in Erasmus Darwin's experiments with the "galvanizing" use of electricity that becomes central to the genesis of the Creature in Mary Shelley's novel.
Though images of Frankenstein are commonly used to dismiss science and technology as the unhappy products of inhuman ambition, Shelley's argument throughout the work is that it is scientific and technological innovation that ignores social contexts and responsibilities that is potentially harmful.
Victor Frankenstein becomes the victim of a fixed idea that produces a fearful isolation. His Creature turns to crime, cut off as he is from any meaningful contact with human society.
The effective and spectacular use of mathematics in 17th century science meant that the activity came increasingly to be seen as an occult activity practised by an elite of the initiated. The modern laboratory soon took on the aura of mystery and gothic power that previously had been reserved for alchemy.
In our own day, it is nuclear physics that has become the object of awe and dread, the wonder at the enormous force released by nuclear energy giving way to fears of terminal fallout. Humanity, it is feared, like Victor Frankenstein will be pursued and ultimately destroyed by its own scientific and technological creations.
The myths surrounding Frankenstein and scientists will be explored in an event next Saturday at the Irish Film Centre, entitled "Doctor Frankenstein, I presume?" Starting at 6 p.m., two film versions of Frankenstein will be shown - the classic 1931 version starring Boris Karloff and Kenneth Branagh's more recent reworking of the tale that was first screened in 1994.
Professor Paddy Cunningham from the Genetics Department in Trinity College Dublin will also lead a discussion on the impact of the Frankenstein myth on modern perceptions of science and scientists.
The event is being organised by the science culture group - made up of scientists, academics and journalists, interested in promoting public awareness of science in Irish culture - and is part of the European Week of Science and Culture. Are today's scientists still "students of unhallowed arts"? Maybe the reel world of cinema has the answers.