What 20th century science fiction got right and wrong about the future of babies

Almost every facet of life in some distant future has been envisioned by science fiction authors, including the methods by which people would procreate. Additionally, a retaliation against people who meddle with Mother Nature has typically been incorporated in their prophecies.

For example, British biologist JBS Haldane, in his 1923 attempt at speculative fiction, claimed that while people who push the boundaries in the physical sciences are often compared to Prometheus, who faced the wrath of the gods, those who tinker with biology run the risk of inciting something far more pointed: the wrath of their fellow humans. He stated in Daedalus, or Science and the Future, "Every biological invention is a perversion, if every physical or chemical invention is a blasphemy."

Haldane made some remarkably accurate predictions. For example, he predicted that in 1951 there will be the first "ectogenic babies" born. The creation of these lab-grown offspring would occur when two imaginary scientists, "Dupont and Schwarz," obtain a new ovary from a woman who perishes in an aircraft accident. The ovary continues to generate viable eggs for the following five years, which the team regularly harvests and fertilizes.

Haldane notes that Dupont and Schwarz eventually find a solution to the issue of "the nutrition and support of the embryo." Soon, scientists will grow accustomed to producing lab-grown children when they learn how to remove an ovary from any living woman, keep it in the lab for up to 20 years, retrieve a fresh egg each month, gather some sperm (he never specifies where), and fertilize 90 percent of the eggs. The embryos are then "grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air"; this is where the specifics get hazy.

In the future France, the first nation to use the new technique, will be "brought out into the air" for 60,000 newborns annually by 1968, according to Haldane's fantasy. Later on, he claimed, just thirty percent of infants are "born of woman," while ectogenic births spread over the world and surpass natural birth rates.

It was incorrect of Haldane to completely exclude the human uterus from these reproductive schemes. He was correct, nevertheless, when he predicted that scientists would eventually be able to extract an ovary from a living woman and preserve it in the lab for a very long time as a supply of eggs. The woman goes back to the lab to have her frozen ovarian tissue thawed and then reinserted into the ovary when she's ready to get pregnant. If all goes according to plan, the implant should start secreting hormones properly again after a few months, which will trigger the ovary to start growing and releasing eggs on a regular cycle once more. Hundreds of kids have been born after ovarian tissue was cryopreserved.

Aldous Huxley, a British author, was also obsessed with lab-created children as the key to the future—for him, it was a totalitarian dystopia. The central idea of his 1932 book Brave New World was artificial reproduction. Eggs and sperm that had been carefully chosen were combined and placed in glass dishes to develop in an artificial uterus. From there, the mixture could be either nurtured with nutrients to produce a healthy and intellectual upper crust or tainted with poisons to produce a lower class of less than human servants.

Huxley was interested in the degree of accuracy of his predictions. Consequently, he gave Brave New World Revisited another look in 1958. The world's first "test tube baby" hadn't been born in his home England for another two decades, which may have contributed to Huxley's perception—at the time residing in California—that his first projection of an endless row of artificial wombs in the baby-making lab had been too unrealistic. While he acknowledged that "babies in bottles and the centralized control of reproduction are perhaps not impossible," they were still a long way off. "It is quite clear that we shall remain a viviparous species breeding at random for a long time to come," he continued.

Indeed, humans continue to breed primarily "at random" and viviparously, that is, by live birth from a mother's body, even over 60 years after Huxley published those words. However, in a way that neither Huxley nor Haldane could have completely imagined, assisted reproductive technology has practically become a common practice. They also failed to foresee the development of a technology called CRISPR, which could alter an embryo's genetic code just as readily as altering a Word page, throughout this astonishing century.

Writers from a much more recent era, like those who wrote the screenplay for the 1997 film Gattaca, were in a better position to get the science essentially correct in this regard, envisioning a dismal future in which genetic engineering of embryos becomes as commonplace as a form of "preemptive plastic surgery," as noted by film critic Roger Ebert in his review.