Tonight:
4°c
I suppose that for those of us who make some of our living from writing about fictional dystopias, rather than utopias, the hysterical reaction to the news that Dr Karim Nayernia and his team at Newcastle University claim to have “created” human sperm in the laboratory can only be a good thing.
It's gratifying that in the 77 years since Aldous Huxley published Brave New World his vision of a future in which humans are produced in assembly-line laboratories, according to predetermined characteristics — physical, intellectual and emotional — still remains so deeply embedded in the popular consciousness.
Of course, I may be kidding myself here, and it's not Huxley's inspired — if a trifle didactic — satire that makes so many people so suspicious of assisted reproduction techniques but some sci-fi Z-movie with a title such as Mad Lesbian Scientists Destroy all Men.
Because to read the lubricious versions of Dr Nayernia's paper about his work in the press (it was published initially in the drier-sounding journal Stem Cell and Development), it is but a short wriggle from achieving successful spermatogenesis in the lab to the annihilation of anything human which has — in our charming cockney colloquialism — meat 'n' two veg.
In fact, not even Dr Nayernia himself believes that this breakthrough will help infertile men in the short-term, let alone lead to the culling of the fertile.
He knows full well that a lot more research is required, and that — crucially — the 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act would have to be changed in order to permit the use of in vitro-derived (IVD) sperm anywhere other than in a laboratory and for research purposes.
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which drafted this legislation, is, it seems to me, one of the rare successful examples in this society of the application of moral thought to social policy.
Perhaps because its forerunner, set up after the birth of the world's first “test-tube baby”, was a committee chaired by a real moral philosopher — the redoubtable Baroness Warnock — the Authority has always worked hard to reconcile the demands of couples desperate to propagate with the religious and ethical scruples of others.
The measure of its success has been that despite the vocal debate that has accompanied each new advance in reproductive technology, once the HFEA's recommendations have been knocked about a bit in Parliament, they are not only adopted but the temperature soon sinks on all sides.
No, the more interesting question raised by Dr Nayernia's claims is not whether some future society decides to do without men but why is it that the “rights” of infertile couples to have conception assisted by whatever means there are available — and preferably for free — should seem so inalienable to so many?
I don't doubt the suffering and sadness of individuals who are having difficulty conceiving —in the past few years, several of my own friends have been just such individuals.
On the whole, these are older people with underlying fertility problems exacerbated by the fact that they've left it late to have children.
They are also affluent people who, if help is not forthcoming on the NHS, are prepared to go private, go abroad — go wherever is necessary.
Arguably, these people are the revolutionary vanguard of a demographic revolution: because ever since the Second World War successive generations have left it later to propagate and then had fewer kids.
Successive generations of the wealthy and the aspirational, that is: at the bottom of the social heap there remain the teenage mums with the six-seater Maclaren buggies, as portrayed by Matt Lucas in Little Britain.
We're quite as anxious as our Victorian predecessors about the unconstrained breeding of the “lower orders” — only less prepared to admit it.
And however many statues of Nelson Mandela we erect, there are just as many people in Britain who fear the indigenous population of this archipelago — whoever they may be — becoming outnumbered by second, third, fourth and unto-the-nth generation immigrants.
No, there is no real fear of Frankensteinian fertility experiments except among those fundamentalist monotheists who believe the entire world is a real-time moral experiment conducted by a crazed super-being.
We know that even if these techniques do become possible, and are used, it will result in a tiny number of births to a vanishing small sample of the relatively wealthy.
The problem, as ever, remains the vast numbers of people who have no difficulty conceiving whatsoever and who are continuing to double the world's population every two decades or so.
Outside the gates of Affluent Britain the mob is pullulating and growing ever younger; inside, the ageing Mr and Mrs Affluent Britain are trying whatever techniques they can get their hands on to assist in the reproduction of little Britons.
They can see the future — and it's a dystopian one all right: air-hangar-sized “care homes” full of the senescent eking out their lives on pitiful post-crash pensions.
It isn't a brave new world at all — it's a craven old one.
Reader views (4)
THERE IS ONLY ONE PROBLEM, TO MANY PEOPLE
- Alan Green, Woodford Green, 10/07/2009 21:47
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Hear hear! I'm adopted as my parents were infertile. Plenty of other potential adoptees out there.
- Man In The Street, London, UK, 10/07/2009 06:35
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The most eco-freindly device in the world is made of rubber - the condom stops two polluters becoming more polluters.
Not deciding to use one, of course, is freindly in other ways - for too many it allows a gentle step up and aboard the benefits and housing gravy train.
- Darius Midwinter, London UK, 09/07/2009 12:06
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Natural selection real works well, money should not be allowed to break mother natures rules. I refuse to accept people like Robert Winston offer true value to medical research
- Ge, Kernow, 09/07/2009 10:53
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