A Cage Of Butterflies By Brian Caswell

The wrongships of human testing

In the novel A Cage of Butterflies the author Brian Caswell strongly pushes a stance against human research through the characters, events and themes. Caswell demonises the drugging of the “Babies” by showing the lead researcher and main antagonist Larsen as a quite evil man. The novel shows Larsen to be a greedy, fame hungry man who cares little for those around him and wo is willing to sacrifice people to reach his goals. Caswell uses Larsen to portray his anti-human research messages and makes the readers see that researchers should not do their work in the hopes of fame and fortune, but instead to help those in need. To further portray Larsen as an evil man he tells the audience that over half of the children

Most of them were injected with enough to put them under heavy sedation but one of them only had enough to make him tell the truth. This led to his mind shutting down and the others thinking he was dead. The actions of Larsen were horrible even evil but the worst part was not asking the parents and probably covering up everything that happened on that day. When the Babies arrived at the facility Larsen made a lot of false statements to the parent’s things like “we both want what’s best for these children,” and “we can offer the best care and medical attention.” (pg11 B.Caswell A cage of butterflies) Caswell used Larsen as an incarnation of all the bad things scientists do. In doing this he showed him lying and performing experiments on the children that almost led to the death of one of

Larsen was at the forefront of some pretty bad work, he had to create a front to hide his true research. All of his deeds were aimed at one thing, fame, money and glory. Larsen’s greed forced him to make a lot of poor decisions like the Pentothal incident and probably many more incidents like this. In all of his research with the Babies he strived for the glory. He dreamt of finding out exactly what was wrong with the Babies. With all of his hard research he probably began wondering if the babies enormous intelligence was copy able and how many millions he could sell it for, and he really wanted to name his discovery after himself he said. “They normally name the discovery after the discoverer, Larson syndrome sounds nice.” (Pg39 B.Caswell A cage of butterflies) Caswell used the actions of Larson to his advantage to push his message, that research scientists should help everyone and not only the portfolio of the scientist