Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [70]
Much of the hand-wringing over reproductive technology makes reference to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The book opens in a baby factory, the ‘Central London Hatchery’, with a frightening scene where we encounter a society that has industrialised the process of human reproduction. Huxley was well placed to write such science-inspired fiction: his elder brother Julian was a widely respected biologist, and the genetics pioneer J.B.S. Haldane was a friend of the family. No doubt the story was fuelled by dinner party conversations of what could be done with human reproduction if researchers had carte blanche and the will to implement such a scheme. Huxley wrote chillingly of a crimson darkness ‘like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer’s afternoon’ in which foetuses are grown on sow’s peritoneum, and ‘gorged with blood-surrogate and hormones’.
The legacy of Huxley’s Brave New World has been an irrational fear of, and disgust for, reproductive technology. But what those eager to draw comparisons with Huxley’s vision and the real-world situation with reproductive technology invariably overlook is that in 1946, fifteen years after the book’s first publication, Huxley declared that he would write it differently, given the chance. In a foreword to a new edition of Brave New World, he said that he would like to incorporate the idea that ‘science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they had been made for man, not … as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them’.
It is clear that, as we always have in the past, we will continue to take up the technologies that the anarchy of science offers us: as they mature, they will become an everyday choice. The advantage of artificial sperm and eggs, when the natural ones are not up to the job, is easy to see. The advantage of an artificial womb seems less clear-cut, but in certain circumstances it may prove safer than a mother’s womb. As far back as 1971, Edward Grossman, a lawyer working for the US House of Representatives, pointed out that an efficient artificial womb, ‘far from increasing the incidence of birth defects, would reduce them by keeping the foetus in an absolutely safe and regular environment; safe, for example, from infection by German measles or drugs taken by the mother’. For those who have no working womb, meanwhile, it will be a godsend. ‘I find ectogenesis in many ways repugnant,’ Stellan Welin wrote in Science and Engineering Ethics in 2004, ‘but I must confess I lack good arguments against its introduction, at least as an option for therapeutic reasons.’
We have been fooled by Brave New World, it seems: there is no coming dystopia wrought by anarchist scientists. Would anyone seriously regret leaving behind a world contaminated by birth defects, genetic disease, infertility, miscarriage and all the other hallmarks of natural reproduction? A full 75 per cent of natural conceptions ultimately end in failure – many before the woman even knows she has conceived. As Roger Gosden has recently said, in fifty years’ time, where there is the will, the education and the resources, donor eggs and sperm will be regarded as an outdated, interim solution and virtually all babies will be born healthy. Who will thank those who stood against this progress? When the baby is born, and is in its mother’s or father’s arms, will there be any less wonder or excitement?
If our experience of IVF is anything to go by, there will not. We are already moving away from the naive sense that the wonder we feel at a new life comes from ignorance of the biology behind it: we are no longer ignorant, but we still have that sense of awe. As we take control of these processes, improving the lives of a vast number of humans, we will continue to enjoy the ‘miracle’ without experiencing the fear, the heartache and the disappointment. The only thing