A Brave New World is Pending :: Brave New World Essays

A Brave New World is Pending In the March 6 issue of Science News, J. Raloff wrote "If pregnancies early in adulthood reduce a woman's lifelong risk of developing breast cancer, could short-term hormonal treatments that simulate aspects of pregnancy do the same thing? A new study suggest that the answer is yes." Reading that fast-forwarded my imagination to a horrible future, one described in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," where women of the future undergo surrogate pregnancies. In the book it was for mental reasons, but now, there's a physical reason to do such a hormonal treatment. How many other predictions will come true in the next, say, 20 years? Already we have television, airplanes, submarines, cyberspace and virtual reality. Is the next step a measurable move toward Utopia? Will we all live with perfect health? Will we stave off death so effectively that we are killed for population control reasons at the old, old age of 60? Will we lose sight of the goal of a long, productive life, abandon it for a long, forever young life (making aging a disease, because drugs to enhance the here and now build up to a painful later)? I'm all for advancement in medicine. My own father, an oncologist and hematologist, deals with ground-breaking new procedures and medicines on a daily basis. But to air out my cautious side: if the government ever starts worshiping Henry Ford, outlawing Shakespeare, instituting mandatory sterilization of certain groups of people, encouraging and perpetuating class divisions and distributing drugs to solve potential conflict, help me out by saying "STOP!" really, really loudly. Then again, this government does revere Henry Ford in a way. If a big car company wanted something done that was contrary to the desires of a community, my bets are on the car company. This thorough encouragement of big business and the tradition of such can almost be seen as worship. While Shakespeare hasn't been outlawed anywhere (as far as I know), teaching Darwin's theory of Natural Selection is banned in some school districts. J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" is banned in some school districts. Ruth Sherman, a white teacher in a black and Hispanic neighborhood in New York, left her job in fear for her life over a book called "Nappy Hair": some parents (who of course, hadn't read the award-winning novel and for the most part weren't her student's parents) thought it was racist and divisive.