AP English IV- American Literature

Adela Cajic

AP English IV- American Literature

3rd Hour- Jennings

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

Bioethics and Babies

Seventy years ago, a revolutionary book with futuristic technology hit the market. This was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a story in which babies are mass produced from a single fertilized egg through what Huxley called the “decanting process”. This process follows a series of smaller processes which make each “batch” of people identical in practically everyway. This mass production of “designer babies”,while scientifically plausible,isn’t morally ethical nor does it coincide with human nature.

In Huxley’s Brave New World, babies are produced by a sort of assembly line, in which a single fertilized egg is cloned numerous times through the Bokanovsky Process (for the three lower castes of society: Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons). Incubators hold a week’s supply of ova at blood temperature and the sperm is kept at 37 degrees Celsius instead of 35 because blood heat sterilizes (Huxley 4). The eggs, which normally take 30 years to ripen, are supplied in multitude through the Podsnap Technique, which accelerates the ripening process to take only 2 years (Huxley 8). First the eggs are inspected for abnormalities, counted, and transferred to a porous receptacle. This receptacle is then immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming sperm (Huxley 5). Then after ten minutes, the receptacle is lifted out of the liquor and its contents reexamined to see if any of the eggs remained unfertilized. It is immersed back into the sperm until all of the eggs are fertilized. The now fertilized ova are then replaced under the incubators; the Alphas and Betas are definitely bottled and the Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are removed after only 36 hours to undergo Bokanovsky’s Process, where arrests in development result in budding of the eggs (Huxley 6). “One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress” (Huxley 6). The embryos are then transferred to larger containers with peritoneum and saline solution. These containers are labeled and sent off to the Social Predestination Room. In Predestination, the embryos are treated with alcohol and other growth and development inhibitors to produce below par people, in other words Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. “‘The lower the caste, the lower the oxygen’” (Huxley 14). Epsilons are predestined to be menial laborers with low intelligence, so they receive the least oxygen to arrest their mental development. Through Conditioning, the embryos are treated with different techniques to make them prepossessed to do the work they are predestined to perform. Examples of this are heat conditioning to make the future tropics workers hate the cold, constant rotation to improve the future rocket-plane engineers’ balance and to make them feel comfortable being upside-down (Huxley 16-17). The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning explained the importance of conditioning, “‘That is the secret of happiness and virtue–liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny’” (Huxley 16). Since people in the WorldState have no choice in what they will do in life, they are conditioned as embryos to be happy with their lot in life. Happiness is the goal of their world, happiness and stability. But at what cost?

This science of decanting, or reproduction, is plausible when considered through the scope of theoretical biology. Huxley, according to an eminent embryologist who reviewed Brave New World, Joseph Needham,

…includednothing in his book but what might be regarded as legitimate extrapolations from knowledge and power that we already have. Successful experiments are even now being made in the cultivation of small mammals in vitro, and one of the most horrible of Mr. Huxley’s predictions, the production of numerous low-grade workers of precisely identical genetic constitutions from one egg, is perfectly possible. (Squier 147)

The way the eggs and sperm are harvested and stored is very logical and indeed similar to what is used today. The fertilization of the eggs is also realistic. It is more rudimentary than what is used in IVF (in-vitro fertilization) treatments today, but the basic principles are the same; the ova are injected by the sperm, simple as that. The “Bokanovskified” eggs in Brave New World can produce “[F]rom eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult” (Huxley 6). This is not far off from the stem cells scientists use today.

A newly fertilized egg is the ultimate stem cell. It is totipotent – capable of generating all the different types of cells found in the body, and also the fetal part of the placenta and supporting tissues. The fertilized egg splits into two, and those into four, and so on. For the first few divisions, up to at least the 8-cell stage, all the cells of the tiny embryo are totipotent stem cells. Indeed, if these early cells separate, they can each continue to develop, making identical twins, triplets, quadruplets, etc. (Thomson)

Provided that these early fertilized eggs were separated, multiple “buddings”, as they were called in Brave New World, are completely plausible. The Bokanovsky Process is basically cloning of the fertilized embryos, which has already been accomplished by scientists in real life. In 1996, Dolly the Sheep was the first successful clone to be produced from an adult cell. “This was done by fusing the nucleus of an adult somatic cell from one sheep with an enucleated egg from another, followed by implantation into a surrogate mother” (Dolly). Further tweaking of the process could potentially produce viable duplicates of animals that could reproduce and are the same as normal animals. Humans are trickier because eggs are relatively rare and volunteer donors are difficult to come by. But, also because the ethics of it would be questioned by the majority of society. As Ian Wilmut, a pioneer of sheep cloning, has said, “[human cloning] could happen if we wish it to happen” and that it’s another matter entirely whether it should happen (Gosden 148). It is the ethics behind the scientific research that impede its progress, not the technology. NICELY PUT!

The ethics of cloning and creating transgenic people falls within the category of bioethics. Ethically this “brave new world” of cloning and conditioning would be wrong because it comes down to power and who has the right to say what, or rather who, is right and wrong. Who gets to decide if a handicap or disorder is not valuable to society? Or if blue eyes and blonde hair are the ideal. Sound familiar? The children of these experiments would lose their sense of individuality because they would just be the product of their parents’ wishes and money.

DEVELOP THE PAR. MAIN IDEA AND SUPPORT: AREN’T ALL CHILDREN OF PLANNED PREGNANCIES THE PRODUCT OF THEIR PARENTS’ WISHES AND THEIR AVAILABLE RESOURCES? IF CLONING WERE DEMOCRATIC WOULD THIS GET RID OF THE MORAL ISSUE?

In Brave New Worldthe clones abide by the order of the WorldState. They do what they’re told and don’t question authority because they have been conditioned to behave this way. They have no freewill or individuality, especially in the lower castes. This was exemplified when the Deltas at the hospital were lined up for their soma rations. All the Delta workers stood obediently in an orderly line with no impatience or fidgeting, which would have been the normal human reaction. “One at a time, with no shoving, the twins stepped forward” (Huxley 209). These clones possess no individual thought; they do as they were conditioned to do, not because they consciously choose to do it. Another part of human nature denied to the people of Brave New World is procreation. The act of procreating is certainty not denied to them, but the outcome, a baby, is. Humans OR FEMALES? have an animal need to make babies; their genes are telling them to do whatever they can to make bigger, better babies. But the people in Brave New World don’t have babies and this causes hormonal instability and depression in their lives, just like with women today who feel anxious as their internal clocks start winding down. Fanny experiences this and has to have a “pregnancy substitute”, a fake pregnancy -just hormones, no baby-, to relieve her unhappiness (Huxley 38). This shows how these genetically engineered and conditioned people still have the same genetic drives as normal people: the need to make babies. The fact that they do not have children then goes against human nature, and genetics, itself. TRICKY PROBLEM HERE IS HOW ARE YOU DEFINING HUMAN NATURE? IF IT IS HUMAN NATURE TO GESTATE A BABY, ARE MALES OR CHILDLESS WOMEN LESS HUMAN? ISN’T PART OF WHAT MAKES US HUMAN OUR ABILITY TO RESIST BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVES? IF THE PREGNANCY SUBSTITUTE SATISFIES THE GENETIC YEARNING, WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?

Brave New World was a novel far beyond its time in terms of practical science. There was truth to Huxley’s processes, however, as modern science has revealed. Where Huxley tears fact and fiction apart is in how human nature and ethics fall into the mix. Huxley’s dystopia in Brave New World is entirely plausible, but only if human nature and our sense of morality were taken out of the equation. Otherwise the science would never be allowed to advance that far.

ADELA: Strong work here and your thorough research and revelation of the science in BNW and in our time is your real strength. For revision, focus on the ethical side of the argument. Does your first argument reveal that the process of cloning itself is immoral or that the application of it could be? If the latter, does that mean there’s nothing immoral about cloning IF applied in a fair way? BNW seems to be exploring the very definition of what human nature is. If living by our genetic, biological drives is what’s ethical, does that mean we should all be living on Huxley’s vision in the reservation? What not use the tools we have if human nature itself is defined and changes depending on the tools we use? It might be natural to give birth without the use of an epidural, but if I’m the one having the kid, I’m pretty sure I’m getting the epidural. It might not be natural, but I’d argue it’s not unethical. Nice work.

Works Cited

"Dolly a sheep (q.v.)"A Dictionary of Genetics. Robert C. King, William D. Stansfield and Pamela K. Mulligan. Oxford University Press, 2007. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.St. Louis County Library.12 December 2011<

Gosden, Roger. Designing Babies The Brave New World of Reproductive Technology. New York City: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1999. Print.

Huxley, A. Brave New World. HarperPerennial, 2006.

Squier, Susan Merrill. Babies in Bottles. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Print.

Thomson, J. et al. (1998) Embryonic stem cell lines derived from human blastocysts. Science 282: pp.1145–1147.