Utopia and Dystopia | The First Test-Tube Baby

Alles Wichtige über Test-Tube Baby, den wesentlichen Fakten, Möglichkeiten und Kritiken:

The First Test-Tube Baby

Birth watch in Britain for an infant conceived in the laboratory

Summary

5

10

15

20

25

30

To millions of people in Britain and elsewhere around the world last week, it seemed as if Huxley's prophetic vision had become reality. Banner headlines in Britain called it OUR MIRACLE and BABY OF THE CENTURY. On television newscasts in Europe and the U.S., stories about an obscure British couple and the abstruse subject of embryology shouldered aside items about the Middle East, international trade balances and inflation. Some commentators heralded the coming birth as a miracle of modern medicine, comparable to the first kidney and heart transplants. Theologians—and more than a few prominent scientists—sounded warnings about its disturbing moral, ethical and social implications. Others, made wary by the recent cloning hoax, remained unconvinced that the child about to be born was indeed the world's first baby conceived in a test tube.
The center of all the furor was a four-story red brick building in the old textile mill town of Oldham in the northwest region of England. There, in a guarded room of the maternity section of Oldham and District General Hospital, Lesley Brown, 30, a resident of Bristol, was being tended in her final month of pregnancy. For nine years she and her husband Gilbert John, 38, a van driver for British Rail, had futilely tried to have a child. Now, finally, the Browns were on the verge of achieving their hearts' desire—in a most spectacular manner. Early in August, she is due to give birth by natural means to a child that her doctors say was conceived not in her body but in vitro (in glass) in a medical laboratory.
In anticipation of that scientifically assisted blessed event, normally quiet Oldham (pop. 227,000) last week was in a state of siege. From as far off as Japan, scores of reporters and cameramen had converged on the town to be on hand for the birth of Baby Brown. Despite pleas from the doctors that the hullabaloo was endangering both mother and child, journalists steadfastly prowled the hospital's precincts. They were seeking any morsel of news. Perhaps a brief word with one of the doctors responsible for the Brown experiment: Patrick Steptoe, who came and went daily in his white Mercedes, dodging in and out of the hospital's side doors to avoid the press. Or a chat with the equally elusive father. Or, scoop of scoops, a photograph of Lesley Brown peeking from behind her carefully curtained window.

» 1-12
General information of the topic given reactions of others on the events

» 13-22
the family Brown / the parents

» 23-74
depicts the changes in Oldham caused by the reporters behaviour

(...)

35

40

45

Some thoughtful observers saw the work as still another ominous step toward further control and manipulation of basic life processes — comparable perhaps to the recently acquired ability of molecular biologists to rearrange and recombine genes of different creatures and even to create new life forms. These critics are not really worried about the imminence of Huxley-style baby hatcheries that produce everything from superbrainy "Alphas" to dronelike "Epsilons." After all, says one researcher, "test-tube babies are not going to be popping out like peanuts." Rather the concern centers on the far-ranging social, ethical and legal repercussions. In the words of Nobel Laureate James Watson, there is the potential for "all sorts of bad scenarios." What, for instance, could prevent a scientist from taking a fertilized egg from one woman, who perhaps did not want to carry her own baby, and implanting it in the womb of a surrogate. Who then would be the child's legal mother? Or, in the words of an old joke, "Which one gets the Mother's Day card?"

» 35 ff.
criticism and comments on potential dangers
or effects

From: "TIME", July 31th, 1978

	advantages
» (to) try to have a baby futilely	» the chance for people (couples in love) who tried to have a baby futilely
» (to) conceive a baby
» fertilize an egg	» they are able to take control and make sure to get no deformed child (freak)
» ominous step
» manipulation of basic life / processes	» to have a healthy child
» (to) create new life forms	» the chance to have babies after a sivire illness
» repercussions (social, ethical, legal)	» securing of the retirement system
» in vitro fertilization of life	» less young generation than 50 years ago
» a surrogate (mother)
» (to) rearrange and recombine genes