Could there be some crazy disease somewhere in a lab that would turn the entire planet into brain-eating zombies or sunlight-fearing vampires? No way. Beefing up shark brains to make them super-smart predators? I don’t think so. Crazed prehistoric-sized piranhas that will devour anybody with an inflatable floatie and a cooler? Please. They want us to believe this stuff?

Like take the insane DNA-spliced mutant monsters that make terrifying cameos throughout the Hunger Games. I’m supposed to believe that one day we could be ripped apart by mutant wolves with tribute eyes? Stung by poisonous and relentless tracker jackers? Or get devoured by giant lizard men?

Seriously?

As it turns out ... maybe so.

Not only do muttations—“mutts” for short—already exist in our world, but the stuff real scientists are doing is far wackier and sometimes scarier than what we see in the Hunger Games—if you can imagine that.

In this essay, you’ll read about some of the movie-worthy stuff going on in labs right now that makes jabberjays seem quaint. We’ll talk about why real-life sci-fi is way scarier than anything you might find in the Hunger Games, and about the lesson we can learn from Panem about not playing God and using science wisely.

But first: let’s talk about the science that makes mutts possible: genetic engineering.

You may have heard of Polly, but did you know that another sheep was actually genetically engineered with some human genes fused into the DNA of the sheep? CNN reported the news in 1997 shortly after Polly was born and before many countries passed laws banning experiments using human DNA. So, yes, technically, we’ve already had a human-sheep hybrid. Of course, we aren’t talking about an unusually furry guy named Bob who can produce the wool to make his own argyle sweaters. While a human-sheep hybrid sounds pretty creepy, these post-Polly hybrids looked like sheep; they only had a few human genes among tens of thousands.

And we didn’t stop with sheep.

In 2001, American scientists genetically spliced a jellyfish gene into a moth, making a new moth designed to kill the pink bollworm—a pest that destroys cotton crops. Jellyfish and moths? It sounds exactly like something you’d find in the Games.

But genetic engineering gets weirder.

Scientists have been working on genetically engineering silkworms that could spin silk strong enough to repel bullets by splicing silkworms and spiders. By weight, spider-silk could be stronger than steel and tougher than man-made fibers used in a soldier’s body armor.

Gene splicing is pretty much what it sounds like. You cut into the DNA of a gene to add some new stuff—except you don’t use a knife. You use chemicals—certain enzymes that will “cut” into the DNA strand. Then scientists add in new DNA and glue it all back together with another enzyme. Since DNA is what makes a cell a cell and determines its function, the splice in DNA causes changes—like the production of extra-strong spider silk or pink bollworm poison. And, there you have it, the beginning of our very own mutts

One day we could even be eating nothing but mutts.

The New Scientist in July reported that scientists have already engineered pigs with omega-3 fatty acids. So forget bacon and eggs—you might be able to get all your nutrients straight from the bacon. They’re also working on cows immune to BSE, or mad-cow disease, and a host of other engineered animals, including faster-growing salmon that could be on our dinner tables faster than you can swim upstream. And unless you live in Europe, where there are stricter laws governing genetically engineered foods, nearly every kind of vegetable or grain you eat is already genetically engineered.¹⁶ From tomatoes that stay ripe longer to green peppers and zucchini that are resistant to viruses and pests to rice that contains more Vitamin A, most of our crops are genetically engineered in some way.

So, we’re working on some seriously crazy stuff. Some possible super dystopian sci-fi Panem stuff. (I might have to stop saying “seriously?” at the movies and start taking the possibility of a shark/squid hybrid or a time-traveling hot tub, actually, well—seriously.)

They’re terrifying. They’re unnatural. They’re bloodthirsty and murderous. They attack without warning, and they don’t stop until their victim is dead. They devour, slash, and rip apart the living. In the sewers in the Capitol, Katniss Everdeen flees a lizard mutant:

These aren’t just predators, they’re actually driven mad by the need to kill. They work themselves into a frenzy, like sharks when there’s blood in the water, except that even sharks eventually stop killing. Mutts never do—no matter how much they eat.

“No mutt is good,” Katniss says in Mockingjay. And let’s face it. Science can be scary. It’s no accident that the mad scientist is an enduring villain who creeps up at every Halloween party. Mad, ego-driven, over-confident scientists have been the bad guys in everything from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the crazy gene-splicing madman in The Island of Dr. Moreau and the wellmeaning but over-reaching scientist couple in Splice. The idea that science can lead to the unnatural creation of monsters isn’t new to the Hunger Games, and it’s easy to take that to mean science is, well, evil.

Let’s look at what else Katniss says in Mockingjay about mutts:

The killer mutts are terrifying, but it’s not because of science. The Gamemakers and the scientists designed them to scare the stuffing out of you. That’s why they are such effective weapons. It’s not just that they’re unnatural; it’s that they’re created specifically to get inside your head and stay there. If mutts are bad, it’s not because science is bad. It’s because the people who created them are.

After all, not all science in Panem is bad. There’s an upside to science—even in Panem.

Take Peeta. The Capitol’s scientists torture him to near insanity using tracker jacker venom, but then Beetee—the most scientific of the tributes (Katniss calls him a smart inventor who “could tell by sight that a force field had been put up” in Catching Fire)—Prim, and the other doctors and scientists in District 13 help Peeta recover using similarly scientific antibrainwashing techniques. And the very technology that brings tracker jackers and killer monkeys to life in the arena ultimately saves Katniss’ life when she finds herself desperately wounded by an explosion during the last rebellion battle in the Capitol. She’s engulfed in flame, but genetically modified skin grafts help her walk and move again. Science saves her life.

After, Katniss refers to herself as a mutt, but it’s clear that just by receiving the treatment she hasn’t turned into some killing machine, like the lizard monsters that chased her through the sewers. She’s the same Katniss she always was.

So—we have the very same technology in Panem being used for very different things. It can be used to create monsters or to save lives.

Science is only a tool; it’s how you use it that matters. Which means that if we just use our science for good, then we’re in the clear, right? I mean, as long as we create things with good intentions, then we’ll never create an evil, bloodthirsty monster. Then—presto!—science is good and everybody wins. Right?

Maybe you already see where I’m going with this.

Once you create a new technology, even with the best of intentions, you can’t always control how it’s used or what the consequences are. The rebel forces of District 13 fall prey to this. When Gale helps the rebels develop new weapons in Mockingjay with the idea of saving lives in the districts and righting past wrongs, they end up killing a member of Katniss’ family, a tragedy he’d hadn’t foreseen and would never have wanted. He is the one who helps Beetee come up with the plans for the bomb that is later used to kill Prim: a bomb with one explosion that kills the soldiers and then a second, delayed explosion targeting the rescue workers who come to help them. Gale’s hand in developing this weapon, whether it was the rebellion’s bomb that killed Prim or not, costs him Katniss’ love.

That’s the problem with developing weapons in particular. Even weapons you hope will advocate the “good” cause might be turned against you—or maybe even the very people you’re trying the hardest to protect.

And think about real world science. We’re developing genetic mutts right now with the very best of intentions—to cure disease, help people live longer, grow more food so less people go hungry. It’s all noble, good stuff.

But every new scientific development is like opening Pandora’s Box: it’s not just the good stuff that comes out. In July 2010, another scientist took a quantum leap forward. He didn’t just splice together the DNA of animals that already exist—he actually created a completely artificial cell. Doctor and researcher Craig Venter created an entirely new life form by making a man-made DNA code and named the cell “Synthia.” Venter believes this new artificial cell could be the key to solving all sorts of problems—cancer, disease itself, you name it. But other scientists don’t think Synthia is a good thing at all. They think that a completely synthetic cell, not bound by the rules of nature and millions of years of evolution, might actually pose a threat to every life form on the planet, including ours. Such a synthetic creation, they say, wouldn’t play by the same rules as normal life. Bacteria and viruses have actually lived with us for thousands, if not millions, of years. They’ve evolved to live with us, and we’ve evolved to live with them—even though they sometimes kill some of us. A life form not bound by all those years of a symbiotic relationship might just kill everything by accident. In fact, it could bring on a plague like the one seen in the movie I Am Legend that nearly wiped out the human race.¹⁷

Seriously.

So, with the path our own scientists are on, maybe we end up curing cancer. Or maybe we accidentally make a synthetic virus that ends up killing most of the world’s population. Maybe both. It sure seems like a roll of the dice. No matter what our intentions are.

It’s the Frankenstein problem. If you get all fixated on the creation of something without thinking it through, you’re probably going to miss some fairly important and obvious consequences (like 1. if you make a monster he will need some guidance/love/parentage from you, even if you’re too scared or grossed out to give it; 2. a neglected monster is a ticked off monster; and 3. ticked off/rejected monsters have trouble assimilating into society and more than likely will end up killing people). Ergo, instead of being hailed as the world’s greatest scientist, you wind up creating a monster that doesn’t do what you want it to do and ends up rampaging through the countryside getting chased by a bunch of ticked off torch-andpitchfork-wielding villagers.

The Frankenstein problem happens often to the scientists of the Capitol. When they made jabberjays—exclusive male homing birds designed to mimic entire human conversations as a means of spying on rebels—their living spy equipment was soon turned against them, as rebels learned to use the birds to their advantage. And while they were never intended to survive on their own (that’s why they were all male, so the Capitol would be able to control the jabberjay population), the jabberjays ended up mating with mockingbirds in the wild, creating mockingjays.

The mockingjay winds up becoming a symbol of all that the Capitol can’t do. That’s why it becomes the symbol of the rebellion. Mockingjays are a living symbol of the Capitol’s shortsightedness and proves that it isn’t invincible. That despite all its technological and scientific advances, it makes mistakes just like anyone else. That makes it vulnerable. The Capitol learns the hard way that the more it tries to control both the districts and nature itself, the less control it actually has.

The Games themselves are a perfect example of this, as well. The technological advances that make the Hunger Games possible—the vast technology that creates the arenas, the mutts that make up the obstacles, and the scientific knowhow from people like head Gamemaker Plutarch—all of these things were designed to keep the districts in line through fear and intimidation. And yet, rather than keeping everyone in line, the Games make some people in the Capitol eager to rebel. Plutarch and Cinna and others secretly work for a rebel cause, undermining President Snow’s power. Snow can’t see that the Games—designed to control the people in the districts—actually undermine his own control over the people in his own Capitol, leading to a complete unraveling of the entire government.

Snow was equally short-sighted when it came to his own health. In his desperate grab for power, he used science (chemistry, specifically) to kill people—with poison. But, there are consequences he hadn’t foreseen. Snow drank poison “from the ... cup himself to deflect suspicion. But antidotes don’t always work. They say that’s why he wears the roses that reek of perfume. They say it’s to cover the scent of blood from the mouth sores that will never heal” (Mockingjay).

Because Snow’s problem wasn’t just that he hadn’t thought things through—he had been overconfident in what science could do for him and how well the antidotes would work. That overconfidence, more than anything, can be our downfall. We sometimes look to science to fix all of our problems. We assume it can. After all, science has a great track record—we’ve developed vaccines, clean drinking water, indoor plumbing. Biology and physics have made our lives longer, healthier, and easier. We’ve grown to think that science can fix nearly anything, but it can’t. Sometimes, science just creates new problems.

In the Hunger Games, as in many sci-fi cautionary tales, there’s a lesson to be learned from tragic overconfidence in science. We may think we’ve got it all figured out, but we just can’t foresee every eventual consequence of our new inventions.

Sounds like a tall order. But the alternative is even more bleak. If we stopped scientific research altogether, we might as well just head on back to the pre-Newton dark ages. Dying of an infected paper cut doesn’t really sound like a great way to go, if you ask me.

We have to go forward; there’s just no way of knowing whether we’re doing the right thing as we go.

That’s why they call it “playing” God—because we aren’t, actually, God. Even with the best of intentions, science can lead us down a path of self-destruction. That’s why it’s such a good bad guy in movies. That’s why—even in our world—it makes such a nice scapegoat.

The answers aren’t easy. Scientists argue with each other constantly about what makes ethical research and what doesn’t. The best we can hope for is that we at least try to be good and that we don’t look blindly to science to solve all our problems.

But perhaps the most valuable lesson of all is that the harder we work to control nature, the less control we actually have. As much as we’d like to control everything, we just can’t do it.

It’s just like quantum mechanics. Everything looks neat and orderly in our world until you get to the atomic level, and then you realize it’s just a bunch of subatomic particles bouncing around. In a word: chaos.

So we can go forward with our inventions in genetic engineering cautiously and with thoughtfulness, or we can make the same overconfident mistakes that so many of the Capitol scientists made in Panem.

In short, science isn’t evil, but it isn’t a cure-all, either. As long as we understand our own limitations—that we aren’t, in fact, God—maybe we can avoid Panem’s fate.

Let’s hope that—like Katniss—we make the right decisions, even when they’re not easy to make.

And here’s hoping that wasp’s nest I just found near my back door is not the genetically engineered tracker jacker kind.

Seriously.