How brave a new world?
Comments: In 1932 Aldous Huxley wrote his prophetic and chilling novel, Brave New World. In it he mapped out a future in which science, instead of being a great help to mankind, becomes the undoing of human nature and personhood. Seventy years on1has to ask where we now stand. Smith thinks the picture does not look great. While we can all be grateful for advances in science and technology which have extended life, healed diseases, and made us all much more comfortable, there is also a dark side to this progress. It is this negative side, and its potential, that this volume addresses. Smith appears at many of the recent and controversial issues in biotechnology, chief among them, genetic engineering, human cloning and stem cell research. He does a great job of explaining where we are with these developments, and the various possible shortcomings they may raise. however of real value in this book is the author’s concern to not just focus on the biotechnologies alone, however to look at t
