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- [00:04]
Dr. Evie Kendall
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- [00:33]
Pat McConville
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- [00:35]
Dr. Evie Kendall
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- [01:35]
Pat McConville
How does art shape ideas? Join me as I explore this question through conversations with philosophers and thinkers about the influence of art on their scholarly work. I'm Pat McConville and this is Concept Art. In this episode, I speak with Dr. Evie Kendall. We discuss Nostalgia TV ectogenesis and the uses and misuses of science fiction. Dr. Evie Kendall is a bioethicist and public health scientist whose work focuses on emerging technologies. Dr. Evie Kendall, thank you for joining Concept Art.
- [02:15]
Dr. Evie Kendall
Thank you.
- [02:16]
Pat McConville
Can you begin by telling us a little about yourself and how you came to be doing your academic work?
- [02:20]
Dr. Evie Kendall
I started, I started off doing a biomedical science, and I had always really loved literature and theater in high school, and I maybe made it through about one semester of just pure science before I realized I was dying inside. And I really needed something creative, that outlet for the sort of literary interest. So I took on a diploma of English literature and that was a great balance for me. So I'd be in the lab and then I'd go read some fairy tales. And that was a fantastic sort of opportunity to have both of those sides of my interests being met. And after that, of course I was like, what do I do now? After I finished my biomed degree, I've finished this diploma of literature. So I Did an honors degree in literature, but then also did a master's in public health later on. And so got a bit of a balance there where I've got, again, more literature, but also more health. So that interest coming through, and eventually the PhD in bioethics was bringing in some science fiction and emerging technologies. So the ethics of artificial wombs and how they're represented in science fiction, literature, film, culture, et cetera. So, again, always sort of bringing those two areas in together, the science, particularly health and technology, and then more artistic interests, literature, cultural studies, et cetera.
- [03:40]
Pat McConville
Has art influenced your academic work?
- [03:42]
Dr. Evie Kendall
Art has been very influential in my academic work, and I suspect, when we think about it, it's probably influential in most people's academic. People often ask what I was doing during the pandemic because I am trained as an epidemiologist. And a lot of what I was doing was the same as everyone else. Sitting on my couch watching nostalgia TV to feel better. So when people are asking, what's the most important job for people at this time, I was like, well, one of the most important things has been improving people's moods by giving them things to experience that get them out of their own head, that help them explore other worlds when they're stuck in the living room with nothing to do. And a lot of that is art and culture.
- [04:21]
Pat McConville
What sort of things have sustained you through these periods of challenge?
- [04:25]
Dr. Evie Kendall
So I read a lot of romance, a lot of science fiction when I was studying literature. There's this divide between capital L, literature, very worthy literature, the kind of thing that wins awards, literary prizes. And then there's what we often called trash lit, and that was romance fiction detection, you know, detective fiction. So science fiction can be in either of those categories, depending on when it was written and how people feel toward it. So sometimes it's about the reception of a work rather than the intrinsic properties of the work. And the technologies that are being sort of theorized in. A lot of science fiction are very interesting. A lot of it is near future possibility. And then you can look at, okay, what kind of societal changes are likely to occur if a particular technology is. Is released into the world? And what kind of changes might we want in order to prevent some of the more negative outcomes that we might find in dystopian science fiction in particular? So it does give you a bit of a roadmap of what we could do, what we perhaps should do, and what we definitely shouldn't be doing in terms of the integration of emerging technology into society.
- [05:35]
Pat McConville
In a paper titled Science Fiction in a Role for Feminist Narratology in the journal Medical Humanities. You criticize the misuse of many science fiction texts by bioethicists and argue that it is important to use appropriate literary analysis when engaging with texts. What are the uses and misuses of fiction in bioethics? What kind of literary tools can help address these?
- [05:59]
Dr. Evie Kendall
The thing that most bothered me when I started doing bioethics research on artificial wombs or ectogenesis was the negative attitudes that people would often have as a snap decision before you have a chance to even tell them who might benefit from this technology, why it would be perhaps useful for families, individuals, et cetera, and how it might actually be positive for fetuses in terms of safety and development. Before you have a chance to do that, someone will throw an image from science fiction, a very negative dystopian image, something like from the Matrix. And it's as if that's their whole argument. They've got this negative connotation they've come across. And, and in bioethics scholarship, you would expect better than that. You would expect that there's a real argument behind what people are objecting to, that they're really thinking through the pros and cons. But in some limited circumstances, of course, not everyone does this, but in some limited circumstances, we find the same kind of snap judgment when we engage with other fields of research, particularly in bioethics. It's important to respect the history of those fields of research and to. To genuinely engage with their practitioners and with their processes and methodologies, as opposed to cherry picking things that perhaps work for our arguments without going further in depth. So literature is just one example that we have historically cherry picked things from without really giving it a lot of thought. And it's not doing a good service to literature, but it's also a disservice to bioethics as well. So focusing on the richness of genuine interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Science fiction has the technology, the shiny thing that you look at, but it's often not actually about the tech itself. It's about the integration into society. And when you take the piece of technology in the abstract and apply it as if it were going to be exactly the same in the real world as in whatever dystopian world has been built in that science fiction narrative, without any of the other social changes that are likely to attend a new technology in the real world, it's very unrealistic. So a lot of the technologies, particularly things like artificial wombs, that you see, in science fiction, it's not really about the artificial womb. The dystopia is almost never caused by that technology. There's a lot of other elements, a lot of social and political changes that actually lead to that dystopia. And because you can't actually see those things, they're quite abstract, the thing that you can focus the audience's attention on is the shiny image of the technology. So you can't visualize some of that social oppression, but you can give them a very negative image of, say, a factory of human beings being grown. So you can capture the idea of people losing their autonomy, their individuality. You can have this idea of we are all just cogs in a machine. We're being sort of churned out in the capitalist system that we have. And a great image to capture that idea is, of course, fields of humans being grown for collecting energy, as we see in the Matrix. But it's not actually about that tech. It's about the oppression and about humans actually being stripped of that individuality, which is quite separate to the use of artificial gestation technologies in that particular film, for example.
- [09:20]
Pat McConville
Why do you think dystopia is such a constant motif of science fiction?
- [09:25]
Dr. Evie Kendall
I think dystopia is so dominant in science fiction, but particularly the science fiction used in bioethics, because it's interesting and it's exploring really interesting parts of the experience of being human. Utopian narratives, and I mean utopian as in perfect world scenarios. They're just a bit boring. There are science fiction scholars who talk about that, that there was a time where utopian narratives were quite popular. One of my favorite is Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. It's very funny, but the reason it's funny is because looking back now, you can say, well, that's not utopian from my definition. It sounds pretty awful, actually. And it's funny because when you see it in its sort of socio historical context, you can understand why that would have been considered a sort of revolutionary utopian idea. And the interest in the drama comes from the fact that you have this displaced character who's sort of jettisoned into the future and has to deal with this very different world. And this sort of dramatic irony you get from that is what brings the interest to that story. But again, that kind of genre of writing fell out of favor quite some time ago. And we went very heavily to the other side, which is that dystopian exploration of possible futures. So what if this new technology existed? What if time travel was real? And what if and then we can substitute any manner of thing in there. And that's a lot of what we're doing in bioethics as well. We're saying, what if we actually changed the law on voluntary assisted dying? What would happen? What kind of problems might we find? And science fiction actually lets us see one potential future in which we've changed laws or we've developed some piece of technology, we've changed something about human nature, and then it can extrapolate what might happen, but it's doing so in a very artificial way and sometimes taking imagery from that particular genre and just sort of smooshing it into our real world experience without taking into account the very unique context that we live in and the very different context of the science fiction world. It again, can be very unrealistic and it can substitute for more in depth arguments about technology and what we do and do not want to develop.
- [11:40]
Pat McConville
One of the other observations that you make in that paper is that there is a pattern of over reliance on technopessimistic science fiction or dystopian science fiction which we've been talking about, which bioethicists use to warn about technology. You wrote a short science fiction piece for the Berggruen Institute last year entitled Extraterrestrial Ectogenesis, which depicts a wider range of speculative futures. In Ectogenesis, can you firstly tell us about ecogenesis and also about the relationship between writing and producing bioethics and writing and producing creative work? Are your goals different or the same?
- [12:16]
Dr. Evie Kendall
So the Berggruen Institute piece was a really interesting one that was commissioned. So for me, they reached out saying, well, you do work on artificial wombs or ectogenesis, and we would like a story of a future possible society that's used this particular method of reproduction. So I really wanted to make sure that I didn't do the cheap narrative ploy of, you know, this is all dystopian because it's got this technology. So I wanted there to be options. So I have multiple planets and they've all used or not used artificial womb or artificial gestation in different ways. And they've had different legal systems, they've had different social systems, and it's a bit of an sort of account of what might happen in each of those different scenarios. And I guess when it comes to the use of the creative utopian bioethics method that I was developing for that, it was more a case of here's the tech, here's the bioethics, arguments for and against. Here are some characters that we can make Real in terms of the drama. So these are characters that really experience a reality in which this technology does or does not exist and exist in a particular way. Remembering that when we're dealing with literature, we're dealing with techniques like, you know, point of view, focalization. Whose story are we actually being exposed to? Is that a reliable narrator? Are they telling us the truth? And what would it be like if there was someone else whose point of view you were receiving instead? So I always like to give the example of Gattaca. It's quite a famous film, even though it is quite old. Most people feel rather antagonistic toward the genetic engineering of that show. Because the characters that we're positioned to sort of empathize with are the ones who have been disadvantaged by this technology being widely taken up in society. And lots of genetic engineering sort of changing the goalpost for what's normal. Had we been positioned in a case where a family had a genetic disorder and they were devastated that, you know, baby after baby ended up being diagnosed with this condition. And particularly if it's lethal and you're watching a family just watch their baby die over and over. And then we offered them a genetic therapy or this type of engineering that would actually allow that child to live longer, not have that disease or whatever it is. That would be a very different film, and we'd have very different views about the exact same technological innovation there. So when I was writing my creative work, I was thinking, okay, whose perspective are we actually going to focus on and make sure that it wasn't always the same in each case? And then crystallizing an issue that I see a lot, which is the conflation of one technology with another. So a common example for artificial wombs is a lot of fiction. And bioethics will conflate this with things like cloning. Now, those technologies are not related. There's no reason to assume they'd be used together. They're very separate. One could legislate on one and not the other. One could allow one and prohibit the other. There's no reason to sort of put them together and assume that the one will lead to the other. A lot of science fiction does assume that, though they think as soon as there's artificial wombs, the argument is often that there'll be human factory. So lots of cloning, human enslavement, all these things that we see in those dystopian narratives. Transplanting that into the real world is, of course, inaccurate. It's not taking into account all the other considerations like human reproductive cloning. Is banned. There's no reason to think that the current advancements in artificial gestation are likely to impact that. Running a business comes with a lot of what ifs, but luckily there's a simple answer to Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses, including Thrive Cosmetics and Momofuku, and it'll help you with everything you need. From website design and marketing to boosting sales and expanding operations, Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality. Turn those what ifs into Sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com SpecialOffer Imagine fast hydration combined with balanced energy. Perfectly flavored with zero artificial sweeteners. Introducing Liquid Ivy's new energy multiplier. Sugar free. Unlike other energy drinks, you know the ones that make you feel like you're glitching, it's made with natural caffeine and electrolytes so you get the boost without the burnout. Liquid IVs need new energy multiplier Sugar free hydrating energy Tap the banner to.
- [16:48]
Pat McConville
Learn more why do you think we do make that mistake of conflating all the technologies? Like developing exogenesis therefore leads to cloning, which then takes over society. Why do we think that? Do we just get carried away? Or are we so primed to think that if we've got it, we've got to use it? Like there's this technological imperative. What do you think it is?
- [17:08]
Dr. Evie Kendall
I think it partly is that technological imperative, that determinism. If it can be done, it will be done. People will misuse technology. But the reality is most scientists are actually not evil masterminds in the lab hoping to clone people. They're actually just helping to cure diseases. That's often their focus. Or they just want to know more about the world and how it works. Most people are not actually looking to misuse technology, but we need to make sure, of course, for the very few that are, that we have protections in place, but also that we don't inadvertently cause harm because we haven't thought through the potential ramifications of new developments, and particularly in reproductive biotechnologies. Because we're not just dealing with a pregnant person who might be exposed to something that could be harmful. We're also talking about a potential future person. So we're talking about embryos, fetuses, et cetera, and of course in some cases, future children. So keeping in mind that we want to think through some of these ramifications, and I think we do perhaps sometimes get carried away with that and Think what else could be associated with this, rather than separating out what is intrinsic to this technology and what is perhaps just the broader social implications that may or may not occur, depending on how we release that technology, how thoughtful we are, and how well we sort of regulate and legislate these new technologies. And what other things do we want to perhaps make sure do not overlap? So if we want to say we want artificial gestation, particularly if we want it to help survival rates for very premature infants, which is the current use of the prototypes that are being developed, that's their use case. If we want that, but we don't want reproductive cloning, we can do that. That's actually quite simple. We maintain the prohibition on human reproductive cloning, while we allow the experimentation on new gestational sort of support technologies. And most people working in that area are only interested in a very narrow window of prematurity, that they think they can significantly improve survival rates and reduce morbidity, mortality, et cetera. So focusing on what good do we want to make sure we can achieve, and what negative things can we easily avoid if we are very thoughtful about how we actually develop and release technology?
- [19:30]
Pat McConville
You've talked about perspective, keeping in mind a literary point of view. How important just is a decent charitable thing. Thorough literary reading of texts, how important is that to bioethical analysis in terms.
- [19:44]
Dr. Evie Kendall
Of close reading, thorough reading, I think it's absolutely essential because what we see in many uses of science fiction in bioethics is misreading the classic. Of course, people saying Frankenstein when they mean Dr. Frankenstein or they mean the Frankenstein's monster or whatever it is, like that's the classic. But it really highlights that it's not actually the text being referred to. It's sort of some cultural currency that the text has. And the problem with that is, of course, it's very imprecise. If I say Frankenstein, I might assume that, you know that I mean misuse of science or going beyond nature's bounds or whatever. But maybe that's not how you're interpreting that text. If you've read that text very closely, you might see it as, you know, the tragic victim of technology is the monster. And we need to be more careful regarding that element rather than perhaps the intended meaning, if that's what you intended of we have to ban science and hubristic scientists from sort of violating natural boundaries. So you can take very different meanings from that. And if you've done a closer sort of reading of that text, it will be more effective in terms of communicating what you mean and making sure it's not actually going to be misunderstood by someone who has an entirely different experience or has, in fact, no experience of that text and is just relying on that sort of cultural understanding.
- [21:09]
Pat McConville
Sort of. What I'm hearing is that a lot of the time when we're doing sort of bioethical analysis using texts, we're not actually using texts, we're using tropes.
- [21:19]
Dr. Evie Kendall
Yes. Yeah.
- [21:20]
Pat McConville
It's a very cheap form of kind of analysis.
- [21:24]
Dr. Evie Kendall
Yes. So it was described to me once as scholastically lazy. I thought that was a great phrase. So it's not really arguing, it's using a trump card. Because you know that people have a visceral negative reaction as soon as you say Brave New World. People know that you're talking about something bad. They don't know necessarily what it is. But even if you haven't read the text, you know that it's bad. And people often have an idea that what's wrong with Brave New World has something to do with reproductive technologies. Just because it opens with a scene that uses an experimental technology, Anyone who's actually read the text will know that the negative element of Brave New World is actually psychological conditioning and sort of political control through manipulation of cognition. It really has nothing to do with artificial wombs. It's just a very interesting part of the plot that you get to get this wonderful description of a technology that's quite fascinating, but it doesn't really play a role in the dystopian elements of the narrative if you read it carefully. So connecting Brave New World to reproductive technologies is demonstrating not really much of an understanding of what's actually dystopian in that text.
- [22:45]
Pat McConville
If we need to read texts closely to do good bioethics with them, how hopeful can we be that bioethicists, bioethics students and practitioners can or will use sex properly? Should we stop using Frankenstein until everybody's actually read it?
- [23:00]
Dr. Evie Kendall
Ideally, we would stop using Frankenstein unless we've read it, partly because it's sort of disrespectful to the field of literature to not read the text and then assume you know what it means, having not actually engaged with it. When we use literature in a way that is not treating it as a real text, not actually engaging with it in. In a genuine way, it not only denigrates the literature, but also it's insufficient in terms of the response. Like, there's a lot more we could get out of engaging with literature if we do it in a sort of more thoughtful, deep way. It also sets up A false dichotomy between what's real and what's fake. In bioethics, we often have, you know, those clinical vignettes where we say, you know, Mr. G needs a heart transplant, but Mrs. F also needs a heart transplant. And what are we going to do? How do we make this decision? And we try to distill it down to as universal concept as possible. So we try to make sure that there's nothing particularly unique or idiosyncratic about either of those characters. But that's not how the real world works at all. These are real people there. They've got relationships, they've got histories, they've got quirks. And in a science fiction text, you would know that about the character, because that's the point. Characterization is part of that art. And it's actually really important to contextualize the whole person and their story. We are a storytelling species. So when we try to distill things down to these very universal concepts of, well, this person has prognosis X. And we're not going to take anything else into consideration because we have to be universal with our ethics, even though none of us really are, it does set up that. That false idea of what's real and what's just fiction. And it does so in a way that denigrates the fiction as if it matters less when the reality is. As I was saying, during COVID those stories mattered a lot. That nostalgia TV kept a lot of people alive. Stories really matter.
- [24:50]
Pat McConville
You have a book coming out with Bloomsbury Academic in 2026 entitled Science Fiction and the Ethics of Artificial Wombs. I wonder if you could tell us about some of the texts that you consider in that book. Perhaps you could talk to us about Octavia Butler's novel Dawn and the film the Pod Generation.
- [25:06]
Dr. Evie Kendall
Dawn was a fantastic text to study for this particular project because I was looking at narratology. And in literary studies, narratology has fallen out of favor. It was very, very popular a while ago, and I find it a particularly interesting literary sort of analysis tool because it's about structure rather than about interpretation. So you look at the structural elements of the text, the plot, characterization, focalization, et cetera, and you can actually extract data from these narratives that you can directly compare, even if the narratives are about completely different things and even if people have very, very different interpretations. So we have a situation where we have a text that is enduring. It's very popular, written within a sort of black Afro futurist modality, and it does discuss the future of the human species. Human reproduction, the problems and oppression that particularly women of color have suffered as a result of disadvantaged in societies throughout history. And then it looks at what would happen if the whole of society was taken over by, you know, this alien species breeding with the humans. Because, of course, this is a more genetic merging story. The narrative point of view is from the character Lilith, who is a human who very much favors natural birth and is very antagonistic toward the genetic sort of merging of species, very antagonistic toward that, and believes that it is oppressive that the human species will essentially be extinct if they're no longer considered to be all human DNA in that sort of purity sense. So it's very interesting because one of the other methods that could be used to perpetuate the alien species and of course, the humans, given the lack of available human beings to actually gestate future humans, would be to use the artificial wombs that we are told these aliens actually do have. We're told that they could use artificial gestation, but they're choosing to use the bodies of these human survivors to carry sort of the human alien hybrid babies. And that's a trauma for Lilith because for her, as I said, she was very focused on what she considered to be natural childbirth and minimizing any interaction with sort of like a Western medicine model. Very sort of focused on organic sort of healthy living, that kind of thing. Had we got the story from a different point of view, it might have been a completely different narrative. It may have been very positive toward the idea of using artificial gestation to create hybrids. It may have been very positive toward the hybridization as a method of survival for two different species. But because we get Lilith's point of view, everything is cast in that very negative light. So that's the version of that story we get. The Pod Generation is a really interesting film. It's very recent, and I was hoping it would be more popular than it was because it does provide at least a bit of a counter narrative to things like the Matrix and what we have coming through. The Pod Generation is a more nuanced account of how an artificial gestation company might actually function. So it's interesting because it does release the technology into a recognisable capitalist model for healthcare that we are familiar with. And it does extrapolate from things that are actually quite likely. Companies are likely to try and benefit financially from things like artificial gestation and having the very best technology to provide exogenesis services, in the same way that we see companies making enormous profits from things like ivf. So that part is quite realistic. And then of course, it introduces this tech into the world. We still have some people who are gestating biologically, but the vast majority of people seem to be using these pods that they essentially rent from a company. And you see the experience of a couple who are having a child through one of these pods and how the milestones of pregnancy are treated in this sort of artificial. So you get to see externalized certain developmental milestones of this embryo and fetus and the kind of reactions that these parents are having. And then you have that discussion of bonding and whether the physical act of gestating is part of that or should be part of that. And the reality is, of course, it is part of it for some people and not for others. One of the challenges that we have when we talk about artificial gestation is people often essentialize the experience of gestation and assume that it's a wonderful bonding experience that can't be replaced by anything else. And the reality is, a lot of people feel very negatively toward their pregnancy. They're very unwell. And a lot of people feel very negatively toward childbirth and they can be severely injured. And obviously pregnancy and childbirth are particularly associated with morbidity and mortality for otherwise healthy young women. So we have a situation where we've taken away that risk, but people often assume that that also loses some essential bonding experience. What we see in the pod generation is actually a really good example of how artificial gestation could improve bonding opportunities and involvement for male partners. We see the male partner actually taking the pod to work and sort of wearing it around his chest as if it's a pregnant belly and having this great bonding experience with his fetus. But then we see the female protagonist feeling like she's lost some of that organic bonding experience and how she deals with that. So overall, the pod generation still does have a number of problematic stereotypes. But it is still very interesting in terms of what benefits could this technology actually yield. And considering how this technology is likely to be co opted for capitalist gain is a very necessary discussion. So I think there's still a lot that we can get out of that film, Even though it does have a number of problematic stereotypes, particularly about women's role in reproduction.
- [31:18]
Pat McConville
Now, Evie, what are you currently working on?
- [31:20]
Dr. Evie Kendall
Oh, what am I currently not working on? So you mentioned the book is coming out soon and that's obviously science fiction, Artificial wombs. And I'm also working on that codifying the creative bioethics sort of methodology, creative utopian bioethics methodology that I've been working through for the last few years. So coming up with an idea where people can replicate some of this sort of analysis of particularly literature, but other forms of art as well, and using that in bioethics and the other things I am currently working on are mostly planetary defense and space base ethics. So the ethics of dealing with asteroidal and cometary impact hazards for Earth and what kind of technologies we should develop and allow to use and how we should use them if we were to be, you know, predicted to be hit by an asteroid.
- [32:15]
Pat McConville
Thanks so much, Evie. I appreciate you taking so much time to talk with us about science fiction and your work. Listeners can find links to Dr. Kendall's work and science of the art we've discussed on the concept art website. Dr. Evie Kendall, thank you for joining.
- [32:30]
Dr. Evie Kendall
Concept Art thank you.
- [32:43]
Pat McConville
Concept Art is produced on Mooinina country in La Truita, Tasmania. Always was, always will be aboriginal land.
- [33:09]
Dr. Evie Kendall
Here we have the limu emu in.
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Pat McConville
Its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug Limu.
- [33:24]
Dr. Evie Kendall
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- [33:31]
Pat McConville
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- [33:32]
Dr. Evie Kendall
Liberty Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates.
- [33:35]
Pat McConville
Excludes Massachusetts.