Genetic Modification In Brave New World

When we enter the worlds of modern dystopian literature, we often criticize the societal norms that are structured within the book. We fall into the belief that the circumstances exploited in these novels are far separated from our realities. Dystopian novelist, Aldous Huxley, enjoyed using satirical language in his stories to provoke the questioning of government and technological advancements. This is a prevalent factor in his story, Brave New World, where he describes a society that revolves around psychological manipulation, hypnoædia, and social classical conditioning. We find that his interpretation of these social advancements is not prevalent in our daily lives. Or so we thought. When Huxley published this book in 1931, he used his language as a warning to what future changes could lead to. Unfortunately for us, merely thirty years

A very prevalent topic in this novel is the advancements in medicine to create what is known as Bokanovsky’s Process. When describing the process at the start of the book the Director states:
“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. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress” (p. 17).
This process allows for the cloning of upwards to 92 twin siblings. It is, however, only applied to the cloning process of Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon classes. As the Beta and Alpha classes are held to a higher authority, there is only one egg per uterus in that process. It is also noted in the book that, “In the highly controlled social world, the ability for the government to control the number of humans is important, as is the ability to control the function of those humans”