The Mutant Project by Eben Kirksey

Author:Eben Kirksey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

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An exhibit of future reproductive technologies on display in a huge atrium at the China National GeneBank illustrates scientific fantasies that have become surprisingly widespread. A blue-and-white canister mounted in a portable metal frame houses a translucent baby-sized plastic bag. The container sits on an exam table, and a robotic arm is poised as though ready to conduct an ultrasound exam. Pink baby flesh is visible inside the bag, with blurred outlines of a head, arms, and legs.

Nearby, a multimedia display in BGI’s main exhibit hall featured a looping video about “future applications of cell storage,” where scientific facts bled into fiction. A lamb fetus was moving inside an artificial womb, a clear plastic bag with tubes that act like an umbilical cord. One tube fed the developing creature with nutrients—proteins, carbohydrates, and fats—via an intravenous drip. The baby lamb was also bathed in synthetic amniotic fluid. The fine print on this multimedia display indicated that the experimental work had been done elsewhere: the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), where the experiments on Nicholas Wilkins and Emily Whitehead took place. Researchers at CHOP had incubated premature fetal lambs for four weeks until they were “born.”

Rearing babies in artificial wombs has long been a dream of radical feminist thinkers. While many celebrated “natural” childbirth, in the 1970s Shulamith Firestone openly called for a revolution in reproductive technology that would liberate “women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology by every means available.”11 A fundamental injustice is hardwired into the human condition, she wrote in The Dialectic of Sex, since it involves “reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both.” Firestone died in 2012, so I can only imagine her ghost as a haunting presence at BGI’s exhibit about the future of reproductive medicine. The blurred boundaries between facts and fiction in the exhibit would not have given Firestone pause, since she argued that “imaginative construction precedes the technological.”12 In other words, she insisted that we take technological dreams seriously before they become reality.

Before Firestone’s time, dystopian science fiction imagined how new technology might enable social engineering with embryos. Brave New World, the classic 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley, opens with a scene in a hatchery where human eggs are fertilized, cloned, incubated, and then conditioned for different roles in society. In the Social Predestination Room the cogitative capacities of the Alpha embryos are enhanced, so that they become “future World controllers,” while the oxygen flow to the Epsilons is reduced to produce “future sewage workers.”13

Shulamith Firestone was well aware that her vision of a radical social experiment could fail. “We are all familiar with the details of Brave New World,” she wrote, “cold collectives, with individualism abolished, sex reduced to a mechanical act, children become robots, Big Brother intruding into every aspect of private life, rows of babies fed by impersonal machines, eugenics manipulated by the state.” Radical experiments can create entirely new problems, she insisted, even when they solve some social or medical issues.

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