Are we breeding a future of discontent?

Jul 25, 2018 by

by Nigel Cameron, UnHerd:

Forty years ago today, back in 1978 when Anna Ford had just become the first female ITV newsreader, the Yorkshire Ripper was on the loose, and inflation was below 10% for the first time in years, the world was stunned to hear that scientists had ‘played God’ and won.

Procreation, that most mysterious of human activities, had been pulled off by a bunch of scientists – and the result was the first ‘test tube baby’, born to a delighted pair of infertile parents.

Less than 20 years after The Pill had arrived on the scene, science was stepping in again: this time not to prevent conception, but to create life. But her arrival was also darkly symbolic, the physical manifestation of the potential threat that science and technology could pose to the most precious and personal dimension of our lives.

Would the mystery of human conception soon be replaced by the ‘Bokanovsky process’ that powered the baby factories of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?

What’s more, this new technology meant scientists in the lab now had access to human embryos. Embryos that had previously been observed in vivo (in the womb) were now for the first time in the history of the human species accessible in vitro (literally, in a glass – a glass testtube). This brought with it a deeply divisive ethical issue: what are our obligations to an embryonic member of our own species?

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