"IN THE YEAR 2525 (Exordium and Terminus)" by (Denny) Zager and (Rick) Evans was a transatlantic #1 back when I was in high school. It included the verse:
In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube, whoa-whoa.
Little did I know back in 1969 that twenty years later I would join the English Department at the very college where Zager met Evans...anyway, thanks to their song and a boatload of similar sci-fi songs, fictions, films, etc., I did get the impression that humans would soon figure out how to engineer themselves. That humans would eventually all be lab-engineered was part of, for example, Aldous Huxley's dystopia fiction Brave New World, published in 1932, which I read about the same time Zager and Evans were zooming up the charts .
I thought of Huxley, Zager & Evans, and a host of others while reading Metzl's book because I was trying to figure out why nothing about it seemed surprising. Zager and Evans were way off as to date--tube-conceived sons and daughters are already an established part of the landscape--but relatively on-target as to outcome. As an occasional reader of science fiction, the whole of Metzl's book had a déja lu feel for me.
Metzl certainly has a point that we need to make some decisions right now about what the ethics and legality of these new developments ought to look like. I was glad to hear that he had been named to some commission or other, because he seems to know his onions about this topic. But I could not shake the feeling that this was all old news.
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