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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!
Read the book.
too many implications.
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.
We are all just bags of water with drives to make more bags of water. Who are you to dictate to override the be fruitful and multiply biblical directive?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Veal is about to get a whole lot fresher! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Probably like mutton. Given that it's sheep and all.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Yet still, scientific evidence would go a long way in supporting your position. And just how has the quality of life degraded for the poorest among us?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
*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
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/
In most wealthy countries, kids are a liability because you have to feed, clothe, and shelter them without them delivering any kind of return on investment. In poor countries they tend to be an asset because they end up being extra farm hands, laborers, etc.
Having kids in western countries is thus a luxury, whereas in places like Africa it's a necessity.
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?
1. Saving prematures whose parents already have decided they want it.
2. Birth control in underdeveloped countries.
We are not the people to dismiss the child wish of people under 1.
We can act on 2. however, as for instance Bill Gates is already doing with his famous:
“The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care & reproductive health services, we could LOWER that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”
By the way, scare mongering isn't really necessary, as Hans Rosling argues that
In developed countries, a ratio near 2 parents to 2 children mostly exists and developing nations are getting closer and closer as their childhood health outcomes continue to improve.
which brings him to the conclusion that
Population growth should hit a limit around 11 billion within the next hundred years, as the world equalizes in health outcomes.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
...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.
Also functions as oven bag, available in ready salinated or garlic and rosemary options.
I don't see how more white people will prevent that. If anything it will just be filled with more dimwitted people, like you.
Well, your gene combination is broken. You will be removed from gene pool.
Nothing like using good old hard economics to achieve a desired outcome eh.
... 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.
Most of the time 21th century feels just like 20th, just with more internet, but every now and then something like this comes along.
"In most wealthy countries, kids are a liability..."
Not quite. In wealthy countries, the One Percent need us to have more kids. When 500,000,000 hungry people are fighting over 100,000,000 jobs, we won't have the time or energy to start a revolution against the rich and powerful.
...omphaloskepsis often...
PERFECT name for a nut job
No Slashdotters are happy because now they can jump the gun without actually reading the summary (never mind the actual article) and rail against the idea that men might actually become obsolete when actually the summary & article are about an alternative to the incubator which will hopefully reduce the premature birth mortality rate by an order of magnitude.
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.
In most wealthy countries, kids are a liability because you have to feed, clothe, and shelter them without them delivering any kind of return on investment.
Don't forget that child support, because when the wife decides she isn't fulfilled, you have to support the larvae until they are in their 20's.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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!
"In most wealthy countries, kids are a liability..."
Not quite. In wealthy countries, the One Percent need us to have more kids.
That's not working very well. A lot of men are opting out of the reproduction game.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
We all might be living equally, but equally might me we are all living very poorly. Most of these blue sky ideas assume that everyone will be somehow living the high life.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
In most wealthy countries, kids are a liability because you have to feed, clothe, and shelter them without them delivering any kind of return on investment. In poor countries they tend to be an asset because they end up being extra farm hands, laborers, etc.
The value of child labor is quite modest, they work at slave labor rates. The primary reason to have kids is to have them support you economically and otherwise when you're elderly and they are young adults because being old and childless is harsh in many poorly developed societies. High risk of child death leads to "insurance", 95% of the women have an extra child because 5% of them will die. Losing a child is of course always a tragedy, but in the western world you'll still get to live at a decent nursing home and have most your needs taken care of so you don't need a fallback plan.
From what I understand, the population boom in Africa is not really necessary anymore. But it takes quite some time from you stop needing it until people realize it. Not to mention a lot of cultural momentum, if it's normal to have five kids many women will have five kids. And as you get wealth the pyramid starts turning, instead of having five kids to support you maybe it's you who want to divide your wealth on two kids and not six poor kids. It's a lot of psychology involved, not just economics.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
1. Saving prematures whose parents already have decided they want it.
If the treatment proves effective, then it should become a required treatment, when the kid's life can be saved; Also, if a mother wants to abort her pregnancy early, because of her right to choose what happens with her body, then this treatment should also be mandatory to attempt to save the life of the kid --- If effective, then her offspring can survive, even if she decides to stop being pregnant. Conflicting rights dilemma resolved!
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.
You must be a trump voter, because you're bringing up a lot of alternative facts. Developing nations are becoming less dependent on the west. And the birth rate is in fact slowing down in all areas.
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.
Another Trump voter sign: imagining things used to be better in your youth when in fact they were quantifiably worse, and making decisions which are going to exacerbate the perceived problems. Diseases are at an all-time low thanks to hygiene, sanitation, and vaccines. Much of that has been thanks to aid from western nations to developing nations. Oil dependence is going to cause wars, climate change is going to cause famine, and neither of those things are going to be solved by lowering birth rates. Which, as we have already covered, are in decline already.
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.
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.
Isn't the biological imperative rudimentary eugenics? Presume your genetic material is 'the best', and fight to get the mate(s) with the 'best material' to produce strong offspring?
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
No, actually it's the solution to the abortion false dichotomy. And this isn't by any means the first story on the subject. A team in Japan did early animal testing in an artificial womb at least a decade back. I know this because I remember having a conversation about funding the development of this technology as a way for anti-abortion folks to put their money where their mouths are while on a church choir trip in 2008.
The fact of the matter is that abortion is worse than a wedge issue. It's a false dichotomy. Why would anyone in their right minds not want both a right to life for the fetus and a right to choose for the mother? The nature of birth involves trading the rights of one person for those of another, and that's the only thing that makes the abortion issue challenging for people to navigate. The mere existence of artificial womb technology is a game-changer.
If Republicans were actually serious about ending abortion, they would have jumped on this a decade back, and would have insisted on pouring funding into making this technology viable. We'd see research dollars being poured into that instead of into missile shields and random weapons research, and this technology would be fully viable by now, because with enough people working on it, the advances would happen faster. But they haven't done this, because they would lose most of their seats if abortion actually became illegal in a way that wouldn't get undone in a future power shift.
A truly intelligent, competent candidate for office, then, should be pointing this out, and should be running on a campaign of making artificial wombs available soon, and then making abortion illegal, requiring patients to instead get outpatient transfer surgery to move the fetus to an artificial womb. And the government should massively subsidize the transfer and pay for the incubation in cases where the woman gives up a fetus for adoption in utero so that no one chooses a back alley abortion over saving a life. And the government should require insurance companies to cover the transfer and incubation in cases where the life of the mother or fetus would be in jeopardy if a pregnancy continued, so that women with high-risk pregnancies can keep their kids without risking their own lives and the lives of their kids.
The mind-boggling thing about this, at least in my mind, is that our politicians still haven't thought of it. This should have been obvious to any competent leader at least ten years ago when the first study came out. Arguably, it should have been obvious earlier than that. I've been advocating this as a solution to the abortion debate for so long that I can no longer even remember when I started advocating it. If I ever run for office, I swear I'll run with the promise of being pro-life and pro-choice—no more false dichotomies. The American people deserve at least that much competence from their politicians.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Remember, the only difference between incubation and sous vide is final temperature...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
All of which just goes to show that the so-called "pro-lifers" are absolutely nothing of the sort. They're all about controlling women and punishing them for having sex, and they'll happily murder doctors and let women die to make it happen.
"larvae". What wonderful father material you aren't.
I work with children professionally.
Larvae is a fitting insult.
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
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
If you hate them so much, why do you work with children? Why not seek another profession?
Probably wants to feed his or her family. I worked with college students almost my entire career, and after working with millennials, I wasn't too fond of them either. But I liked my paycheck.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
And anyways isn't it a Progressive stance to bleat on about how there's too many undesirable people in the world and how to fix it?
No, and definitely not when it's thinly veiled "Brown people are to blame!" We are interested in fixing issues with the world, we're just uninterested in trying to claim it's all a massive moral failing on someone's part and make ourselves feel superior for it.
And you should realize that unlike the right, it's not a religion with us. If a key liberal position were there's too much babies and we need to stop trying to save lives, I'd be firmly opposed to that but would still be a liberal.
I don't think that's true at all. Most of the pro-life voters I've known are people who genuinely care about protecting the unborn. Most of the pro-life politicians at least appear to be using the abortion issue as a means to get elected (though I suppose it is also possible that they're genuine but clueless). The number of pro-life folks who are actually misogynists is probably fairly small, though I'm sure that they do exist.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
What Rosling seems to argue in his video, is that health outcomes are equalizing.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
There are already too many people.
Let me slightly correct your statement:
in the US as well, with a number of mentally ill and other officially disapproved of people being sterilized.
Retrospective studies show a lot of "mistakes" in classification.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You realise of course that the vast majority of abortions are preformed before 10 weeks? The 'baby' is as a little over an inch long, and this bag will do nothing to help it.
This technology has little to do with abortions.
Your argument, such as it is, rests on the assumption that the child in the womb does not have its own right to bodily self-determination. And it's exactly that assumption that pro-lifers disagree with.
Though it certainly is simpler to just assume that those you disagree with are innately evil.
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
Oh wow, that changes... well, nothing relevant really about today. Regressives are the more racist ones these days. But it's almost interesting.
Conservatives, ar least in the American form, do not care what color your skin is.
What's scary is that you actually believe this despite an abundance of scientific studies showing otherwise. Is there any way to disabuse you of this notion? How many peer-reviewed papers would it take to convince you that no, conservatives, liberals, apathetics, me, and you do in fact let race bias us?
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.
The rights of the child cannot supersede or override those of the woman. A woman at no point loses the ability to chose what she wants to do with her body. Let's talk about marrow donation. It is painful but relatively safe (much safer than pregnancy) procedure that saves lives. A child is dying and needs a marrow transplant to live. Does the child have any right to anyone's marrow, including the parents', without their consent? The obvious answer is no. Forcible human organ transplanting is rightly regarded as a human rights violation. So if the child has no right to one type of easily harvested tissue from anyone else, what gives them rights over the entire organ system of a woman that pregnancy entails? A fetus cannot develop outside a human womb. The process of development requires an interplay between teh mother and teh fetus or it will not proceed. As even the experiment in the parent post shows, before the third trimester, even with massive medical intervention, death is assured. Greater than 90% of abortions happen within the first 90 days of pregnancy. Half happen within 6-8 weeks. Almost all the rest happen as a result of some defect that will prove lethal to the fetus. So how can a fetus have a right to life if they can't live on their own? The facts of pregnancy are against anti-choicers. The only reason left to them are inherently misogynistic.
"Progressives" is rather broad - the CPUSA never held that position and one leading female member famously got herself arrested for dancing with a black man on the first of may. Not really the sign of a party prepared to sterilize black folks. Of course, once Stalinism took hold things went downhill rather fast.
But yeah, social democracy has much to answer for in this area. They never had the excuse of Stalinism, they got their all on their own.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)