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An Artificial Womb Successfully Grew Baby Sheep -- and Humans Could Be Next (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Inside what look like oversized ziplock bags strewn with tubes of blood and fluid, eight fetal lambs continued to develop -- much like they would have inside their mothers. Over four weeks, their lungs and brains grew, they sprouted wool, opened their eyes, wriggled around, and learned to swallow, according to a new study that takes the first step toward an artificial womb. One day, this device could help to bring premature human babies to term outside the uterus -- but right now, it has only been tested on sheep. The Biobag may not look much like a womb, but it contains the same key parts: a clear plastic bag that encloses the fetal lamb and protects it from the outside world, like the uterus would; an electrolyte solution that bathes the lamb similarly to the amniotic fluid in the uterus; and a way for the fetus to circulate its blood and exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. Flake and his colleagues published their results today in the journal Nature Communications.
Bene Tleilax, here we come!
now they don't have to talk to a woman to have a kid
Yea, its for sheep. Not to compete with the 50k plus it costs for surrogates. Nope not going to start doing this in China, Thailand, etc. the second its even close to popping out kids (human ones).
Too much information
Does this world really need any more people?
The populations in Africa and the Middle East have far exceeded the available resources in those regions, and they're now heavily dependent on handouts from Western nations. There's no sign of the reproduction rates slowing down in those regions, either.
India is not far behind.
Central and South America may not be as bad as India, but their population growth is now resulting in diminishing living standards in many nations there.
At least China has managed to get their population growth somewhat under control.
And at least most Western nations are only just breaking even, if not somewhat below replacement rates.
Finally, we have places like Japan and Russia, which are well below replacement rates.
Even without this technology, it's clear that humans can reproduce much faster than we should be, given the resources that are (or more correctly, aren't) available to us.
The focus should be on getting the reproduction rates in third-world regions back down to more reasonable levels, to prevent the never-ending stream of famines, wars, and disease outbreaks we've been witnessing in such regions lately.
Read the book.
too many implications.
The last thing this planet needs is more humans.
If anything, they should work on better methods to prevent babies.
Since many women feel free to just go to a sperm bank and have a child without a "father" [through artificial insemination], men will eventually be able to go to an egg bank and have a child without a "mother" [by renting an artificial womb].
Of course that is not the primary drive behind the development, but there are so many possibilities. Women with hysterectomies banking eggs to have children later without the risk and complexity of a surrogate. Husbands having children from eggs extracted from their dead or dying wife. Gay couples having children without involving any women. Old couples changing their mind about having children (as long as they planned ahead). "Professional" women who don't want to ruin their jobs or be inconvenienced. Attractive women who don't want to ruin their figures. Governments producing children using extracted DNA.
Iron Wombs being used by freeborn scum in the innersphere. You guys might not turn out such pussies after all.
Veal is about to get a whole lot fresher! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Someone had to ask.
I have no doubt that in countries where abortion is legal, right-to-lifers will be lining up to crowd-fund this research, and to pay for women who would otherwise have an abortion to pop their fetuses into these artificial wombs and brought to term.
And then, of course, they will act boldly to ensure that the fetuses are adopted into loving families...perhaps even their own!
Yeah, right.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
*Should* humans be used to bring sheep fetuses to term, or should they continue using the artificial wombs?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Coming soon, a man,"not born of woman." (Macbeth)
for the win. Too obscure?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"The ocean's dying. Plankton's dying. It's sheeple! Soylent Yean is made out of sheeple!!!"
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
If they're going to spend their brief lives in a steel box before being prepped for someone else's dinner, I guess an immune system doesn't matter that much.
That's like a scene from every alien horror flick...
So if this is made to work for humans will it make abortion obsolete?
...there is an observation port built into the device.
Then it would be a womb with a view.
Jeez, get a grip - and READ THE ARTICLE.
The apparatus did NOT 'grow' a sheep, it merely kept a premature sheep embryo alive long enough to separate it from the device, and then have it submitted to the knife of the 'scientists' so they could evaluate the effectiveness of the artificial womb.
OK, I am NOT anti-science, and I really do appreciate the accomplishments of this endeavor - - - therefore there is NO reason to blow the accomplishments out of proportion.
THIS 'device' is being put forward as a means to extend the viability of really early premature birth infants so they actually have a chance to survive - - - and NOT as an ARTIFICIAL WOMB with the ability to actually grow an infant from sperm-egg inception to birth.
cheers . . .
redneck geek
Do sheep-people dream of electronic androids?
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Gene Ray.... is that you?
... but I find this effing creepy.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yup you beat me to it. This artificial womb will save millions of lives each year and prevent millions more from suffering disabilities caused by premature birth. Think of it as a replacement for the incubator rather than an artificial womb but with a much higher survival rate than the 30% we get with current incubators at 23-24 weeks.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I for one welcome our True Born overlords!
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Iron_Womb
Most of the time 21th century feels just like 20th, just with more internet, but every now and then something like this comes along.
PERFECT name for a nut job
Imagine future generations of womankind growing up in a world where women are no longer needed for making children except for their eggs. This is a first step toward that. And that's not the end of the world for women. It's more like the end of the beginning.
Look at how dishwashers and vacuum cleaners worked out - did women think that was the end of the world because so-called "women's work" was in part automated? Noep, noep, and absolutely noep, it freed women to do other things. Patriarchal boneheads at the time complained about women having more free time but in the end only the Tradcon fringe thinks "women's work" is a thing anymore.
The artificial womb will free women from the expectation of motherhood in order to perpetuate the species. markdavis's remark about women being able to build up their professional life without worrying about missing out on motherhood will be just the first symptom of this liberating technology. Perhaps we'll never be rid of the Tradcons, but technology like this will further enable women to not give a crap about what they think.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I can also see this used to go back to the 1920s/1930s ethic of eugenics to breed a better race. Eugenics is primarily associated with the Third Reich... but it also had its stay in the US as well, with a number of mentally ill people being sterilized.
Now, what is the "better" race, is subject. I'm sure if one is from China, it would be someone from the Han race. India, a Brahman caste. DPRK, offspring of Kim. However, we already have countries using DNA testing to find anyone with certain ancestry in order to keep them from public office, or outright exterminate them.
I can see countries using pieces of this puzzle (cloning, CRISPR gene editing, IVF) in order to create what they feel like is a true master race. It may not be blonde hair and blue eyes, but I can see this happening, especially as global tensions rise and countries get itching for good old fashioned war so they can expand their borders.
With each global conflict splitting mankind along a more general difference, the gender is the ultimate discriminator to base a war on now that we will think we can do without the other gender...
This artificial womb will save millions of lives each year and prevent millions more from suffering disabilities caused by premature birth.
Your numbers seemed high, so I looked it up.
Preterm birth complications are the leading cause of death among children under 5 years of age, responsible for nearly 1 million deaths in 2015.
Three-quarters of them could be saved with current, cost-effective interventions.
So if current, cost-effective interventions were applied we'd have about a quarter-million lives lost that could potentially be helped by this new technology.
Assuming it would be even more expensive than existing interventions, it would be available in an even smaller percentage of cases than those. But let's say it was equally available. That means ~62,500 lives saved.
It's just a first step. It doesn't need to be a miracle to be worth doing.
Nope, no sig
My figures were taken from an article on the device
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Space Above and Beyond. Great show!
This is a situation where slippery slope will NOT be a logical fallacy. As the technology progresses earlier and earlier premature babies that would otherwise die would be saved with this method. Eventually the lines between premies, fetus and embryo will become blurred.
love is just extroverted narcissism
THIS 'device' is being put forward as a means to extend the viability of really early premature birth infants so they actually have a chance to survive - - - and NOT as an ARTIFICIAL WOMB with the ability to actually grow an infant from sperm-egg inception to birth.
True, but that doesn't mean it won't eventually become an artificial womb. If they're successful at using it to keep babies who are 15 weeks premature alive and healthy through their full development, then clearly the next step is to use it for babies who are 16 weeks premature, etc., etc. As they push back the age of viability new challenges will arise and be solved, and step by step it will get pushed back all the way to starting from an embryo. The development process will take years, maybe decades, but it's all but inevitable once we take this first step.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want
He makes me down to lie
Through pastures green he leadeth me the silent waters by
With bright knives he releaseth my soul
He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places
He converteth me to lamb cutlets
For lo,m he hath great power and great hunger
When cometh the day we lowly ones
Through quiet reflection and great dedication
Master the art of karate
Lo, we shall rise up
And then we'll make the bugger's eyes water.
There has been a very strong downward trend in population growth worldwide, as you can see by looking at the World Bank data
India in fact is part of that steep decline, as you can see in the per-country breakdown. On average the "Middle East & North Africa" has also seen a moderate reduction over the last 50 years, from 2.7 to 1.8, while the "Arab World" has gone from 2.7 to 2.0. The only region with a generally upward trend over that time is "Sub-Saharan Africa", and even that has started to level off.
The reasons for this are fairly well understood, and are covered in this Kurzgesagt video on Overpopulation.
TLDW: disease, war, and famine are not a result of population growth so much as they are a cause. The more people fear their children won't reach adulthood the more children they have. The more developed the country, the more likely children are to reach adulthood, the less children they have. Every country that has undergone significant economic development experiences a (relatively) brief "bubble" in which the older birth rate exceeds the newer death rate before everyone realizes so many children aren't necessary.
Overall Africa is one of the last areas in the world to undergo this normal economic/technological transformation of population growth so they're at the tail end of this cycle. However current data seems to indicate that they're finally moving into Stage 3. So unless something (more) happens to wreck their economy they should start progressing into Stage 4 within a few decades and pretty much all areas of the world will have declining population growth.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I have no doubt that in countries where abortion is legal, right-to-lifers will be lining up to crowd-fund this research, and to pay for women who would otherwise have an abortion to pop their fetuses into these artificial wombs and brought to term.
And then, of course, they will act boldly to ensure that the fetuses are adopted into loving families...perhaps even their own!
Yeah, right.
OTH, the same people will lose their shit when they realize gay and lesbian couples will be able to have their own babies in a buy-an-egg-or-sperm kind of a thing. This will fundamentally change the nature of reproduction (and thus marriage). And then the Anti-Christ will come or something. Oh, I can see the shows in the 700 Club.
I watched a friend struggle with a premature birth. The baby was born at 26 weeks, just barely past the point of viability. She's very lucky that her child is totally healthy, but it was a long struggle. This kind of technology could save a lot of suffering, and maybe even a lot of effort and expense. Her child needed constant monitoring and interventions to develop somewhat normally. It would have been terrific to be able to put him back into a plastic womb and finish developing that way.
My figures were taken from an article on the device
Fake news!
Sorry, habit. :-)
Nope, no sig
Define "a lot" and please tell us what % of the breading age female population your "a lot" covers.
Baby sheep born in artificial womb and humans might be next?
Why would we use humans to give birth to baby sheep if we've already got an artificial womb to do that?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Oh bullshit, you attribute the attributes you see in yourself on others. The Prolife crowd is exactly that, pro life. If they were, as you say, about slut shaming and such they would not be doing things like promoting adoption, having larege families of their own, or providing alternatives to abortion.
or providing alternatives to abortion.
You mean like lobbying to have birth control coverage mandated for all women and providing free birth control to women to prevent unwanted pregnancies? Yeah, that is nice of them to do.
/sarcasm. You make this far too easy.
You are conflating two different things. A fetus is just a baby in a certain stage in prenatal development that starts around 11 weeks and ends at birth. I assume that when you worry about the slippery slope you are against the forced use of this technology to save a life that would otherwise be aborted at the sole discretion of the mother. The current legal line between a baby with no rights and a baby with the right to life independent of the mothers wishes is the moment of birth. The majority of states require only a second physician to either consent or be present at the procedure even after 20 weeks.
No technology is required to blur that line. I don't see how anyone can argue from a biological perspective that the moment of birth is a biologically trans-formative event. I'm not sure how the moment of birth is an ethically trans-formative event either. In what way is the baby 1 day pre-birth different from an ethical perspective than a baby 1 day post birth? A physician can freely kill that baby the day or the second before birth, but if he/she were to kill the baby after birth it would legally be murder.
For the 18 or so states that have a viability test for the increased rights of the unborn, this technology may indeed blur the legal line, but the ethical and biological line is already pretty murky.
Governments producing children using extracted DNA.
Governments or corporations may want to stealthily grow a genetically advanced army using artificial wombs. Some scientists may also want to grow chimeras using artificial wombs as the fetus + eventual birth may be dangerous to the human surrogate.
There are already too many people.
wow! Thanks for all the kind remarks.
Yes, I know this is /. and reading the article is not required to post in this arena.
However, I still support my original point that this is NOT the headline-grabbing Artificial Womb.
It IS a means of providing extended womb-like support for really early premature births, and should be lauded as a serious accomplishment in it's own merits, as it provides a MUCH better option than a premature birth installed in an oxygenated tank for 'hopeful' completion of the embryo's development.
There is no reason to over-sell it's accomplishments, since the fundamental issue of providing life-support for these premature embryos is a major accomplishment in itself.
Yes, it could very well lead to the actual development of a REAL artificial womb, capable of supporting full embryonic growth from sperm-egg inception to a live birth, but that is another issue altogether - requiring the development of the umbilical link, the development of the nutrient support, the development of the hormone additives (to determine the sex of the embryo), and the development of the 'unknown' issues involved in the early stages of gestation.
Thanks to all the supporters and readers of this forum for your input.
cheers . . .
redneck geek
The current legal line between a baby with no rights and a baby with the right to life independent of the mothers wishes is the moment of birth.
This is not a true statement. A baby begins to get some protections in the third trimester. Sure, not full protections. Both sides exaggerate how cut and dry this is. It is clear that the courts might have allowed a ban on abortions in the third trimester, but instead congress did the "partial birth abortion ban". They did it, because they wanted to keep the issue alive.
What an abuse of nature and an abuse of the offspring!
Sheep gestate for ~21 weeks. This incubator only worked for 4 weeks. That's 20% of the gestation period. Sheep also develop far more in the womb than humans do. The human equivalent would be an mid-third trimester fetus; basically a month or two premature. Sounds far less impressive now, doesn't it. This is why you read the paper and not the press release.