A romantic comedy starts production in Hollywood next year that promises to start a popular debate that has been going on for a few years now in the world of bioethicists.
Starring actors Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor and set in New York in the not-too-distant future, ‘The Pod Generation’ tells the story of a young couple who decide to cement their love by having a baby.
However, instead of doing it the natural way, they choose to share the burden of pregnancy using a new technology of a detachable womb.
The prospect of extra-corporal human gestation has long been the subject of dystopian fiction and film. Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic ‘Brave New World’ opens in a ‘hatchery’, where designer humans are grown in bottles to create a new caste-based society. In the science-fiction classic ‘The Matrix’, babies are not born but grown in fluid-filled bags.
Yet the science is a long way off from the dystopian or utopian, depending on your point of view, technological...