Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein was written in 1818 and published in 1820. The book was fiction, but brought questions of science, philosophy, and ethics to the public in a way that dry science explanations could not. However, those discussions on the nature of life and death and what man and his knowledge could do about it were at the very forefront of science at the time, due to some very real experiments similar to Doctor Frankenstein's. Vox tackles how scientists at the time were pushing the limits of life itself, and scaring the daylights out of the rest of us.