Brave New World: Foreshadowing the Real New World by Simon Levien

Recently I've been reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. This dystopian (or rather utopian?) novel delves into the concept of genetic engineering and its ramifications on humans to a great extent. Huxley describes a future world much like the Indian caste system but each person is prescribed their caste. Regulation heights, regulation intelligence, regulation, thoughts. Humans are no longer viviparous, but instead formed in labs with each person in each caste the same as the next. The lower castes (Gammas through Epsilons) are engineered to be subservient. Hypnosis methods at early ages enable higher castes to not only prevent a Spartacus-esque uprising, but eliminate unwanted thoughts altogether. Each caste member is told there's no caste better for them, and they are happy, even though only the Alpha-Plus' understand the truth of the world before everything was 'perfect.' Aside from a compelling plot (I highly recommend reading this book), Huxley raised questions in the 1930s about genetic engineering, ethics, and eugenics that humans have just begun to ponder now. In fact, within a few hundred years of scientific advancements, Brave New World will no longer be fiction. As much of a far-off science fiction land this book seems to take place in, human genetics engineering is closer than you think. Perhaps the ideas Huxley presents of conformity, a new world order, and mind control are purely fiction, other elements are not. My thoughts may seem outlandish now, but watch this video that perfectly illustrates how truly close humans are to a truly brave, new world. In short, the video describes a new method of identifying specific strands of DNA with 100% accuracy called CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or whatever that means) and can essentially edit the DNA of a cell. Although this method is in its infancy, it's future implications on what makes humans human will no doubt have effect on upcoming generations.

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