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Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.


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Journal ArticleDOI
Eli Y. Adashi1
TL;DR: In an all too brief an opening chapter, the authors are being treated to a profound display of clairvoyance in which Huxley literally lays out the future of reproductive medicine.
Abstract: President Bulun, Members of the SRI, Friends, What a pleasure it is to be back. It has been 15 years since I had the privilege of presiding over this society then known as the Society for Gynecologic Investigation (SGI). I am especially pleased to see President Bulun at the helm. The society could not have done better. I also wish to take this opportunity to thank the society for this vote of recognition. I am deeply honored. Among my distinguished predecessors, I wish to single out Robert B. Jaffe, the 1973 president of this society who made this city his home (Figure 1). This presentation is dedicated in his honor. Aldous Leonard Huxley, a liberal humanist and one of the preeminent intellectuals of his time, died at the age of 69 in Los Angeles in 1963 (Figure 2). Were he to rejoin us today, 50 years hence, he would hardly be surprised. By now, sex without reproduction and reproduction without sex have become commonplace in a manner he long ago envisaged. Equal equanimity would likely have been accorded to some of the improbable scientific breakthroughs of the day most if not all of which he has prefigured. The grandson of a celebrated zoologist, Thomas Huxley, the brother of an evolutionary biologist, Julian Huxley, and the half-brother of a Nobel Prize-wining physiologist and biophysicist, Andrew Huxley, Aldous never suffered from want of scientific enlightenment (Figure 3). His hopes of becoming a physician, however, were dashed early on by compromised eyesight. Instead, he threw himself with abandon into a life of literary excellence. Still, it is safe to assume that young Aldous was suffused with the science of the day. For all we know, his keen foresight may well have been informed by no more auspicious a source than conversations around the family dinner table. That said, John Haldane’s 1924 essay, Dedalus, or Science and the Future, was probably just as pivotal. 1 Brave New World, Huxley’s bleak satirical masterpiece, written in all of 3 months, was all about a sinister dystopian future gone off the deep totalitarian end. Set in London of 2540, the plot as such it is revolves around a regime bent on reproductive and social engineering, with the view of keeping the masses at bay through endless mindless bliss. Sex was recreational, love was obsolete, and the notion of a family obscene. Unexpectedly, however, in an all too brief an opening chapter, we are being treated to a profound display of clairvoyance in which Huxley literally lays out the future of reproductive medicine. The setting by any other name is a familiar one. The so-called Central London Hatchery, replete with its ‘‘Fertilizing Room,’’ incubators, work tables, slides, test tubes, bottles, and microscopes, could readily pass for today’s embryology laboratory. Eggs are secured via ex vivo cultures of whole ovaries. Embryos in turn are secured via, imagine, in vitro fertilization only to be followed by in vitro gestation that is ectogenesis. Even genome editing and human cloning receive some mention. Clearly, the arc of Huxley’s vision went well beyond the present state of the art. Hard as we might try, we are still catching up to him. The realization of in vitro fertilization (IVF) by Edwards and Steptoe constituted a remarkable indeed disruptive innovation. Life thereafter was never the same again. Many of us were fortunate enough to witness this breakthrough in our lifetime. Huxley, regrettably, passed on 15 years earlier. Recognized by a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine (Figure 4), IVF all but vanquished the scourge of infertility. No less important, IVF gave rise to multiple often improbable therapeutic and diagnostic breakthroughs, many of which could not have been foreseen by its originators let alone Huxley. Astoundingly, IVF, remarkable a feat as it was, could well be supplanted before too long by a literal watershed of unprecedented breakthroughs which are materializing at a far more ferocious clip than ever before. With your indulgence, let me expand some on this latter point. Examined in hindsight, the
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, a special issue was inspired by an Economic & Social Research Council funded seminar series that explored the possibilities for using Big Data and data analytics for assessing health and wellbeing risks within organisations.
Abstract: This special issue was inspired by an Economic & Social Research Council funded seminar series that explored the possibilities for using Big Data and data analytics for assessing health and wellbeing risks within organisations. The aim of this special issue was to build on some of the themes developed in the seminar series and draw together and update some key insights from different disciplinary perspectives on the opportunities, challenges and lessons that could be applied in this area. This editorial, therefore, draws together the findings and themes from the submitted papers and interprets these in light of the findings from the seminar series.
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Dare to Dream as discussed by the authors is a book written by Tom and Audrey about their journey from Australia to Europe and the dilemmas of balancing involvement in Soviet international study and advocacy with family responsibilities at home.
Abstract: the difficulties of learning the Russian language (a feat at which Audrey excelled, and Tom did not), the incidences of love affairs and drinking between other comrades on the 3-week boat journey from Australia to Europe, and the dilemmas of balancing involvement in Soviet international study and advocacy with family responsibilities at home. Dare to Dream is written in lively, accessible prose for a general readership, and will be of immense interest to contemporary unionists, social movement activists and all politically engaged readers as well as providing a rich historical source for scholars of industrial relations, Australian politics, and gender, environmental and labour history. The book evokes a world of activism and idealism that was predicated on a far less fragmented and fluid working class than exists in Australia today. If the Australian left is to reconfigure the union movement in ways that enable it to occupy the same kind of seamless, everyday presence in lives of working people that it did in Tom and Audrey’s youth, books like Dare to Dream will be essential reading. This is not because they offer a blueprint for change (the historical and industrial circumstances of their times will not be coming around again), but because they offer invaluable inspiration as to how it is possible to marry a set of core values to the particular circumstances of the age, with an abundance of creativity, hope and tenacity.
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors of George Orwell's Nineteen eighty-four (1949) contributed to the appearance of strong feelings of dislike against the type of oppressive, totalitarian regime, through the impact the novel had upon an enormous number of readers.
Abstract: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) contributed to the appearance of strong feelings of dislike against the type of oppressive, totalitarian regime, through the impact the novel had upon an enormous number of readers. The interest of the public in the image of the controlled individual by an almighty state remains high, even though Postmodernism, with its permissiveness, has generated the diversification of literary forms, technical inventions and, in the sense of reception, changes in taste and mentality. George Orwell imposed the most revealing description of a dystopian environment, surpassing the phenomenon of definitive human degradation under the assault of irrational cruelty. Orwell’s fictional world has aesthetic legitimacy, even though there were critics that noticed the presence of a single narrative voice. The author created a parable developed with Kafkian means, an irrational fictional world, but, paradoxically, passionately read by the public for its cruel, revealing realism and memorable scenes. The novel fails to reach the aesthetic absolute, it does not illustrate a remarkable constructive performance, but confirms a major human problem and existential tension, creating the impression of thorough analysis of humanity. The difficulty of writing is the metaphor of the irrationality of the world and the book is a transparent product, through which we follow the mechanism of terror in full operation.

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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20241
2023244
2022672
202192
2020142
2019141