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...