If it happens at all, the aim will be not to engineer societies but to attract consumers. Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, whose 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, described children produced and reared as organ donors, last month warned that thanks to advances in gene editing, “we’re coming close to the point where we can, objectively in some sense, create people who are superior to others”.īut the prospect of genetic portraits of IVF embryos paints a rather different picture. The spectre of a harsh, impersonal and authoritarian dystopia always looms in these discussions of reproductive control and selection. Whether it’s Newsweek reporting in 1978 on the birth of Louise Brown, the first “test-tube baby” (the inaccurate phrase speaks volumes) as a “cry round the brave new world”, or the New York Times announcing “ The brave new world of three-parent IVF” in 2014, the message is that we are heading towards Huxley’s hatchery with its racks of tailor-made babies in their “numbered test tubes”.
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Instead, the gestating fetuses and babies are tended by workers in white overalls, “their hands gloved with a pale corpse‑coloured rubber”, under white, dead lights.īrave New World has become the inevitable reference point for all media discussion of new advances in reproductive technology. There are no parents as such – families are considered obscene. Set in the year 2540, it describes a society whose population is grown in vats in an impersonal central hatchery, graded into five tiers of different intelligence by chemical treatment of the embryos. That book was, of course, Brave New World, published in 1932.
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Inspired by predictions about the future of reproductive technology by the biologists JBS Haldane and Julian Huxley in the 1920s, Huxley’s brother Aldous wrote a satirical novel about it.
![where is it already 2017 where is it already 2017](https://s.w-x.co/util/image/w/snow-noaa-analysis_0.jpg)
It’s a long way from the image conjured up when artificial conception, and perhaps even artificial gestation, were first mooted as a serious scientific possibility. If there’s any kind of future for “designer babies”, it might look something like this.