Who has seen Frankenstein (the original one?  Starring the unforgettable Boris Karlof in one of the most famous movies of Hollywood's so-called Golden Era, Frankenstein is a portrayal of an experiment gone awry, a vain but misguided attempt to create life in a lab with, as the human portagonist puts it, "my own hands."
     Though the movie is decidedly different from Mary Shelley's nineteenth century fascinating gothic novel, both novel and movie ask a critical question:  what is life?  What is this existence we experience, this free flowing rush of unrequested consciousness, this all too brief moment of physical form and mental sentience?  What, really, is it?  And how can we know it?
     These are immense and timeless questions, yes, and movie and novel attempt to come to grips with them, weaving their plots around the implications of a humanity who is capable of making itself.  What if we can create our own lives?  What have we accomplished?
     We will have demonstrated that we can indeed make life.  But we will have also demonstrated that we are far from the creators we imagine ourselves to be.  We have life, but we still have not really defined it, or answered why it exists.
     How can one who has been created create, much less, apart from a creator's help, understand that from which he came?