… the future of babies
"Science fiction writers have imagined just about every aspect of life in some far-off future — including how humans will reproduce. And usually, their visions have included a backlash against those who tamper with Mother Nature.
In his 1923 stab at speculative fiction, for instance, British biologist JBS Haldane said that while those who push the envelope in the physical sciences are generally likened to Prometheus, who incurred the wrath of the gods, those who mess around with biology risk stirring something far more pointed: the wrath of their fellow man. "If every physical or chemical invention is a blasphemy," he wrote in Daedalus, or Science and the Future, "every biological invention is a perversion."
Some of Haldane's projections were remarkably specific. He wrote, for instance, that the world's first "ectogenic babies" would be born in 1951. These lab-grown babies would come about when two fictitious scientists, "Dupont and Schwarz," acquire a fresh ovary from a woman who dies in a plane crash. Over the next five years, the ovary produces viable eggs, which the team extracts and fertilizes on a regular basis…"
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