Brave New World

Brave New World Summary | Chapter 1 Summary

In the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning (D.H.C.) is giving a tour to new students. They begin in the Fertilizing Room on the ground floor, an enormous laboratory where workers dressed in wintry white overalls and "pale corpse-colored" rubber gloves bend over instruments in the frozen, dead light. Here, eggs are extracted from human ova kept in incubators and then fertilized to produce five groups of people: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons.

Using Bokanovsky's Process, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon eggs are forced to "bud"— divide into an average of seventy-two identical embryos. The process is one of arrested development, in which an egg's normal growth is checked with X-rays, cold, and alcohol. When the egg's growth is checked, it divides and then grows; then its growth is checked again, and so on, so that one egg results in anywhere from eight to ninety-six embryos. Bokanovsky's Process, the Director insists, is a major instrument of social stability, creating uniform men and women in standard batches.

Furthermore, they can produce at least a hundred and fifty mature eggs within two years, resulting in nearly eleven thousand brothers and sisters within two years of the same age. The Director calls over Mr. Foster, who eagerly explains that some of the tropical Centers have produced more, but he plans to beat them.

The aim of this mass production is to stabilize the population immediately. It is the year A.F. 632, and the World State's motto is "Community, Identity, Stability." Predestinators collect figures from the Fertilizers, who provide them with embryos, thus compensating for unforeseen human wastages like those resulting from natural disasters. In the Social Predestination Room, numbers of individuals of various qualities are updated and coordinated, figures calculated, and then the embryos are sent down to the Embryo Store.

The Embryo Store is in the basement of the building, where the light-sensitive embryos are protected. Here, dim figures with purple eyes, coral teeth, and symptoms of lupus test the embryos for sex, apply male hormones to some of the females to produce sterile freemartins, and finally, through a variety of environmental and mechanical techniques on the assembly line, condition the embryos for their future lives.

For example, the embryos of future rocket-plane engineers have their containers continually rotated and their circulation slackened when they're right-side up, so they'll associate being upside-down with well being. Through an alternating application of heat and cold, those destined to emigrate to the tropics and become miners and steel workers are conditioned to thrive in the heat and be horrified by the cold. For that, explains the Director, "is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny."

Lower-caste embryos, like the Epsilons, are deprived of oxygen to keep their intelligence low, since Epsilons do not need to be intelligent. The lower the caste, the lower the level of oxygen. The problem, explains the Director, is the years wasted in physical development; the Epsilon's mind is fully mature at ten, but the body is not actually fit to work until eighteen.

They stop while Mr. Foster speaks to Lenina, one of the purple-eyed nurses. After reminding Lenina to meet him on the rooftop at ten to five, Mr. Foster offers to take the students to Meter 900, where the Alpha Plus intellectual embryos are conditioned. However, the Director says they have to go up to the Nurseries now, before the children have finished their naps.