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Who Gets the Good Genes? | TIME

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I n the 1932 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley envisioned future childbirth as a very orderly affair. At the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, in accordance with orders from the Social Predestination Room, eggs were fertilized, bottled and put on a conveyor belt. Nine months later, the embryos–after “decanting”–were babies. Thanks to state-sponsored brainwashing, they would grow up delighted with their genetically assigned social roles–from clever, ambitious alphas to dim-witted epsilons. Ever since publication of Huxley’s dystopian novel, this has been the standard eugenics nightmare: government social engineers subverting individual reproductive choice for the sake of an eerie social efficiency. But as the age of genetic engineering dawns, the more plausible nightmare is roughly the opposite: that a laissez-faire eugenics will emerge from the free choices of millions of parents. Indeed, the only way to avoid Huxleyesque social stratification may be for the governmen

In the 1932 novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley envisioned future childbirth as a very orderly affair. At the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, in accordance with orders from the Social Predestination Room, eggs were fertilized, bottled and put on a conveyor belt. Nine months later, the embryos–after “decanting”–were babies. Thanks to state-sponsored brainwashing, they would grow up delighted with their genetically assigned social roles–from clever, ambitious alphas to dim-witted epsilons. Ever since publication of Huxley’s dystopian novel, this has been the standard eugenics n

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