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Biological Manipulations for Producing and Nurturing Mammalian Embryos

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The Custom-Made Child?

Part of the book series: Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society ((CIBES))

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Abstract

Aldous Huxley’s description of large-scale assembly-line production of humans in Brave New World represented replication of an individual embryo into multiple copies as a tremendous achievement in his grotesque “utopian” society. Just how close have today’s scientific and technological advances brought us to achieving such asexual human reproduction and manipulation of human embryos outside the natural environment?

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. Make ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress.

A. Huxley1

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Authors
  1. Rosalind L. Herlands
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Helen B. Holmes Betty B. Hoskins Michael Gross

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© 1981 Humana Press Inc.

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Herlands, R.L. (1981). Biological Manipulations for Producing and Nurturing Mammalian Embryos. In: Holmes, H.B., Hoskins, B.B., Gross, M. (eds) The Custom-Made Child?. Contemporary Issues in Biomedicine, Ethics, and Society. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-6007-3_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-6007-3_34

  • Publisher Name: Humana Press

  • Print ISBN: 978-0-89603-025-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-6007-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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