Your New Lifestyle/The Ultimate Baby Bottle; Your Bionic Future; Scientific American Presents; by Powledge; 4 Page(s)

NOBUYA UNNO brings up the nightmarish novel Brave New World himself, marveling at Aldous Huxley's accurate prediction that the kids are likely to be anemic after they emerge from their artificial wombs. Actually, Unno's little ones are not quite kids yet. They're fetuses. Goat fetuses.

Raising the ticklish subject of Huxley's 67-year-old novel is pretty cheeky for a scientist who has devoted a decade to developing an artificial womb. But Unno, an obstetrician-gynecologist and researcher at the University of Tokyo, might simply be acknowledging the inevitable. The novel's clever and even now slightly shocking vision of human kids fostered in jars always lurks beneath any talk of artificial wombs.