For most of human history, the ethical considerations of scientific inquiry would have been a moot point. Outside of the Bible and mythology, there was no thought of creating life from inert matter because scientists would not have felt it was possible to do so. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, in the wake of landmark discoveries in the fields of chemistry, biology, and genetics, the possibility of scientific tampering with the human body and mind broached the ethical question of whether or not humankind would actually benefit, in the long run, from such a move. This dilemma is explored in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Mary Shelley wrote in a period when the "hard sciences" were still considered a branch of philosophy, but were rapidly developing into a discipline of their own, with new discoveries occurring at a rate that foreshadows the explosion of knowledge of our own day. Yet in Frankenstein Mary Shelley shows her concern that scientific exploration was exceeding its ethical boundaries; her novel is a blatant warning about the results of playing God, exemplified by the act of creating a human being without a woman.

But whereas in the thirties science was considered the sure road to salvation, we now regard it with the caution it deserves. Genetic testing goes on, but the cloning of a human being -- for now, at any rate -- is forbidden. Atomic power plants are regarded with grave caution. And every schoolchild is taught to recognize the seduction in the advertising messages heard on TV. Science is at least somewhat tempered by public perceptions of ethics, as it should be.

Mustapha Mond is an intelligent, competent, nice man, like many recently seen a tremendous people we meet in our own lives. He tells the young students about many barbaric practices of the past: actually living in a squalid home with one's birth parents and their other offspring; suckling milk from a mother's breast "like a cat"; lifetime monogamy. The torturous emotional rollercoasters such lifestyles involve! The students shudder; none of these dreadful concepts are even imaginable to them, and fortunately, Mond assures them, they need never know such traumas. "No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy," he tells them, "-- to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having any emotions at all". The greatest good in the Brave New World is not to be virtuous but happy.

The beginning of the novel describes life in the new World State through the eyes of a group of students, who are touring the "Central London Hatching and Conditioning Centre," to see infants and children -- something they would normally

However, as the nineteenth and then the twentieth centuries rolled on, people began to become more and more enamored with scientific progress -- and less and less interested in the ethical questions this progress raised. In 1932, when Aldous Huxley was writing Brave New World, the civilized world had boost in scientific and technological advances. These advances were hailed not only as evidence of man's progress but also as the basis for all human hope. Huxley felt that the hope for mankind lay not in technology but in man himself. He feared that unbridled research in science and technology was inherently dangerous, and that the misuse of knowledge can have dire consequences. He also feared that people would become so content to have all their diseases cured and their problems eliminated that they would allow their basic freedoms eliminated as well. Brave New World offers a picture of the world as it might become if man allows science to rule him rather than man ruling science.

The only way it is possible to produce a system like that is to eliminate free will

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Approximate Word count = 1736
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)