Brave New World: Aldous Huxley's stress on scientific advancements; specifically biology, technology, and psychology.

Essay by dselchauHigh School, 12th gradeA, December 2003

download word file, 3 pages 3.5

Brave New World

When thinking about progress in society, most people think of advances in the field of science. Along with this comes the assumption that these advancements are beneficial, and better our society. But are they always that good? Through Brave New World, Aldous Huxley stresses that scientific advances can be a threat to our society.

One scientific advance that Huxley warns the reader about is biology. In Brave New World, the mass production of humans is done with the Bokanovsky process, where humans are genetically engineered in laboratories. "...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 (p. 4)." One of the threats of this genetic breeding is that no family structures exist, except on the reservation. Instead humans are raised in conditioning centers, taking away our traditional relatives, and ones we love.

With no families, it becomes harder to associate yourself with something to be proud of, and no pride is a lack of motivation to live. Another threat the Bokanovsky process brings, is that life is not valued at all. "Murder kills only the individual and, after all what is an individual? With a sweeping gesture he indicated the rows of the microscopes, the test tubes, the incubators. We can make a new one with the greatest ease - as many as we like (p. 133)." This proves that because the test tube humans can easily replace deaths at any time, life holds no real value. To top it off, this process prevents individuality, as on the reservation, where everybody is cloned. The biological technology achieves a bland kind of equality where humans are physically the same, are placed into different...