Now that Dolly the clone has a little lamb, this is a timely study. The monster motif was supplied by Mary Shelley, sister of the doomed poet, during a rainy summer in Switzerland in 1816. Byron proposed that the party write a ghost story, and Mary's was the only one to be completed at the time. Her tale to awaken thrilling horror is about the laboratory creation of life. Few of us have read the original story, but most of us have recoiled from the truculent monster lumbering across cinema and television screens, having turned on its creator.

In tracing the history of the development of biological science over two centuries, Turney's thesis is that the Frankenstein story is not only central to, but governs much of, today's debate about the new age of biotechnology. In other words, the shadow of the beast born from a test tube continues to fall across the laboratory benches of the world.

The scientific credo was stated in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1912, in an article on Creating Life in the Laboratory. Life is a chemical reaction; death is the cessation of that reaction; living matter, from the microscopic yeast spore to humanity itself, is merely the result of certain accidental groupings of otherwise inert matter, and life can actually be created by repeating in the laboratory nature's own methods and processes.

Alexis Carrel, the 1912 Nobel prize-winner for physiology and medicine, claimed to have a living visceral being in his laboratory, though totally severed from the brain, a dog's heart beating its 120 beats a minute. In his Daedalus, or Science and the Future, published in 1924, JBS Haldane predicted that in 1951 the first ectogenetic child would be conceived and born outside the womb. A leading Catholic journal complained that the spirit of Frankenstein did not die with the Third Reich. His blood brothers regard a human being as just another expendable microbe, provided it is legally defenceless, physically helpless, and tiny enough to ride on the stage of a microscope.

The discovery of the DNA double-helix astounded the scientific world in 1953, accelerating the debate about the artificial creation of life. Louise Brown, the first child conceived after in vitro fertilisation, was born in 1977. Now Dolly the cloned sheep has given birth.

This is a thought-provoking account of a controversial subject. The scientists, in the race for funding and honours, must raise their faces from their microscopes and explain what they are attempting to do, and what the consequences could be, otherwise the lamb could end up eating the lion.