“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley: Inspired by the trendy scientific ideas of “ectogenesis” and “cloning”

I am now starting to reread Brave New World to see if it has anything relevant to multiple personality. But before I was interested in multiple personality, I had read this novel in the course of researching ectogenesis, which is making babies in artificial wombs (1), an idea popularized by the biologist, J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) (2).

“Haldane was parodied as ‘the biologist too absorbed in his experiments to notice his friends bedding his wife’ by his friend Aldous Huxley in the novel Antic Hay (1923). His essay Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1924), about ectogenesis and in vitro fertilization was an influence on Huxley's Brave New World (1932)...Haldane was the first to have thought of the genetic basis for the cloning of humans, and eventually super-talented individuals. For this he coined the term ‘clone’ ” (2).

Since they were friends, Huxley evidently knew about Haldane’s ideas before publication of the latter’s essay mentioned above. In Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), a character says, “…the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift…the means of dissociating love from propagation…In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear…”

And since Huxley had taught French and was familiar with French literature, it is possible that he first got the idea of ectogenesis from “D’Alembert’s Dream” (1769?) by Denis Diderot (1713-1784), in which there is this passage: “You would have a warm room lined with little vials, and on each of these vials there would be a label: warriors, magistrates, philosophers, poets — this vial for courtiers, that one for whores, that one for kings.”

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ectogenesis

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane