Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus" close to 200 hundred years ago. She conceived the idea during a wild weekend retreat in 1816 with the poets Byron and Shelley and a physician, Dr. Polidori. Her novel was published in 1818.

It's a powerful story; it must be, to have remained in print for so long and to have survived some bizarre Hollywood versions.

In these, the moral issues of the original work are lost and the monster is at center stage. The cinematic special effects and the harnessing of the lightning were nowhere in the original book. In the movies Baron Frankenstein loses ground to his own creation - to the point where in that classic film, "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein," the Baron is not there at all, his role having been taken over by Count Dracula. The word "Frankenstein" has passed thoroughly (and wrongly) into the language, so when children say, "you look like Frankenstein," we all know what they mean.

The most interesting thing about the book "Frankenstein," however, may be its scientific respectability.

In Mary Shelley's time, the idea of the spontaneous generation of life from dead matter was widely accepted. Maggots were believed to appear naturally in dead meat, eels and amphibians were spawned from the mud at the bottom of ponds. Also, electricity was one of the biggest mysteries of the day. Galvani's experiments, showing how an electric charge could cause the leg of a dead frog to twitch, seemed to show an intimate connection between electricity and life. How much easier, then, it must have seemed to reanimate a corpse made from an assemblage of once-living parts by giving it the "spark of life," than to create life from raw inanimate materials.

History doesn't record anyone using Mary Shelley's book as the starting point for a series of practical experiments, though I can imagine some pretty messy teenage science projects hidden away in the cellars of nineteenth century Europe. What the book did do was question the relationship between living and non-living things. Many people in Mary Shelley's time, partly motivated by religion, had a strong conviction that living organisms were not just an assembly of chemicals. Plants and animals were thought to be basically different from inorganic forms, because they contained a "vital force" unique to living things.

It was easy to hold this view when almost every substance found in the human body could not be made in the alchemist's retorts. But just ten years after Mary Shelley's book was published, the chemist Friedrich Whler was able to synthesize urea, a substance never before found outside a living organism.

From that beginning, the chemists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced, from raw materials having nothing to do with plants or animals, many of the sugars, proteins, fats, and vitamins found in the bodies of animals and humans. This leads to the natural question: if we can make the materials that compose living things, can we make life itself? Will there be, some day, a real Baron Frankenstein?

I ask many questions that I can't answer, but this is not one of them. We can make life, and no matter how controversial this may prove, one day we will.

I can even point the direction that the process will take. At the heart of all life is its genetic code, the DNA that must copy itself to produce the next generation. We know that the information stored in DNA is provided by sequences of just four molecules, adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. These sequences completely define the organism, so one organism differs from another only according to the length and variability of the A-C-G-T strings of molecules. The full DNA sequence for any living thing is known as its genome.

We have mapped completely the genome of certain living things, including some viruses, bacteria, and, very recently, fruit flies. We are well on the way to mapping the full human genome.

However, there is much more to creating most creatures than mapping their genomes. Even a tiny bacterium contains within its single cell a complex interacting set of parts and functions. The place to start when we want to create life from scratch is with a virus, a stripped-down organism containing little more than its own reproductive code, and parasitic on other living entities for everything else, including the machinery that makes reproduction possible.

When we make life it will almost certainly be a virus. And how soon will we be able to do such a thing? I'm guessing, of course, but we are not talking the far future. I believe that Baron Frankenstein's spiritual heir will create a form of functioning virus from inanimate components within twenty years.

And yes, that thought frightens me as much as it frightens you.

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