The Limits of Individual Plasticity

The Limits of Individual Plasticity is a short essay written by the science fiction author H.G. Wells in 1895. In it, Wells speculates his theories on the plasticity of animals, explaining that the default biological form of an animal may be altered in a way that it would continue to survive even if it, in any way, no longer resembles its inherent form. This could, according to Wells, theoretically be achieved through surgical or chemical modification. Wells was fully aware that surgical modification is only a physical change, and would not alter an animal's genetic blueprint. He made note that should an animal be surgically modified, its offspring would most likely retain its parent creature's original physical form. It was published in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art Volume 79 Issue 2047, pages 89-90 on Saturday, January 19th, 1895.

Transcript
The generalizations of heredity may be pushed to extremes, to an almost fanatical fatalism. There are excellent people who have elevated systematic breeding into a creed, and adorned it with a propaganda The hereditary tendency plays, in modern romance, the part of the malignant fairy, and its victims drive through life blighted from the very beginning. It often seems to be tacitly assumed that a living thing is at the utmost nothing more than the complete realization of its birth possibilities, and so heredity becomes confused with theological predestination. But, after all, the birth tendencies are only one set of factors in the making of the living creature. We overlook only too often the fact that a living being may also be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something that may be shaped and altered, that this, possibly, may be added and that eliminated, and the organism as a whole developed far beyond its apparent possibilities. We over- look this collateral factor, and so too much of our modern morality becomes mere subservience to natural selection, and we find it not only the discreetest but the wisest course to drive before the wind.

Now the suggestion this little article would advance is this: that there is in science, and perhaps even more so in history, some sanction for the belief that a living thing might be taken in hand and so moulded and modified that at best it would retain scarcely anything of its inherent form and disposition ; that the thread of life might be preserved unimpaired while shape and mental superstructure were so extensively recast as even to justify our regarding the result as a new variety of being. This proposition is purposely stated here in its barest and most startling form. It is not asserted that the changes effected would change in any way the offspring of such a creature, but only that the creature itself as an individual is capable of such recasting.

It may be that the facts to be adduced in support of this possibility will strike the reader as being altogether too trivial and familiar for their superstructure. But they are adduced only to establish certain principles, and these principles, which are perfectly established by these small things, have never been shown conclusively to be necessarily limited to these small things. For reasons that it would not be hard to discover, they have in practice been so restricted in the past ; but that is the sum of their assured restriction. Now first, how far may the inherent bodily form of an animal be operated upon? There are several obvious ways: amputation, tongue-cutting, the surgical removal of a squint, and the excision of organs will occur to the mind at once. In many cases excisions result in extensive secondary changes, pigmentary disturbances, increase in the secretion of fatty tissue, and a multitude of correlative changes. Then there is a kind of surgical operation of which the making of a false nose, in cases where that feature has been destroyed, is the most familiar example. A flap of skin is cut from the forehead, turned down on the nose, and heals in the new position. This is anew kind of grafting of part of an animal upon itself in a new position. Grafting of freshly obtained material from another animal is also possible, has been done in the case of teeth, for example. Still more significant are the graftings of skin and bone—cases where the surgeon, despairing of natural healing, places in the middle of the wound pieces of skin snipped from another individual, fragments of bone from a fresh-killed animal; and the medical student will at once recall Hunter’s cock-spur flourishing on the bull’s neck, So much for the form. The physiology, the chemical rhythm of the creature, may also be made to undergo an enduring modification, of which vaccination and other methods of innoculation with living or dead matter are examples. A similar operation is the transfusion of blood, although in this case the results are more dubious. These are all familiar cases. Less familiar and probably far more extensive were the operations of those abominable medieval practitioners who made dwarfs and show monsters, and some vestiges of whose art still remain in the preliminary manipulation of the young mountebank or contortionist. Victor Hugo gives us an account of them, dark and stormy, after his wont, in ‘‘ L’Homme qui Rit.” But enough has been said to remind the reader that it is a possible thing to transplant tissue from one part of an animal to another, or from one animal to another, to alter its chemical reactions and methods of growth, to modify the articulation of its limbs, and indeed to change it in its most intimate structure. And yet this has never been sought as an end and systematically by investigators. Some of such things have been hit-upon in the last resort of surgery; most of the kindred evidence that will recur to the reader's mind has been demonstrated as it were by accident—by criminals, by the breeders of horses and dogs 3 kinds of untrained men working for their own immediate ends. It is impossible to believe that the last w anything near it, of individual modification has reached. If we concede the justifications of vivisect we may imagine as possible in the future, Operators, armed with antiseptic surgery and a growing in the knowledge of the laws of growth, taking living creatures and moulding them into the most i forms ; it may be, even reviving the monsters of mythology, realizing the fantasies of the taxidermist, his mermaids and what-not, in flesh and blood.

The thing does not stop at a mere physical metamorphosis. In our growing science of hypnotism we find the promise of a possibility of replacing old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing; the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed of what ye call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct ; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into pseudo-religious emotion.

We have said enough to develop this curious position. It may be the set limits of structure and psychical capacity are narrower than is here supposed, But as the case stands this artistic treatment of living things, this moulding of the commonplace individual into the beautiful or the grotesque, certainly seems go far credible as to merit a place in our minds among the things that may some day be.

The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
The essay is paraphrased in chapter 14 of The Island of Doctor Moreau where Dr. Moreau explains how and why he created his beast-men. In addition to the themes of the short essay, it talks about pain and Moreau's conviction that people rely too much on visible pain to make decisions despite so much unseen pain, the selfishness of genes and the greater good of intellectual pleasure.