Aldous huxley brave new world1/9/2024 The cultural groundwork has been laid, and the scientific infrastructure has reached the experimental stages. Unfortunately, whatever humility and caution may be exercised by the scientific community at large, there are always individuals whose ambition drives them to define progress solely in terms of achieving new developments, with little regard for whether those developments truly signify advancement for the human community. While it seems more likely that this technology will be employed by parents seeking to perfect their offspring than by governments seeking to restructure society, the fact is that all of these possibilities merit robust ethical discussion in advance of their implementation. With the development of the genetic-editing technology CRISPR, “designer babies” have already been born. Artificial wombs and in-vitro gametogenesis (laboratory creation of eggs and sperm) are in experimental development. Of course, if we decided to mimic Huxley’s genetically-tiered society, the scientific potential to create and manufacture a servant class is also within reach. In this scenario, the “haves” benefit not from the fruits of labor developed on the backs of the “have nots,” but rather through the experimentation on and destruction of the bodies of the vulnerable and unwanted of our society. We are headed for a darker fate than Huxley’s genetically-tiered society in which the “have nots” merely found themselves relegated to service positions. As the medical interventions developed by means of this research expand beyond vaccines, people of faith will find themselves grappling with the dilemma of cooperation with evil in the treatment of eye diseases, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and more. īiden’s reversal of the Trump-era ban on fetal tissue research in early 2021 has widespread implications. Although federal funding for this type of research continues to be prohibited in the United States, research in the private sector is unregulated. The International Society for Stem Cell Research recently relaxed its 14-day limit on the growth of human embryos, a limit researchers and worldwide legislation have recognized since 1979. Researchers continue to grow embryos in the lab for experimentation, even creating their own “embryo-like” entities. Meanwhile, scientific developments are converging to make lab-grown children a reality. Despite exorbitant costs, abysmal success rates, and heartbreaking cases-gone-wrong, IVF is growing in popularity, and with it comes widespread societal acceptance of the idea that the realm of the genesis of new human life is somewhere other than the loving embrace of a mother and father. Women worldwide are being used as human incubators, the bonds and significance of gestational motherhood reduced to functions of capitalism or even erased. Big Tech and other corporations encourage women to freeze their eggs, putting motherhood on ice (a move heartily endorsed by the fertility industry on whom this “choice” renders them dependent). While this description might appear to resemble a dystopian warning more than an accurate description of the society we inhabit today, a constellation of recent developments in medical research and technology has shocking implications: the science fiction of large-scale human manufacturing is a theoretical and potentially imminent possibility.Īs to objections that sheer repugnance at the idea of laboratory grown children will be enough to deter any impetus in that direction, consider the ways in which the fertility industry has already reshaped our ideas of human reproduction. It might be the plot of a dystopian novel, but in the nearly 100 years since the publication of Brave New World, the details of Aldous Huxley’s dystopia have inched their way out of the realm of science fiction and into our headlines. Reproduction has moved to the laboratory: new generations are genetically engineered into varying social classes and are industrially grown. The government indoctrinates and raises our children, and it keeps the population subdued through widespread state-sanctioned drug use. The family has been dismantled, monogamy is reviled, and promiscuity is the norm.
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