Oryx And Crake By Margaret Atwood Essay

Margaret Atwood’s novel “Oryx and Crake” is a thought provoking speculative fiction novel, published in 2003. Margaret Atwood was born in Ontario, Canada, where she was raised with her mother, a nutritionist, and her father, an entomologist. As a result of her father's continuing research in entomology, Atwood spent most of her childhood in the backwoods of Quebec, reading Dell map books, or Grim Fairy-Tales and comic books. With such an early interest in literature, she began writing at a young age as well. When she began studying at the Victoria College in the University of Toronto, she began to publish poems and articles in her school's literary journal. She began “Oryx and Crake” in the summer of 2001 while bird watching in the northern
At the Watson-Crick Institute, Jimmy witnesses “a large bulblike object . . . covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.” The chickens only have enough brain function to accomplish production. The animal lacks any form of legs, wings or even a head (Atwood, Oryx and Crake 203). This form of genetically modified animals is already being used today. Scientists modify animals in order to make them more useful to humans. In fact, our own form of ChickieNobs is already in place. Avigdor Cahaner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, created a red-skinned featherless chicken through cross-breeding. “He claims that the chicken would be lower in calories, faster-growing, environmentally friendly, and more likely to survive in warmer conditions” (Young). However, Cahaner’s featherless chickens have yet to be mass produced like the ChickNobs; these featherless chickens are well on their way
The idea of a designer baby is selectively breeding in order to get a baby that has specific genes one might want. This is called in vitro fertilization. In vitro fertilization is a complex series of procedures used to treat fertility or genetic problems and assist with the conception of a child. "Genetic screening like this has really taken off and helps improve the odds to eliminate a disease that is life threatening and it can improve the effectiveness of the IVF treatment," said Dr. Jessica Spencer, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Emory University School of Medicine's department of gynecology and