ABSTRACT
Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World,1 published in 1932, has lent its title to a wide range of disciplinary assessments, ranging from biology, physiology, and psychology, through architecture, literature, and the cinema, to physics, chemistry, and engineering. But it is with developments in the biological sciences that the fashioning of a brave new world has become most closely associated. Huxley’s novel is a fabulous account of a world state in which social stability is assured by personal gratification and satisfaction based on a scientific caste system. It is reinforced by a sexual ‘freedom’ which flows from the abandonment of family and the incarnation of artificial reproduction, controlled by the state; human beings are graded according to pre-planned intelligence quotients, hatched in incubators and brought up in communal nurseries. The dangers of such developments have long been thought to be self-evident; the Sunday Despatch in 1945 warned of the spectre of artificial insemination by donor creating a super race of test-tube babies who would become guardians of atom bomb secrets. It envisaged that, ‘Fathers will be chosen by eugenic experts of the United Nations. The mothers will be hand picked on their health and beauty records, family background and their achievements at school.’2
