Brave new world

1997's 'Gattaca' featured a bleak future world ruled by bio-engineered superhumans -- an outcome that no longer seems far-fetched.

The meaning of human nature itself is under threat from a new philosophy of “soul-less scientism” that will undermine “our own self-understanding as human beings” and reduces the aspirations of mankind to the purely material realm. This new philosophy outstrips the danger posed by the actual techniques and technologies of modern biomedical science, said Dr. Leon Kass, speaking to a New York audience in October.

In 1999, when Rob was 13, his parents sent him to the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, located in Canton, Massachusetts, 20 miles outside Boston. The facility, which calls itself a "special needs school," takes in all kinds of troubled kids—severely autistic, mentally retarded, schizophrenic, bipolar, emotionally disturbed—and attempts to change their behavior with a complex system of rewards and punishments, including painful electric shocks to the torso and limbs. Of the 234 current residents, about half are wired to receive shocks, including some as young as nine or ten. Nearly 60 percent come from New York, a quarter from Massachusetts, the rest from six other states and Washington, D.C. The Rotenberg Center, which has 900 employees and annual revenues exceeding $56 million, charges $220,000 a year for each student. States and school districts pick up the tab.

N A laboratory in Germany, a tiny worm dances to flashes of light. A flash of yellow and it darts forward. A flash of blue and it jerks back. Yellow, forward, blue, back right on cue every time.

A DOCTOR who gave a massive dose of a paralysing drug to two terminally-ill babies, hastening their deaths, said he "felt in his heart" they were suffering.

Welcome to the dangerous and controversial Brave New World of so-called 'supermarket' babies, in which choosing the characteristics of your child is as easy as picking out a new car.

I went undercover to expose exactly how Ms Ryan has created a Huxleyesque world in which medical ethics and the natural laws of reproduction are being trampled in the pursuit of profits. To separate fact from fiction, I contacted the centre, posing as a 44-year-old childless British woman desperate for a baby with her new, much younger, husband. I took care to mention to Ms Ryan that I'd recently come into a generous inheritance.