A Brave New World: A Genetic Analysis

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes how the world would be if humans were being created in factories. Huxley states that people would be placed in different social categories such as “alpha[s]…[who] work much harder…because they're so frightfully clever. Epsilons are…worse [because] they're too stupid to be able to read or write”. Modified babies would work specific jobs, and that is what Huxley defines as a perfect world. The advanced reproductive technology’s main goal is to be able to detect diseases in embryos. As a result, healthy embryos would be chosen. A problem is these genetic techniques are dangerous, unethical, and will cause societal problems. However, there could be regulations by the government that doctors could perform …show more content…
This process is called in-vitro fertilization and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. IVF is the process women go through to scan their embryos for diseases. The way this process works is doctors take a three-day-old embryo and pull cells from it to test if it contains any genetic diseases (Edmonds). If the tests come back fine, then the embryo is implanted back into the mother’s womb, but if it’s not, the parents have the option to abort it or to do a pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. In the PGD process, the embryos are tested to figure out what genetic disease they have (Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis and PGS). Furthermore, in the process of genetically modifying a baby, a lot of things could go wrong. There is a chance changing a baby’s genes can cause side effects. For instance, there was a case in which a mouse was altered to improve its memory. However, making his alteration caused the mouse to have a higher pain sensitivity (Catalano). Knowing that this could happen to a human with much worse side effects is alarming. Not only is this type of modification dangerous, it is also an unethical