When Ilya Prigogine carried off the Nobel Prize for network thermodynamics the science editor of a great English daily newspaper was on hand with guidance for the perplexed: "Professor Prigogine," he explained, "is an expert on the chemical makeup of human beings." Frankenstein, for once, did not rear his head, but he is no stranger to the headlines. As Jon Turney reveals in his dense treatise on the Frankenstein image of biological science, the story has formed the basis of 130 later fictions, more than 40 films and 80 plays, besides some 600 tales and 30 series in comics; so allusions to the old fellow in the public prints must run into untold thousands.

Turney reads a great deal into the durability of the myth and represents it as a kind of epiphany to the lay public. Its inspiration derived from the "electricians," who, in the wake of Galvani and Volta, applied electric shocks to cadavers, whose twitches were seen as signs of incipient life. Turney oddly does not mention the alchemist, Konrad Dippel, who was brought up in Schloss Frankenstein on the Rhine, later called himself Frankensteina and taught that the élan vital could be infused into inanimate matter. It has certainly been conjectured that he was Mary Shelley's original model, though other (to Turney perhaps more plausible) conjectures have been put forward.

At all events, the novel maintained its hold through the later nineteenth century, when the great physiologists, such as Claude Bernard, Magendie, Schäfer and Burdon Sanderson, made their discoveries, based on vivisection. The wave of revulsion that swept through Victorian society found expression in fictional representations of scientists as sinister, hubristic, unfeeling and, worst of all, impious.

In the early years of this century the image changed somewhat. Helped along by the utopian visions of H.G. Wells, T.H. Huxley's grandson, Julian, and others, biological scientists came to appear more often as benefactors and healers. Yet the Frankenstein myth endured and Turney sees this as a warning to us all. He believes, indeed, that the eighteen-year old Mary Shelley "intuited the power of a threat which would come to seem graver as time went by." Well, perhaps, but then she wrote the novel only in response to a challenge by Byron that he, she and Percy Shelley should each concoct a ghost story. She was unable to oblige until later, when the vision of a charnel house, in which life suddenly and chillingly stirred, came to her in an unpleasant dream. More likely then, it seems to me, that such a conceit (like modern urban myths) speaks to an atavistic fear buried in the human psyche.

But like all good clichés it has served busy (or lazy) journalists well. Like Dracula or Jack the Ripper, Frankenstein has become a handy symbol: press here to release retch-factor. As J.B.S. Haldane observed, "if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion." The retch button has been activated a lot in the past decade or two under the stimulus of heart transplants (still forbidden in some cultures and by fundamentalist religions), in vitro fertilization (likewise), gene manipulation and Dolly the sheep.

Turney - in what to me is the most interesting part of the book - has examined the reactions to the publications of Jacques Loeb, T.H. Morgan, the malignant Alexis Carrel and others before and just after the First World War. The New York Times, for instance, greeted Loeb's observation of parthenogenetic division of sea urchin eggs with the headline "Chemical Creation of Life." Bataillon's experiments on frog embryos were hailed as "Tadpoles generated by Electricity," and later, in England, the Daily Mail greeted Julian Huxley's success in inducing metamorphosis in axolotls with the pronouncement: "Young Huxley has discovered the elixir of life." Or consider this small gem from the New York Times: "The Mexican consul in Trieste reports that Professor Herrera, a Mexican scientist, has succeeded in forming a human embryo by chemical combination."

That the level of public debate on the nature and implications of scientific discoveries has improved in recent years is due mainly to responsible scientists and to a new breed of able, scientifically informed science writers. As to the politicians - well, when I heard the Home Secretary solemnly state on the radio, in regard to some proposed legislation about dangerous breeds of dogs, that dogs have no DNA, I realised that we had some way still to go.

Quite recently a minister from the Department of the Environment sought to reassure an audience of environmentalists that they did not have to worry too much about the effects of global warming: expert opinion now had it that the sea level would rise no more than 20 meters by 2030 and only 65 meters by the end of the 21st century. A loud whisper came from his minder off-stage: "centimeters, Minister, centimeters." Ah, the benefits of a classical education!