Eric Cohen - The Future is Now: America Confronts the New Genetics

A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World States motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.

And this, said the Director opening the door, is the Fertilizing Room.

Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Directors heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horses mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D.H.C. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments...

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a British author and essayist. His many books include Crome Yellow, Point Counter Point, The Doors of Perception , and, most famously, Brave New World . Selections from chapters 1, 16, and 17, Brave New World , 1932.

I shall begin at the beginning, said the D.H.C. and the more zealous students recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin at the beginning . These, he waved his hand, are the incubators. And opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. The weeks supply of ova. Kept, he explained, at blood heat; whereas the male gametes, and here he opened another door, they have to be kept at thirty-five instead of thirty-seven. Full blood heat sterilizes. Rams wrapped in there-mogene beget no lambs.

Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils scurried illegibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of its surgical introductionthe operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months salary; continued with some account of the technique for preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing; passed on to a consideration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the liquor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept; and, leading his charges to the work tables, actually showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes; how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed slides of the microscopes; how the eggs which it contained were inspected for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle; how (and he now took them to watch the operation) this receptacle was immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoaat a minimum concentration of one hundred thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted; and how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of the liquor and its contents reexamined; how, if any of the eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed, and, if necessary, yet again; how the fertilized ova went back to the incubators; where the Alphas and Betas remained until definitely bottled; while the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only thirty-six hours, to undergo Bokanovskys Process.