be a close friend ofAldous Huxley’s. It was Haldane who gave Huxley the idea for the Hatchery. In 1923, Haldane delivered a lecture at Cambridge University, a meditation on
“the influence of biology on history.” He imagined a future in which a third of all children would be conceived and incubated in glass jars. Haldane’s lecture, published as
Daedalus; Or, Science and the Future
, contains a fictional history—a very earlyscience fiction fantasy, a founder of the genre—of the experimental work (including his own) that had led toectogenesis:
It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the firstectogenetic child. As early as 1901 Heape had transferred embryo rabbits from one female to another, in 1925 Haldane had grown embryonic rats in serum for ten days, but had failed to carry the process to its conclusion, and it was not till 1940 that Clark succeeded with the pig, using Kehlmann’ssolution as a medium. Dupont and Schwarz obtained a fresh
ovary from a woman who was the victim of an aeroplane accident, and kept it living in their medium for five years. They obtained several eggs from it and fertilized them successfully, but the problem of the nutrition and support of the embryo was more difficult.… France was the first country to adopt ectogenesis officially, and by 1968 was producing 60,000 children annually by this method. In most countries the opposition was far stronger, and was intensified by the Papal
Bull “Nunquauam prius audito,” and the similar fetwa of the Khalif, both of which appeared in 1960. 50
What actually happened was different. In 1934,Gregory Pincus claimed to have fertilized a rabbit egg in vitro. “Rabbits Born in Glass: Haldane-Huxley Fantasy Made Real by Harvard Biologists,” the
New York Times
reported. Three years later, Pincus was denied tenure at Harvard; his rabbit experiments had caused something of a scandal. In 1944, Pincus cofounded theWorcester Foundation
for Experimental Biology, where, in the 1950s, he and his colleaguesMin Chueh Chang andJohn Rock developed the oral contraceptive known as the Pill. 51 No ectogenetic child was produced in 1951. But in 1952 a young photographer namedLennart Nilsson did come across three jars containing human embryos, each only
half an inch long, in an anatomy laboratory in theKarolinska Institute, in Stockholm.
Nilsson, born outside Stockholm in 1923, had always been interested in the mystery of life. “From the time he could toddle about Swedish countryside showed single-minded drive to explore secrets of nature,” one
Life
press release put it. When he was five years old, he fell through the ice on a lake near his home and, when he was pulled out, reported calmly, “There were some very interesting things to see down
there.” When he was twelve, his father gave him a camera. By the time he was fifteen, he was selling his photographs to Swedish magazines. In that lab at the Karolinska, he took pictures of what was in those jars, and in 1953 he brought those pictures to New York, to show them to the editors at
Life.
Encouraged to pursue the work, Nilsson spent seven years in Swedish hospitals and gynecological clinics, taking pictures of dead embryos and fetuses, attempting to
chronicle “thestages of human reproduction from fertilization to just before birth,” a project that helped invent the idea of being unborn as a stage of human life, a stage that was never on any board game. 52
Pincus’s contraceptive pill was sold beginning in 1960; it went a longway toward separating sex from reproduction. But separating reproduction from women hadn’t come nearly as far. Haldane had predicted that by 1968 sixty thousand children would be bornectogenetically in France alone. That prediction was wrong. Nevertheless, a great many people, including the millions of people who sawStanley
Kubrick’s 1968 film,
2001
, were thinking aboutectogenesis.
Kubrick was born in New York in 1928. His father, a physician, gave him
“the influence of biology on history.” He imagined a future in which a third of all children would be conceived and incubated in glass jars. Haldane’s lecture, published as
Daedalus; Or, Science and the Future
, contains a fictional history—a very earlyscience fiction fantasy, a founder of the genre—of the experimental work (including his own) that had led toectogenesis:
It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the firstectogenetic child. As early as 1901 Heape had transferred embryo rabbits from one female to another, in 1925 Haldane had grown embryonic rats in serum for ten days, but had failed to carry the process to its conclusion, and it was not till 1940 that Clark succeeded with the pig, using Kehlmann’ssolution as a medium. Dupont and Schwarz obtained a fresh
ovary from a woman who was the victim of an aeroplane accident, and kept it living in their medium for five years. They obtained several eggs from it and fertilized them successfully, but the problem of the nutrition and support of the embryo was more difficult.… France was the first country to adopt ectogenesis officially, and by 1968 was producing 60,000 children annually by this method. In most countries the opposition was far stronger, and was intensified by the Papal
Bull “Nunquauam prius audito,” and the similar fetwa of the Khalif, both of which appeared in 1960. 50
What actually happened was different. In 1934,Gregory Pincus claimed to have fertilized a rabbit egg in vitro. “Rabbits Born in Glass: Haldane-Huxley Fantasy Made Real by Harvard Biologists,” the
New York Times
reported. Three years later, Pincus was denied tenure at Harvard; his rabbit experiments had caused something of a scandal. In 1944, Pincus cofounded theWorcester Foundation
for Experimental Biology, where, in the 1950s, he and his colleaguesMin Chueh Chang andJohn Rock developed the oral contraceptive known as the Pill. 51 No ectogenetic child was produced in 1951. But in 1952 a young photographer namedLennart Nilsson did come across three jars containing human embryos, each only
half an inch long, in an anatomy laboratory in theKarolinska Institute, in Stockholm.
Nilsson, born outside Stockholm in 1923, had always been interested in the mystery of life. “From the time he could toddle about Swedish countryside showed single-minded drive to explore secrets of nature,” one
Life
press release put it. When he was five years old, he fell through the ice on a lake near his home and, when he was pulled out, reported calmly, “There were some very interesting things to see down
there.” When he was twelve, his father gave him a camera. By the time he was fifteen, he was selling his photographs to Swedish magazines. In that lab at the Karolinska, he took pictures of what was in those jars, and in 1953 he brought those pictures to New York, to show them to the editors at
Life.
Encouraged to pursue the work, Nilsson spent seven years in Swedish hospitals and gynecological clinics, taking pictures of dead embryos and fetuses, attempting to
chronicle “thestages of human reproduction from fertilization to just before birth,” a project that helped invent the idea of being unborn as a stage of human life, a stage that was never on any board game. 52
Pincus’s contraceptive pill was sold beginning in 1960; it went a longway toward separating sex from reproduction. But separating reproduction from women hadn’t come nearly as far. Haldane had predicted that by 1968 sixty thousand children would be bornectogenetically in France alone. That prediction was wrong. Nevertheless, a great many people, including the millions of people who sawStanley
Kubrick’s 1968 film,
2001
, were thinking aboutectogenesis.
Kubrick was born in New York in 1928. His father, a physician, gave him
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