frank chapter 2

Prologue

Frank had been born in the year 1861 on the tiny island of Edgeøya, part of Svalbard, an archipelago that lies inside the Arctic Circle at the point where the Barents Sea becomes the Norwegian Sea. His father, Oscar Kørner, was a soil scientist and radical non-conformist who was convinced that the rich mineral deposits on the Islands could be exploited to create a Norwegian technological revolution that would see his country rapidly outstrip the creaking steam engines and bureaucracy of the British Empire. Frank’s mother Sylvia was a member of the Sámi people, a nomadic tribe that lived without respect of national borders between Norway, Finland and Russia. His father’s enormous intelligence, Old Norwegian aristocratic blood, outspoken desire to end the union with Sweden, and penchant for outdoor copulation with his savagely beautiful wife had led to his forced exile from Oslo in 1859. At the age of three Frank’s unnaturally thin fingers were already able to slip tiny samples of plant or insect into a microscope’s slide, and without aid of written language he had produced a small catalogue of the few animals and plants that lived in his immediate environment. His elegant and precise drawing style, an example of which was said to have much impressed John Ruskin, led to his parents considering a future in Fine Arts, but Frank’s true passion was for science. By the age of ten he had, together with his father, produced microscopes of incomparable quality and was able to observe single cells with a level of detail which would only become available to mainstream European scientists in the next century.

Commercial miners began to arrive on the archipelago in the 1880s, but they rarely troubled Oscar Kørner and his small family, confining most of their activities to the larger areas of Spitsbergen and Barents Island which were b y now more generally known to be rich in coal and metals. At seventeen Frank’s mind had turned to the improbability of life arising and surviving in the intense cold of the Arctic Circle. He began to study the effects of freezing on plants and animals. Because he had the microscopy he was able to witness and notate the finest details of changes to both plant and animal cells. Protective strategies within the cells relating to what are now called chromosomes, but which Frank called threads of life led him to attempt to freeze and then re-animate some of his own cells. The rest, as they say, is history, but of course it is a history unknown to other scientists. The isolation of his environment and his inherited distrust of the state led Frank to take a singular and self-centred path. His father’s earlier attempts at mining had opened up a spectacular underground cavern which contained a lake of stagnant water, rich with minerals and organic molecules, and maintained at a perfect 1.742o Celsius for millennia. Frank placed his own frozen cells in that liquid; his papers refer to it as the nutriment, and watched with amazement as mitosis took place.

Now began the phase of his life which Frank called the Promethean Years in his interviews with Professor O’Connell in St. Patrick’s Hospital Dublin during the Irish Civil War.