Word: novelization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley envisioned future childbirth as a very orderly affair. At the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center, in accordance with orders from the Social Predestination Room, eggs were fertilized, bottled and put on a conveyor belt. Nine months later, the embryos--after "decanting"--were babies. Thanks to state-sponsored brainwashing, they would grow up delighted with their genetically assigned social roles--from clever, ambitious alphas to dim-witted epsilons...
Ever since publication of Huxley's dystopian novel, this has been the standard eugenics nightmare: government social engineers subverting individual reproductive choice for the sake of an eerie social efficiency. But as the age of genetic engineering dawns, the more plausible nightmare is roughly the opposite: that a laissez-faire eugenics will emerge from the free choices of millions of parents. Indeed, the only way to avoid Huxleyesque social stratification may be for the government to get into the eugenics business...
...Brave New World, state-sponsored eugenics was part of a larger totalitarianism, a cultural war against family bonds and enduring romance and other quaint vestiges of free reproductive choice. The novel worked; it left readers thinking that nothing could be more ghastly than having government get into the designer-baby business. But if this business is left to the marketplace, we may see that government involvement, however messy, however creepy, is not the creepiest alternative...
Stokes chose to survive. He volunteered to take part in a novel clinical trial about to be conducted on heart patients by Dr. Jeffrey Isner at the St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Boston. To his surprise, he was accepted. Last May he flew to Boston, where a solution containing billions of copies of a gene that triggers blood-vessel growth was injected directly into his heart...
...heart-patient trial, St. Elizabeth's Isner found a novel way around the delivery problem. Eschewing virus carriers, he fashioned a construct called "naked DNA." It consists of part of a human gene called VEG-F, which stimulates the growth of blood vessels, and includes its signal segments. These segments, Isner explains, "order the cell, once it has manufactured the gene product, to export it from the cell...