This is Akiraio from Brainson, where we're serious about being curious.

Brainson is supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

This is Brainson, I'm Molly Bloom, and I'm here to transport you to a dark and stormy night in 1816.

Now, 1816 is known as the year without a summer. All over the world, the weather was cold and

dreary, crops didn't grow well, and some rivers flooded, there were ice storms in July in New England.

It was not a normal summer. People weren't aware at the time, but it is now believed that a massive

volcano in Indonesia was responsible for this strangely cool and stormy time. A volcano called Mount

Tambora erupted the year before, and it sent a massive cloud of dust into the atmosphere,

so big in fact that it had an impact on the whole world's climate.

And it was during this year without a summer that an 18-year-old named Mary Shelley was staying

at a house in Switzerland. She was there with some friends, many of their writers. They were on

a beautiful lake, but the weather forced them to stay inside. As is the appropriate activity for

a cold night, they were reading a book of ghost stories allowed around a fire. Inspired,

one of Mary's friends suggested they each try to write their own ghost story. An out of Mary's

imagination, Frankenstein was born. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein was published 200 years ago in 1818.

In it, a university student named Victor Frankenstein assembles different dead body parts into a

single body and is able to bring this body back to life. Victor Frankenstein abandons his creation,

forcing the creature to try to find his way in a world that is afraid of him.

There's a lot that happens in this story, but the source of inspiration for this important moment

came from science. It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my

toils with an anxiety that almost amounted to agony. I collected the instruments of life around me,

that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already

...