Sanctuary finished up its first 13-episode run last Friday in classic cliffhanger fashion, with humanity on the verge of a war with the mostly hidden population of abnormals. The show had a strong first season (personally, the show had me when it brought on Nikola Tesla as a character. Tesla frequently makes cameos on science fiction shows as some kind of genius who turns out to be a century or two ahead of his time, but making him a vampire on top of everything else was a master stroke.) But turning back to the premiere, and the premise, of the show, there was an early scence where Helen Magnus, the central character of Sanctuary, tries to describe what she does to her bemused soon-to-be-protege Will Zimmerman. She claims to be a student of teratology, which she explains as the science of monsters. Now, in his recently published book Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us about Development and Evolution, Mark S. Blumberg takes us on a tour of real-life teratology, and how understanding abnormalities is casting new light on the relationship between the genetic and non-genetic forces that shape us all.
