A Summary of Chapter 1 of Brave New World

Brave New World Chapter 1 Summary (Notes)
-Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.
-The year is a.f. 632 (632 years “after Ford”).
-Director of Hatcheries / Conditioning is giving students a tour of a factory that produces humans and conditions them for their roles in the world.
-Explains that humans no longer produce living offspring. Instead, surgically removed ovaries produce ova that are fertilized in artificial receptacles and incubated in bottles.
-The Hatchery destines each fetus for a particular caste in the World State.
-The five castes are Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon.
-Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon undergo the Bokanovsky Process. (Shocking an egg so that it forms up to 96 identical embryos, developing 96 identical human beings).
- Alpha & Beta embryos never undergo the dividing process.
-Director explains the Bokanovsky Process brings social stability because the clones are predestined to perform identical tasks at identical machines.
-Cloning process is one way the World State implements its guiding motto: “Community, Identity, Stability.”
-Podsnap’s Technique (speeds up ripening process of eggs in an ovary). Hundreds of individuals can be produced from the ova and sperm of the same man and woman within two years.

-The average production rate using Podsnap’s Technique is 11,000 brothers and sisters in 150 batches of identical twins. Called over by the Director, Mr. Henry Foster, an employee at the plant, tells the attentive students that the record for this particular factory is over 16,000 siblings.

- Director and Henry Foster explain the processes of the plant to the boys. After fertilization, embryos travel on a conveyor belt in bottles for 267 days.

-On the last day, they are “decanted,” or born.

-Seventy percent of the female fetuses are sterilized; they are known as “freemartins.”

-Fetuses undergo different treatments depending on their castes. Oxygen deprivation and alcohol ensure lower intelligence and smaller size of people of the 3 lower castes.

-Fetuses to work in tropical climate are heat conditioned as embryos; during childhood, further conditioning is done to produce adults that are emotionally and physically suited to hot climates.

-The process aims to make members accept and like “their inescapable social destiny.”
-Lenina Crowne explains that her job is to immunize fetuses destined for the tropics with vaccinations for typhoid & sleeping sickness.
-Henry explains that future rocket-plane engineers are conditioned to live in constant motion.
-Future chemical workers are conditioned to tolerate toxic chemicals.
-Henry wants to show the students the conditioning of Alpha Plus Intellectual fetuses, but the Director, looking at his watch, announces that the time is ten to three.
*decides not enough time to see the Alpha Plus conditioning.
-He wants to make sure the students get to the Nurseries before the children there have awakened from their naps.