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Lab Develops Artificial Womb
Meowharishi writes: "According to this article at the Observer, scientists from Cornell University have successfully developed the first artificial womb. Embroys successfully attached themselves to the walls of these wombs and began to grow but were terminated to comply with regulations. Developments like this really offer tremendous opportunities for creating a family for those who cannot have children the old fashioned way."
...is thinking of the "Baby Harvesting" scene in the The Matrix right about now??
a step closer to having male pregnancy,,another Arnold movie predicts real life =p
Why don't these researchers dedicate their energies to producing better contraceptives ?
We seem to live in a crazy world!
I can see the Sci-fi scenarios now: Saddam Hussein breeding an army of clones to conquer the world.
Talk about Pinky and the Brain.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
This is actively working against evolution. I demand this stop immediately. Not only do we allow blind, deaf, ugly, and stupid people to pro-create, but now we're going to start allowing sterile people to procreate? Someday, we'll all end up stuck in the matrix feeding tubes, and it won't be imposed on us by some AI run amuck.... it will be done by our own choice.
For the record, I don't have anything against the aforementioned groups of people, I'm just saying that the proliferation of those traits in our gene pool is not necessarily desired. Not to be misconstrued - I firmly believe that we're all created equal, and should be given ample opportunities to pursue happiness in our own ways. I'll not persecute people based on how they were born, but do we necessarily want to become a people who can't function without the full dependence on technology?
Stephen Hawking claimed that ALS was the best thing that ever happened to his career, note that he didn't say that it was the best thing to ever happen to his life.
- passion
Is there something they're not telling us here? Is this making anyone else paranoid? If the human race is having serious problems with self-government and religion, what makes anyone believe we are going to get "better" playing God?
This is exciting. Alduous is doing pretty good on his predictions. I'd be scared about the future, but I've just taken a gram of soma.
Pax Digitalia
What is facinating about this is that it could either revolutionize the human birth process or be perverted into something horrid.
If Women were no longer subjected to being the bearer of children, and allowed to have the option of using an alternative method of gestating a child. Health costs could be lowered, OBs would be rare, etc. The Truth Machine and The First Immortal wree two books by James Halperin about ideas of how the future could turn out. He had artificial wombs as one of the techs (mentioned briefly).
At the same time, an artificial womb could be quite horrific. How would a person be after developing in an artificial womb. Charles Wilson explored this with Embryo and had a bunch of psychotic murderers running around.
I often felt that humans just shouldn't be allowed to do what they do with some forms of medical science because of how it is perverted in the name of their deity either. I'm sure the right-to-life people are going to have a field day with it, as well as the right-to-abortion folks. Both will show it as 'proof' that their side is right. Televangilists on TV will be telling folks to send em their money so they can stop it, etc.
Me, I find this facinating medically, but frightening socially.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
How is this different from a couple's child being gestated in a surrogate mother's womb?
How is this different from a different organ - the kidney - being replaced with external machinery (dialysis)?
How is this different from the prosthetic limbs or the artifical hearts in development?
Our bodies are imperfect and sometimes bits don't work properly or break. We have the means to workaround these shortcomings with technology; in this case, we still need parents to provide the genetic material and, obviously, raise the child once it is born.
---
Oregon
At first a clone needed a human surrogate mother to carry the fetus to term. Now, we can clone the human and not even have a human carry it. This could be done behind closed doors. Nobody would even be aware that the child exists.
Combine that with genetic experiements, there are plenty of opportunities to play god and not get too concerned about the mistakes. Biology and medicine is more or less a game of trial and error, and genetics is unlikely to be much different. But if nobody knows about the 10,000 mutants that resulted from every success...
Something to think about anyways.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
In the book "The universe in a nutshell" by Stephen Hawking, he notes that humans developing inside an artificial womb would be able to develop larger brains. (of course, larger brains != more intelligence.. )
This device makes it possible for (baby|fetus)s to reach this "viability" mark much earlier...
I don't want to start a flame war, but what effect do you think technological advances such as these will have on ethics relating to unborn children/fetuses?
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
So this is how Lucas is going to promote Episode II.
Perhaps that tells you that the scientists are doing something they shouldn't be doing...?
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
As if it weren't obvious, this has tremendous implications. But perhaps it's worth pointing one of them out.
Currently, abortion is legal until the fetus has reached a point of viability- that is, until it could conceivably live outside of its mother's womb on its own. Advances in medical science have been pushing that date back slowly since Roe v. Wade, but this is very big.
It's a pretty arbitrary line to begin with, and this makes it even farther from being grounded in modern science.
I'm not interested in having the yet another abortion debate, but I am curious how folks think this will change the rhetorical landscape for politicians, religous figures and ethicists. And, of course, for women.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
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but were terminated to comply with regulations
...Kind of like Emeril's sitcom?
ok. that was really bad.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
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...they "modified" living females, greatly increasing the size of their wombs and turning them into mindless organic "factories" capable of producing anything from living tissue to chemical compounds.
You're using her as bait, Master!
The ugly is very appealing to man.... It's instinct. One shrinks from the ugly, yet wants to look at it. There's a devilish fascination in it. We extract pleasure from horror.
ATTRIBUTION: Sonya Levien (1895-1960), Russian screenwriter. William Dieterle. King Louis XI (Harry Davenport), The Hunchback of Notre Dame, commenting on the crowd's decision to crown the ugliest person as King of the Fair (1939).
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
'There are going to be real problems,' said organiser Dr Scott Gelfand, of Oklahoma State University. 'Some feminists even say artificial wombs mean men could eliminate women from the planet and still perpetuate our species. That's a bit alarmist. Nevertheless, this subject clearly raises strong feelings.'
For the record, how many guys do you know who come out saying 'Man, I'd love to have kids.. but its those damn _women_ I can't stand. Pussy? Who needs pussy! I just want a baby to cuddle!'
Sure, they don't like our PMS trips, but do they really want to eradicate sex (real sex) from their diets? I mean Rosy and her sisters, and the Realdoll only go so far...
These chicks make us normal feminists look bad.
Witty quotes suck.
"Men redundant? Now we don't need women either"
I'm sorry, but while I can stand being considered 'redundant', I consider women to be absolutely necessary.
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
Can you imagine one of these things making an appearance in one of those ABC AfterSchool Special shows about teen pregnancy?
Holy shit, that would be so trippy.
PDHoss
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
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I'm so far from a luddite it's not funny, but are we sure we should be doing this? I mean most of us here are pretty firm believers in Darwinism, whether god started it or just luck (I believe luck, but I digress) - I mean if you medically can't have children, perhaps there's a reason? I know there's disease, accidents, and botched surgery that can cause these things, but I'm just uncomfortable with the idea.
I think we need to get away from the notion that every person out there has an automatic right to have children. Some people just shouldn't. Or how about adoption? There are a lot of kids out there in foster homes.
Top marks for the pure science involved tho!
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
http://google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Center+for+Rep roductive+Medicine+and+Infertility%22&btnG=Google+ Search
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
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But in this case, I did.
'Overpopulated' is one of these wonderful terms, that suggests a scientific problem. But really means 'there are some people I would rather weren't born.'
More specifically, 'overpopulaton' - whatever that is supposed to mean - is used as a euphamism for 'too many of them, about the right number of us.'
When we talk of overpopulation, what we are really saying is 'there are a class of people who should not be allowed to reproduce.' That is a dangerous and evil thought...
Feel free to tell me I'm wrong!
*r
--- My dad's political betting
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Yes... and then evolutionary forces (like peanut butter or flights of stairs) apply their leverage and voila, evolution in action!
GPL Deconstructed
Earlier, I said this doesn't raise any moral dilemmas - scratch that.
The abortion issue is a red herring - John & Jane (and Jill and Jacqueline) Mormon may get government sanction to adopt any aborted fetus they want in the state of Utah, by chucking them in one of these, but I doubt it.
However, I worry about extensive birth defects among babies birthed using this technique.
The evidence (search for string 'birth defects') is not as strong as I recall, but there is reason to believe that babies concieved by in vitro fertilisation - who are then transplanted into the womb of another woman - have higher birth-defect rates than other babies (this study was done in Australia, so maybe IFV agravates fetal alchohol syndrome.)
An artifical womb, which would, almost by definition, be a pretty imperfect copy the first time round, might have a hugely higher birth defect rate.
Be like me, enliven your sex life by discussing "flipper babies" instead of letting her go to sleep.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
A lot of people have brought up the issue of abortion and viability, suggesting that this sort of technology may have an effect on the ethics of aborting a fetus that may be considered viable at any stage.
However, there's another interesting consequence... What if a fetus could be transplated from a natural womb to an artificial one? Let's say a woman wants to have an abortion, and the doctor says, "We can either terminate the fetus, or we can transplant it to an artificial womb and put it up for adoption".
Would it ever be ethical to destroy the fetus in this case? This eliminates the argument of autonomy . Should a woman have the right to decide whether or not to destroy her fetus or simply put it up for adoption?
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?
Christ on a crutch, this author *sucks*. Pick a plot and *go* with already, I can't keep track of this one.
--Dave Rickey
You want to go live in the stone age, enjoy yourself. Keep me out of it.
Dyolf Knip
Developments like this really offer tremendous opportunities for creating a family for those who cannot have children the old fashioned way."
Or for creating an army of genetically enhanced flying monkeys. Fly my pretties, fly! Hahahahahaha!
Its about time my kids can get a womb with a view!
*rimshot*
sounds like the clones in huxley's 'brave new world'.
I Didn't Think It Was Possible. The "grim sci-fi future" is more gentle and humane than the present. Case in point: 7 of 9 is on a Borg cube and there is a drone in a maturation chamber. Despite heroic effort, she is unable to save it. The present: Regulations stipulate that human life be terminated, and scientists comply.
Yeah, I know there is no way we can stop this from happening... or do you mean to say "resistance is futile"?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
> Embroys successfully attached themselves
> to the walls of these wombs and began to
> grow but were terminated to comply with regulations.
That's nice, but any chance of doing the same with embryos?
RMN
~~~
"I shall begin at the beginning," said the D.H.C. and the more zealous
students recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin at the
beginning. "These," he waved his hand, "are the incubators." And opening
an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes.
"The week's supply of ova. Kept," he explained, "at blood heat; whereas
the male gametes," and here he opened another door, "they have to be kept
at thirty-five instead of thirty-seven. Full blood heat sterilizes." Rams
wrapped in theremogene beget no lambs.
Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils
scurried illegibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern
fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of its surgical
introduction-"the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society,
not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months'
salary"; continued with some account of the technique for preserving the
excised ovary alive and actively developing; passed on to a consideration
of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the liquor in
which the detached and ripened eggs were kept; and, leading his charges to
the work tables, actually showed them how this liquor was drawn off from
the test-tubes; how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed
slides of the microscopes; how the eggs which it contained were inspected
for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle; how
(and he now took them to watch the operation) this receptacle was immersed
in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa-at a minimum
concentration of one hundred thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted;
and how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of the liquor and
its contents re-examined; how, if any of the eggs remained unfertilized,
it was again immersed, and, if necessary, yet again; how the fertilized
ova went back to the incubators; where the Alphas and Betas remained until
definitely bottled; while the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were brought out
again, after only thirty-six hours, to undergo Bokanovsky's Process.
"Bokanovsky's Process," repeated the Director, and the students underlined
the words in their little notebooks.
One egg, one embryo, one adult-normality. But a bokanovskified egg will
bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and
every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into
a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one
grew before. Progress.
"Essentially," the D.H.C. concluded, "bokanovskification consists of a
series of arrests of development. We check the normal growth and,
paradoxically enough, the egg responds by budding."
Responds by budding. The pencils were busy.
He pointed. On a very slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was
entering a large metal box, another, rack-full was emerging. Machinery
faintly purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes to go through, he told
them. Eight minutes of hard X-rays being about as much as an egg can
stand. A few died; of the rest, the least susceptible divided into two;
most put out four buds; some eight; all were returned to the incubators,
where the buds began to develop; then, after two days, were suddenly
chilled, chilled and checked. Two, four, eight, the buds in their turn
budded; and having budded were dosed almost to death with alcohol;
consequently burgeoned again and having budded-bud out of bud out of
bud-were thereafter-further arrest being generally fatal-left to develop
in peace. By which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming
anything from eight to ninety-six embryos- a prodigious improvement, you
will agree, on nature. Identical twins-but not in piddling twos and threes
as in the old viviparous days, when an egg would sometimes accidentally
divide; actually by dozens, by scores at a time.
"Scores," the Director repeated and flung out his arms, as though he were
distributing largesse. "Scores."
But one of the students was fool enough to ask where the advantage lay.
"My good boy!" The Director wheeled sharply round on him. "Can't you see?
Can't you see?" He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. "Bokanovsky's
Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!"
Major instruments of social stability.
Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory
staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg.
"Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!" The
voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. "You really know where you
are. For the first time in history." He quoted the planetary motto.
"Community, Identity, Stability." Grand words. "If we could bokanovskify
indefinitely the whole problem would be solved."
Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of
identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to
biology.
As one of few pro-life anarchists out there I would like people's opinion on this.
forgive my website trilucid.com flaked out and I lost most of my pages
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Tonight I shall sleep beneath a blanket of paranoia.
I wasn't worried about being cloned without my permission. I knew that no woman (other than dear ol' Mom) would want to carry a copy of me arond for 9 months. However, this changes everything.
A couple of things..
1)I wonder if a live fetus was miscarried, could it be placed into the artificial womb till birth.
2)This will be the end of that "re-birthing" craze. What re-birthing will renew my life? Well, sorry but I wasn't born that way. I was born by cracking my "shell". Which brings up...
3)You can't call this being born. You have to call it being hatched.
What kind of psychological impact will it have if a baby is brought to term without any of the rocking, singing, ooh-ah, coo-coo, dinner, conversation, love and life of the mother in close contact? An "artificial womb" will presumably be a dark, enclosed tank with little or no human contact. There is substantial evidence to indicate that prenatal stimulation is important. I wonder what kind of messed up people will come out of these chambers.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
This is no big deal. Take a soma and relax!
Of course if we had a Beowulf cluster of these, hmm...
sic transit gloria mundi
realdoll.com? :)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
The Raven.
The Raven
So as far as I can remember, this is the first time this has been done. I can remember mention of people thinking it ludicrous to put a human on the moon, even after assorted animals had been put into orbit. Closer to current times, who would have thought processor speeds could have gone to what they are now, working on line sizes of 0.13 micron? If you said something like this to someone 10 years ago, they would have laughed at you.
I think this whole artificial womb thing is scary. An lab-created womb with attached fetus can be much easily monitored and controlled than an expecting mother, so the whole issue of antibodies and nutrients would be controlled much better than a mother watching what she eats and drinks and how much adverse environmental things she exposes herself to. It's amazing that this has happened, and quite frankly, it scares the shit out of me.
The emotional bond that seems to exist between the mother and child within the womb seems irreplacable. It's proven fact that stimulation is what help babies develop, and it seems like a test-tube baby would lack many of the sensations available to a naturally born baby (the sounds of the mother's voice, jostling, temperature and hormonal variations).
As I posted earlier, I think this sort of thing could make us "God children" (see G.A.T.T.A.C.A.) become inferior as superior, disease and disability-free children are born from laboratories.
*sigh* Perhaps I'm just overreacting.
I imagine that if human civilization ever came to accept this type of technology, it would be possible to one day use it to colonize far away solar systems. Instead of massive self-sustaining 'generation' ships, we could send unmanned robotic prospecting missions out to look for life-sustaining planets. If the ship found a promising new home, it would drop landing vehicles and build temporary shelters. Food plants could then be grown indoors from seeds transported in cold storage, and the planetary atmosphere tested further. If everything checked out, the ship could then start to give birth to and raise a "crew" from a cold-store of embryos.
The crew would grow up and be taught how to build more complicated structures and machinery; one day they would move out of the temporary shelters and onto the land itself. They would have access to an archive of our culture and knowledge to guide them as they adapted to the land and built a new culture from available resources. Maybe one day they would decide to 'phone home...', and we would meet aliens from space... ourselves!
Obviously, I am talking science fiction here; anyone who has seen a 2-year-old on a rampage realizes that it would require insane artificial-parent technology to bring about a new genesis of humanity on a far away planet, (I don't think the talking Barney and a VCR would cut it), but I do think that advances like the artificial womb are exciting, and bring all of this speculation closer to the realm of the possible.
The Way of the Gun baby, marry money and all this can be yours.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
When we talk of overpopulation, what we are really saying is 'there are a class of people who should not be allowed to reproduce.' That is a dangerous and evil thought...
True. Some people think that population control means killing, if not sterilizing large amounts of people accordingly deemed unfit to reproduce. Or, failing that, strict fecundity restrictions a la China.
Most people who don't already have a genocidal streak inside them think more in terms of improved contraception and an increased standard of living [which need not be as profligate as that of your typical U.S. resident] as the ticket to a lower birth rate.
Happy, well-fed people with lives worth living tend to find it less of a priority to create new ones. That's what has been happening in almost every industrialized Western country in the past few decades, and is not happening in areas of greater human need.
Now, how to make this happen is another can of worms entirely---but most sane people concerned about overpopulation rightfully see authoritarian measures as a giant leap backward.
iSKUNK!
+1 insightful
;-)
Sorry, I'm not a moderator today or else I'd give you those points for real.
I posted to
I am certinly not an eloquent slashdotter, but let me bend your ear(eye?) for a minute or two.
I smoke. I know that I will grow a nasty case of lumps on and in my lungs if I don't stop. (bare with me here.) I deserve to get what ever comes my way, but look at the development science like this.
I pay for insurance on my car in case I'm in a wreck. I warehouse keeps parts to replace my fenders. Time goes by, and I run over a couple of MS employees one day. Damage done, Insurance pays, warehouse ships parts, car gets fixed.
So back to my point. I smoke, I get lung cancer, Insurance pays, warehouse ships, body gets fixed.
(NOTE: I'm kidding about the selfish smoking thing) Really, Think about the kid that is born with a heart problem. Or the cop that gets shot in the line of duty and looses his lung(s). That is the real reason for this stuff. Not so that we can breed humans, but so that we can "manufacture" factory replacement parts. Besides everyone knows that the cheep after market parts never fit quite right.
(BTW: I'm all in favor of natural selection, but the point I'm trying to make here is that this isn't so that we can populate the earth)
So, whether this technology overturns Roe vs. Wade or not (and quite frankly, Roe vs. Wade was a horrible butchery of justice, flagrantly beyond the scope of the constitution), the effect on the social landscape will be minimal.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
It should be apparent to you that humans no longer live according to the natural laws. We've evolved past living in the bodies we were born in, past living in the environment we were born in. I would suppose that we aren't even animals any more.
A lot of this type of thing makes you question what existence is, what consciousness is, and what your are. Are you your body? When you get an organ transplant do you become partially another person? What about receiving and donating blood even? Is there some kind of spirit that separates you from the not-you?
Does it become such of a problem if a person is blind if she can be given sight again? That sight would probably be better that any sight you or I could ever imagine. What if deaf people can be given their hearing back? Heck, ugly people can already become sexy.
Now, most people tell me that I simply watch too much anime, but one day I hope that the body can become irrelevant. I'm quite disgusted with the body I was given, and I'm excited at how many options are available for making it much more comfortable to live in.
From time to time I think that it would be a good idea to impose some kind of restriction on procreation. In most species of animals, not every member of the species may procreate. Maybe given a "purer" gene pool, I wouldn't be in the mess I'm in, but it's debateable whether my mess is related to genetics at all.
The problem I always run into when trying various thought experiments where procreation is only limited to the select is what the criteria should be. Perhaps we should have a yearly near-deathmatch among males who wish to procreate in order to weed the weaklings out. The survivors could choose from among females that want to procreate on the basis of whom they think will be wildest in bed. That's a close approximation to how it's done in the animal kingdom, but it raises the question of whether the resulting traits would be a good direction for the species. You'd probably end up with a bunch of bimbos and jocks. Another situation would be a large fine for the privelege of marriage and therefore procreation, payable by each mate, maybe somewhere in the neighborhood of $500,000. It has several advantages, but do you really think that you want a world of Bill Gateses? Intelligence isn't enough to be successful; there's also a requirement of being underhanded and sometimes downright evil. I've also explored a few other interested situations, but I always come to the same conclusion: there's no good way of defining quality.Additionally, evolution is a process, not a goal. The fallacy of those situations is the assumption that there's a knoweable outcome we can solve for. That just isn't true.
Is it that much of a problem that humans can modify their own bodies? I think that's a step in evolution, itself. Let's face it: you can't tell people to not reproduce. Humans have no instinctual pecking order that prevents all but the fittest from mating. The evolution now is being able to control our own bodies.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
There are fields stretching as far as the eye can see, where Humans are no longer born... We are grown.
-Morpheus, The Matrix
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
She breathed a short laugh. "For all that I try to be all modern and galactic, that feels so strange. All sorts of men don't make it home for the births of their children. But My mother was out of town on the day I was born, so she missed it, just seems . . . seems like a more profound complaint, somehow."
-- Diplomatic Immunity , Lois McMaster Bujold, chapter 1,
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
This is sick. Creating human life just to see if it will attach to an artifical womb? What have we become?
How about some Bioethics 101
Rule 0: Human life is sacred.
Rule 1: A human's life shall not be taken.
Rule 2: A human shall give consent to all expirementing done on them. This concent may not be given until they are of age(around 18).
Rule 3: Whenever possible expirements should be carried out on other organisms to minimize human suffering.
Rule 4: Research shall be carried out in a contained enviornment. Only when a new organism/product/medicne's side effects have been thouroughly tested shall it be released into "the wild"
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
What's up over there in the States? Is it rendered illegal to adopt a poor child from your local community or even a poor foreign country? Or is it unpopular now, because that cute little kiddie might have terrorist genes because it came from Somalia?
I don't get this planet anymore. Millions of kids die of treatable diseases and undernourishment every year, but billions are spent every year to produce breeding technology for those who are biologically disabled from offspring production.
Beam me up Scotty. There ain't no intelligent life down here.
+++ath0
If they were to combine such technology with a Realdoll!
She doesn't cook, she doesn't clean, but she will bear your children!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Essentialy we're in the same kind of situation. A tiger uses it's teeth to kill and stripes to hide. These special characteristics help the tiger survive and breed. Our special characteristic is our brain. As I see it: Anything our brain helps us with is natural. Even if it means we'd become wheelchair sitting, websurfing, tubefed weaklings who'd die in an power outage. Shit happens! The dinosaurs died... Maybe because they became to specialised? The same could happen to us. The univers wouldn't care less.. :) .. So enjoy your life as it is.
Cheers...
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
There was a thread not long ago about how people with high IQ and advanced education are having far fewer babies than the minimum replacement rate (data gathering was limited only to intustrialized countries). If intelligence has anything to do with IQ and is also to some degree hereditary (plausible assumptions), the inevitable consequence is that evolution currently serves to make humans dumber with every generation.
However, I think many parents who want the best for their children but for some reason cannot produce their own would want to use genetic material from people they admire. This way, you could "adopt" the spawn of Natalie and Linus, and the inconvenience to the two of them would be minimal.
Here's a question you could take as serious, or as a joke--it works both ways...
If you wanted a baby but couldn't use your own genetic materials, who would you want the "parents" to be? I look forward to responses (limit them to people whose DNA is readily obtainable).
Also, it's worth keeping in mind that though this is first being tried with unmodified human eggs, other research shows that we can substitute any human DNA we want into the nucleus of the egg. This means that if we injected Linus DNA into the egg and had AC generously contribute some sperm, we could spawn an unholy kernel-child. There would even be a 25% chance it would be a girl. If we assume the eggs are from reproductive-aged organ donors, creating this child would be very little trouble for both Linus and AC. Not only that--your neigbors could order a Linus/AC spawn and try to raise it too.
It would be strange, but not in any obvious way a bad thing. For one thing, it would help counteract the possible deevolution problem we worried about last week. I think it would be a fine way to pay tribute to the greats: have them provide the DNA for the children you raise. I wonder who would hold the record for most sired children? (I have a feeling I don't want to know the answer, because it's probably someone like Leonardo DeCaprio. Hmmm. Maybe this really wouldn't help against deevolution.)
[giving up mod access for what some right-to-lifer with mod points is going to see as flamebate... but hey, opinion is opinion, and too many people seem to think that their opinions are FACT, so what the hell....]
It's not successful until the device can be proven to gestate a fetus to term, and that said fetus be functional and free of defencts (depending on the old truism of garbage in, garbage out with regards to the genetic materials). "Regulations" have allowed for nothing more than a proof of concept. Yee ha. Test it on a pig or something and see if it really works all the way.
Too many people are shooting straight from the hip with moral panic attacks about this- the results of which are essentially as close minded as "640k ought to be enough for anybody." The morally minded need to shut the fsck up and realize that they have no right to have ANY say in the procreation alternatives of other sentient individuals. I cannot assess wether or not this device is practical for reasons stated above- it's not a functional proof of concept until "regulations" (created or pushed through by the morally minded who seem to exist only to restrict the will of others) allow for a thorough test.
Is it a good idea? Of course; it's advancing science. Medical science and NASA would be about thirty years behind where we are now were it not for German scientific data garnered from the second world war.
The only life you have ANY say in is YOUR OWN. Now keep your mouth shut about why cloning and Gattica-style selective breeding is a bad idea.... because simply put, it doesn't presently exist, so we just don't KNOW, do we? It's not your life, it's not your choice, so fundamentally, it's *not your business* unless you're looking to reproduce and have run out of options.
There's a LOT more to an artificial womb than getting the embryo to attach. The baby/mother system has lots of biochemical communication, turning mommy into a nutrient factory for the little tyke under construction.
Her body sacrifices the calcium in her bones, the energetic compounds and trace elements in her fat, and the vitamins in her bloodstream, handing it off to the foetus as directed by a plethora of signals. She gets morning sickness from folic acid deficiency and strange appetites at odd hours ("Honey, run out and get me some Ice Cream and Pickles!") whenever baby needs some oddball compound. And then there's the support, massage, and shaping performed by the bag of muscles the kid lives in for 9 months.
The signals are FAR from all known, and you can bet that kidlet will not form up healthy and happy if you just give him/her a stock nutrient solution rather than adjusting it according to his/her signals.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually, the artifical womb story reminded me of the Azi in CJ Cherry's books, like Cyteen and 40,000 in Ghenna.
Scary shit if you really stop to think about it. You could give birth entire species once you develop the technology far enough. Instead of having colony ships filled with people, animals, etc., you could have one filled with frozen genetic material (sperm and ova), ready to be thawed out and grown at the other end...
Or you could make a few hundred clones of Hitler in some underground lab in South America...
Or the like- I can't imagine that people such as Helms or some of the bums and genetic rejects I see on the bus could convievably be the result of a traditional pregnancy. Unless the mom took PCP like vitamins and drank like a fish.
IIRC, the Russians or Germans did some experiments along these lines in the early part of the 20th century. Not the artificial womb, so much as artificial maintenance of newborns- the control group was cared for in the ways you would expect; lotsa love and care and baby talk and all that other stuff.
The subject group had their base physical needs taken care of, and that was IT. The nurses did not interact with the newborns in any affectionate capacity. The results were pretty interesting- the subject group - you'll love this- died. All of them.
A device like this is an important step forward, but it's not going to produce viable results without additional stimulation. While you can theoretically grow an embryo in a tube like you would a chicken in an egg... ya gotta remember that chickens don't go to school or talk.
It's an important thing to note that while it's been proven through the above example that once the fetus is out in the world it needs care and *attention*- but we have ZERO *proof* that the stimulation you mention has any serious bearing on the infant, for the fact that we cannot- not even now, due to "regulations"- test this hypothesis!
Worldly stimuli is quite possibly entirely optional. As for my own curiosity, I would think that pheremones and nutritional intake have a serious bearing, as that shapes the physical development. Beyond that.... hey, my oldest memory would be from about the age of 18 months or so, and it's a pretty danged fuzzy one at that.
The Japanese had built an artificial womb some years ago, and raised a goat to term in it... http://www.lucifer.com/~sean/BT/21.html#21womb
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Army, Navy, Marines... they all get to test things like nerve gas and vaccinations so the masses don't have to. It's part of the job description- hundreds die to prove a hypothesis or run a test trial of something at MIGHT work. And you never hear about it.
It's a proven fact that war triggers massive technological innovation. Given the social and genetic diversity of the human race, there will ALWAYS be those that are in the eyes of others "morally questionable", who are willing to do these types of experiments in the advance of human knowledge.
And we scream bloody murder in moral outrage, beat their asses, take their data and build on it with our hands clean. Our society would be a mere shadow of what it is now had that little "opinion poll" of yours gone through... and the fact of the matter is that despite everything that happened during that period in time, the human race is BETTER for it all as a result.
Deal with it.
It would be a completely different birth. No mother-screaming-in-pain. No panic. No grandparents-rushing-to-hospital-later. You could assemble the whole family, everyone could be relaxed and ready, and the baby could be "hatched" into the arms of its happy, fully aware, ready-to-nurture parents.
On the other hand, the mother, if any, wouldn't be lactating. Oh well. That can be dealt with I suppose.
You are so right.
We have no idea what we're getting into. And we have no idea what we don't know yet about the natural gestation process.
It is a silly and frankly stupid notion that everyone has a right to reproduce biologically, and that that right must be enabled by expensive new technology. If you can't make a child naturally, you can adopt one. God knows there are enough already who need to be adopted.
... it's very is to trip and fall down with your nose on the ground.
Maybe we could also develop airbag-noses to go with big brains???
Interestingly you missed a *huge* reason as to why infertile couples don't adopt. It's not easy to do. We looked into it and were told our chances were slim to none. The view for adoption agencies is to find the best home for a child not to provide a child for a family (as it should be).
Not only is it not easy it is made deliberately difficult. We have been through (unsuccessfully to date - but there is hope) IVF treatment. When we started this process we looked at all the options, and adoption was one that obviously came up. The policy of the adoption agencies (in the U.K.) is that if you want to adopt then you must stop fertility treatment. No ifs, buts, or maybes - stop. There is also a maximum age of the adoptive parents, and we were close to it. So that was the choice - we could try IVF but forego adoption, or adopt but forego IVF.
There would be a sting in the tail even if we were younger. Rather oddly you cannot be seen too be to keen to have children if you want to adopt (this is just one of the obscene number of hoops you have to jump through). Having multiple attempts at IVF "looks bad".
And people wonder why there are so many children needing adopted.
A sheep conceived and gestated through entirely artificial means seems to me just as amazing as a cloned sheep, and you can then start working on humans once you have the bugs out of the system.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wouldn't you say that the people in Brave New World were quite happy? Granted, monstrously clean and neat, but still rather happy? They had purpose in life, and seemed satisfied, gamma or alpha.
Anyhow, this is part of what makes great literature great. It is multifaceted and nuanced. You hear me, soulless action authors? John Grisham or whatever your name is?
Stop the brainwash
You may wish to abstract "mind" vs "brain".
Wresting control of reproduction out of the anarchic whims of parents and placing it under state control was essential to Huxley's totalitarian dystopia.
You appear to have mispelled utopia.
My Journal
dear scientists,
we would like to praise you for your recent advancements in producing artificial uteruses (uteri?). however, we feel you should now turn your attention to a much more urgent and pressing matter: the cloning of vaginas. thank you for your attention to this matter.
sincerely,
men.
do not read this line twice.
Yeah, but now we have an Artifical womb, and
can clone. Men can eliminate women and still
perpetuate the Species as well. Thats
equality for you.
What's up over there in the States? Is it rendered illegal to adopt a poor child from your local community or even a poor foreign country? Or is it unpopular now, because that cute little kiddie might have terrorist genes because it came from Somalia?
Speaking as an (adoptive) parent, there are a bunch of reasons.
Adoption works. It's truly sad that so few people understand that.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
You're right, we'd never have the problem of an artificial womb having a few beers after work. But we have no idea how much monitoring gets done by the expecting mother. There are hugely complex hormonal interactions between the womb and the fetus. I do not believe that we could begin to approximate this process in the near future.
Sure, progress marches on, but I really think this is just too complex.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
At least a pig is a natural environment. Mamals are complex organisms; their developmental needs are not limited to biological.
science is a religion
I think it sounds great! Women can have children now without ever having to go through pregnancy. No morning sickness, no weird cravings, no hormonal imbalance, no labor, none of the ripping and tearing during actual birth, no cesarian sections, no death-by-childbirth. And none of the post-partisan depression that occurs after pregnancy, and none of the losing-your-figure.
And for we men, no more hearing about all of it.
Pregnancy is scary. Not this.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Thousands upon thousands of childern in this nation alone need to be adopted. A struggling foster care program begs for honest good people to help kids before it is too late,
:)
please people, DO NOT have any more f*cking kids.
If you feel that a little microscopic grouping of molecules makes all that much difference as to whether or not you can love a child, then please, do not have any childern. You are too short sighted.
But if you are of the reasonable and decent type, then for crying out loud, ADOPT. Do _NOT_ have any more childern, do NOT fill up this world any more then it needs to be.
If you spend hunderds of thousands of dollars (or even just tens of thousands) going to extremes to have your 'own' child, then you are not only keeping an innocent baby from having a home but you have just spent more $$$ in a nice way that shows exactly how egotistical and self-fucking-centered we of western civilization are.
Bah, no wonder the world thinks we (mostly us in the USA, but you Europeans are not getting off of this one either) are a bunch of self centered fuckwits.
(and if you already have adopted, may whatever Diety, Dieties, or scientific conjucture(s) you believe in, bless you.)
Now then, on the other hand this presents a WONDERFUL opportunity for birthing almost extinct animals.
w00t. Hey, we have any more Dodo bird genes left lying around?
hey that would even be popular, think of all the The World's Funniest Animal Home Videos episodes you could make off of just Dodo birds.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Objections to this kind of technology always boil down to control. The fact is that use of an artificial womb, assuming the thing actually works, would harm *no one*. It would, in fact, make it possible for women who couldn't otherwise safely bear children to do so without a surrogate and the possibility that the surrogate would attempt to steal the child through legal means (as has been done in the past). It would also make it possible for women who didn't want the inconvenience of pregnancy to have a child without that inconvenience - not medically required, but who am I to condemn women to 'natural' pregnancy when an alternative is available? It isn't for me, or you for that matter, to tell a woman how her body has to be used and what she can do with it.
No, the objections aren't about trying to keep someone from doing something to us (artifical wombs wouldn't adversely affect *any of us reading this*), but rather about forcing others to live according to our views. Don't like the idea of artificial wombs? Pass a law banning them, *even though their use would affect our lives in no fashion whatsoever*. A closet mysogynist would use the same tactics to check any advance made in releasing women from the necessity of biology, since closet mysogynists always oppose any additional freedom that might be had by women. Alas, the technical fields are chock-full of mysogynistic bastards who wax lyrical about the advances of science until such advances are applied to the opposite sex.
A true objector would do the rational thing: refuse to use the artificial womb. An objector with hidden motivations rooted in imposing controls over others (in this case women) would insist that the technology itself be banned. If you want to know who the objectors are and who the women-haters are, it's quite simple to tell them apart in this case. Just read what they post and ask: are they refusing to use the technology for themselves, or are they insisting that others not use it as well? Answer this question and you separate the objectors from the malicious control freaks.
And please, don't give me any crap about how it 'might harm the child', or some such rot. You know no such thing. You have no such evidence. *Because it hasn't been done yet*. Until you have empirical evidence in hand, shut your yaps on the 'save the children!' arguments - it's just another variation on 'do what the hell I tell you!' theme, clothed in false altruism.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
You are the worst troll ever.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
If this happens everytime some research might 'offend' someone, we wil quickly find us slipping into the dark ages as a 3rd world nation status, where we live off the handouts from greater nations.. Research should not be impeaded by the govermental winds... Only the application of such ....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
but you can't terminate it in the first to do
research that could save lives...
You can, you idiot. What Bush did was to say the federal government won't give you money to do it. The same was true during Clinton's time in office. I wonder why people didn't bitch and moan about it then
You're right for now. But I can feel a ban coming in my one knee.
In any case, I wonder why the two seem to be such different ethical issues to many people?
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Erg. Yeah, it is. But it's not what I meant. It's just that the way a baby turns out is dependent on both genetics and the care it recieves in the womb. Are you telling me that the embryo produces all the required hormones? The only influence that the womb has is care and feeding?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
The Texas Myth.
The upshot is that even with optimistic assumptions, the amount of space people need in support vastly outstrips the mere "living space" (housing) they need. The proportion is sobering.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
If this technology develops further, there will be some staggering implications for premature births. Our daughter was born eleven weeks early at 820g (~1 lb 13oz). She spent 3 amazing/stressful months in a neonatal intensive care unit and is now a perfectly normal 2 1/2 year old.
If a high-quality artificial womb were around, we probably would have been advised to put our daughter into it. If she was smaller/earlier/worse prognosis, we might even have been told that not using an artifical womb would kill her. Someone using an artifical womb to conceive (like IVF) at least makes a decision about what to pursue in advance based on their own ethics. In a problem pregnancy, the mother might well be compelled/pressured to use one, regardless of her beliefs.
Think about setting up an adoption agency down at the sperm bank. A little room in the back could house hundreds of them and bring life to as many highly desirable children the "market" will support. Oh yeah, the real orphans will have to sit in institutions. They will be joined by the 75% (like Dolly!) of those hudreds that fail to be perfect every year. Those that live that is. Won't it be nice to subsidize such a place by institutionalizing all of defective products? Kinda sucks for the legitmate orphans too that they can only go to the people who can't afford to get a perfect child. One day the technology will be better than that. When it's more reliable than natural birth, it should be considered. Even then it should be well considered. People are not cattle and should never be sired like them.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Did you actually READ the article? Don't be an automatic religo-Luddite. There are two labs in particular doing this sort of research, each in the testing stage and about to start more stringent testing with nonhuman animals. When they perfect it there (and they will - there is no magic here, just science) then they will apply for and get permission to start more testing with human embryos. Ultimately, this will succeed, like it or not due to nonsensical religious beliefs.
If you READ the article you will see there is no "mad scientist" here, just pragmatic, good, science. Deal with it and forget trying to shove your religion down everyone else's throat.
No handwaving here, just science and fact and reality.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I know what a dystopia is, I just don't think that BNW is one.
My Journal
...a corporation buys some sperm, buys some eggs, and makes a baby with an artificial womb. At what point during that process can they be allowed to destroy what they've made?
Conception?
Viability outside the artificial womb?
Birth?
Majority?
Never?
My guess is, should such a technology ever reach the point of being able to carry a baby to term, the same rights and limitations will apply to the owners of the technology as apply to women now, for simply practical reasons. Rights as they exist now strike something of a balance between the duty of the state to protect the helpless, the right of the individual for self-determination, and the practical matter of having the right person make the decision.
I cannot derive ethics from first principles, and ethics generally seem to arise from practical considerations anyway. But some people claim to be able to.
And so, if one thinks that it is ethically wrong for a corporation to terminate a healthy blastula, how can one think that it is ethically right for a woman to do the same thing?
The second derivative of the space-luck curve is infinite at my nexus, at least on the pong axis.
That's pretty funny. I'd have chosen 1984, which is definitely a dystopia.
My Journal
What makes you think that this doesn't exist already? You have just described the status quo.
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
Um, eugenics how? I believe all your points may be true, and maybe I'm just being blind, but how is my position even related to eugenics?
Oh. Nevermind. Just read through your webpage. If eugenicists are pro choice, that doesn't make pro choice people eugenicists. Simple logical fallacy. It's unfortunate for pro-choice people to have eugenicists associate themselves. Just as it's unfortunate for pro-lifers to have clinic bombers and Pat Buchanan associate themselves with the pro-lifers. I'm pro-choice and eugenics is insane.
Is there any other way in which the extension of my point is eugenics? Because I really don't see it.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
My wife's uterus was damaged by uterine fibriods. As a result she is unable to bear children. Barring adoption, the only option we have is a suragate mother, and option we dread to try. I plan to be at that conference in Oklahoma to learn more.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
Harsh.
But let me take on some of your points; it won't get me any karma, but I'll do it anyway. (Hey, my whoring days are over - I'll never get proper mod rights, so I'm just going to have to get used to it!)
Overpopulation is not a new theme. It has dated back to Thomas Malthus (c.1800) and before. The theory has a simple premise: food production is growing arithmetically (or is in someway limited), but population grows geometrically. And, the only way to hold the population in check is wars, disease, etc. These checks mean that the geometrical growth in population has (until now) been such that has matched food production.
But now (and the now always changes) food production can no longer grow in line with the population.
Which brings me to my two points.
(1) The whole spectre of overpopulation is overblown by people that don't understand the issue. (Don't get me wrong, I'm a member of Greenpeace, but the world is not about to fail to be able to meet the food needs, at least in theory, of its people.)
(2) The concept of overpopulation is nearly always racist in the way it's used, because the people being asked not to breed are not in Birmingham, Alabama, but in Bangladesh and Bengal.
Adressing the first point:
The world's food supply has consistently grown faster than population, and these shows no sign of stopping. (No, that does not mean it is perfectly distributed.) Since 1960, grain yield (per hectar) have grown from 1.3tons to 2.7tons. If we exclude the ex-Soviet area, where things have got indisputably much worse since 1990, the growth is even higher. Indeed, the growth in yield per hectar has not even started to level out.
By contrast, world population growth has begun levelling out. Given education and contraception, birth rates have fallen from their peaks almost everywhere.
Equally importantly, lets not sit back with our (oh so wonderful) Western viewpoints, and aassume that familes like producing kids they can't feed. Population growth has largely been a *result* of the agricultural (read green) revolution, not a precursor. When (local) yields have levelled off, so have populations.
This is not to dispute the glaring local examples to this (in Africa, for example) - but on a global basis, things have gotten better not worse.
Secondly, and this point is simple, no-one proposes banning people in Minnesota from having two children. Attempting to suggest this in the US would be an unforgivable breach of the fundamental freedoms people hold. Suggesting it is OK for us (US) to dictate this to China is racism, pure and simple.
Just my thoughts,
Robert
--- My dad's political betting
...in another post to another response to this thread.
Essentially:
Bad people do bad things and learn interesting things from it. Good people put the smack down on bad people and not only get to do the victory dance, they get all of the data gained by the bad people while keeping their hands blood free.
Skin grafts. Nerve gas. Explosive decompression. Pressure experimentation. Vaccinations and germ warfare. The weapons technology race to beat a nation that had the upper hand in every way save overall manpower against the rest of the world.
Was the expermination done a good thing? Possibly not... but the fact of the matter is that the data gained WAS a good thing, and has been put to VERY good use [the space program is the best example- rocket technology and space suits were prototyped by the germans during the second world war.]
Consider that people are always going to have funky motives in the eyes of others- and that in the end run, a hell of a lot of good has come from a hell of a lot of bad. Would I trade world war two never happening for the moon landing? Hell no. Both events have done far more for the advancement of mankind as a global civilization than possibly any other event in history. It just so happens that the tech to get to the moon was borne from german war science.
Read some Moorecock. There is no good, there is no bad- which is which gets decided by the winners. Hitler was just as morally justified in bombing England as Truman was nuking Hiroshima- it's all a matter of perspective and the fact that Truman wins the opinion poll hands down every time [self included, mind you.].
Stick to your "good people, bad people" argument, and the next thing I know you'll be arguing that Colonel Tibbets should have been executed for war crimes.
There's no being careful with "good" when it comes to technology or technological innovations. Tech and knowledge are neither good nor bad- they're a tool, a means to an end. It just so happened that WWII Germany happened to use methods that are despised by the rest of the world in the acquisition of that information- and garnering it through other methods would have likely taken years- if not decades- longer. Refer to my Moorecock statement- their methods are despised for the fact that they lost. Had they won, we'd never even know about them.
I will, after this pinch-hitting as devil's advocate, concede that the Nazi scientific practices are emotionally offensive to anyone with half of a brain. Our society has a manifest distaste for those sorts of methods, which is totally understandable. On the other hand, where there those willing to *volunteer* for such experiments.... hey, there's nothing wrong with that. I cannot condone experimenting on unwilling subjects, but I cannot deny the value of the information that these experiments have added to the knowledge base of the human race.
Seems like you can- crank your life view settings from two bit to greyscale and look at the big picture. Be objective and actually *THINK* about it.... rather than *FEEL* about it- that's where I'm coming from: in the case of my statements I've chosen to play science and cold fact over emotion.... nevermind the fact that my *feelings* on the matter are similar to yours.
Hell, if anything, deal with the fact that not everyone has or shares your opinion- you'll have a lot less stress in your life!
>Don't be afraid of knowledge, embrace it.
Just because we can do something doesn't mean that we should...or that we shouldn't carefully consider how we use said knowldge. That's the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
I really don't know the literature in the field; actually, I don't know much more than what filters out into Scientific American and other pop magazines. Still, I had the impression that many of these IQ results were generated in tests on adopted children, controlling for the IQ of the adoptive parents. If I remember right, results show that IQ scores of children resemble the genetic parents more closely than they do adoptive parents. I admit, my memory about this is pretty shady. I'm no social scientist or psychologist, but if I were and found that no study like this had been done, I'd do it. The problem is, nobody likes results that make us feel like genetics have more influence on our behavior than the environment. Even I don't like it, but now that I suspect it's true, I say it's time we get over it.
Thanks! Hey, I learned something on Slashdot!
just doing my part to disable modbombing
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"