Biotech in a Brave New World

Living in today’s world of Viagra, Ambien and other drugs designed to enhance our living conditions, reading Aldous Huxley’s future scenario in Brave New World sounds a bit familiar today. His main drug featured in the book, soma, is the most common tool used by the citizenry to feel good. But Huxley takes overall medicine and biotech predictions in the book quite far.

Looking through the eyes of 1932, Huxley prognosticated on three fronts: genetic engineering, intensive human conditioning, and drug development. With these three tools, society’s leaders in the book are able to shape the population and control it by keeping people “happy.”

The first thing the author presents to the reader is a bioengineering laboratory. Huxley makes good use of mechanical and sound effect descriptions as we tour a plant with some children. As we learn about the process of producing different types of people – the swiftest and most beautiful are “alphas” and the menial grunts are the “epsilons” – Huxley makes sure you get a nice dose of supporting philosophy along the way. Through exploring this plant, we are able to understand the reasons for such a place to exist and the goals of the men who run it. All of this is written in a light tone with plenty of humorous reactions from the children.

Beyond the genetically engineered humans themselves, we next hear about how they are intensely conditioned through their upbringing. The youth are never attached to a parent but grow up in groups together. During their sleep, they hear phrases uttered continuously to program their beliefs. It’s a bit like The Manchurian Candidate only on a broad scale and with complete buy in from the entire public. We learn that the conditioning is relatively effective but that anomalies will crop up here and there. It’s not foolproof but gets the job done.

Finally, there are drugs to control births, certain desires and, of course, soma to make everyone feel good. There is a dose for every occasion and plenty of rituals to go along with it. The orgy-porgy gatherings are particularly scandalous and are one of the ways society mixes the drugs with group activities. Later in the book, we learn how soma can also be used to gradually slip away from life. When a person gets on in years, they can medicate more and more until they pass away in their blissful state. Soma gets more of the drug attention in the book than other mentioned medication but it’s seemingly engineered to manage many conditions. Today’s pharmaceutical companies compete in an environment where differentiating drugs has a huge marketing advantage. Perhaps if today’s government supported production of a drug like soma like it does in Huxley’s future world, we’d probably have such a thing available to the masses.

Fortunately, our government is not yet pushing a panacea on us to keep us quiet. Let’s hope this never happens. All of the human bioengineering seems like it could realistically happen very soon with the many rapid strides in DNA discoveries. Again, let’s hope this stays under control and we’re never forced to have children become a certain programmed type or alpha or beta based on a lottery or social standing. Much of what Huxley predicted could realistically happen with today’s technologies or those that are literally on the brink of discovery. My sense is that we’re all watching closely and don’t want clones running around or T-Rex’s coming to life. With any luck, we’ll keep it that way.