9 ms·

An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep

226 points by techpulse-co 9y ago

gokusaaaan 9y ago
I wonder how long before we have cities that regulate humans population via such machines as shown in Ergo Proxy?
- Laforet 9y ago
  It's going to take a while, for what they have described is a process to keep extremely preterm foetus alive, rather than an artificial environment to develop an entire organism from a fertilised egg - we actually know lot about IV fertilisation and keeping it alive through the first few development stages, but there are still significant gaps to cover until you have a somewhat developed foetus that has a chance of survival outside the womb. In parallel example, we have not managed to find an artificial replacement for egg shells which is required for avian embryos to develop. Some techniques do exist, but none of the them were able to ensure survival past the first 2 weeks. Considering that humans have been breeding chicken for centuries, there is still plenty we don't know about our favourite bird, let alone fellow humans.
  - slv77 9y ago
    Hatching a chick shell free using plastic wrap was developed in 2014. It was recently replicated by Japanese students which made the news.
    - Laforet 9y ago
      Not really, similar techniques were developed as early as.the 70s and there are sufficient doubt that the student project in the news did not go as well as they claimed, nor was there any report of reproducibility in a controlled laboratory setting.
      - dotancohen 9y ago
        Jurassic Park, at least in book form, describes in the first few chapter or three a revolutionary plastic which can replace an egg shell and produce viable chicks. I believe that this was based on actual contemporary science, circa 1990.
- Moshe_Silnorin 9y ago
  What's really frightening is not controlling human population, but vastly expanding it. Countries could grow citizens in factories. I've always thought Malthus would come back roaring, but this could go uncomfortably far.
  - devrandomguy 9y ago
    No need to let them run free. Those humans could work remotely, from a small pod of amniotic fluid, mounted to the side of a huge tower. They could live their lives in MMOs, which would seem absolutely realistic, if that was the only thing they ever experienced. I don't think it is realistic to use them as an energy source though, heat would be a waste product in an environment like that.
    - derefr 9y ago
      I've always been confused about the part of The Matrix where they still bother to grow the whole human, rather than just the brain.
      - struct 9y ago
        Rewatching the films recently, the only explanation I've thought of for the machine's barmy plan is that they must be bound by the three laws or feel some kind of deep obligation to us, even after we made the entire world uninhabitable. Why else would they spend so much time growing us, feeding us, simulating for us, allowing the One(s) to save humanity repeatedly, and why else would they initially try to simulate paradise for us?
      - snuxoll 9y ago
        The method of which they produce the fetuses is never explained in the franchise, and considering they'd want to maintain genetic diversity it's probable that they simply harvest gametes from mature humans in the power plant and incubate an embryo. There's also the whole "cycle" thing that's apparantley gone on for 6 iterations, allowing humans who reject the matrix to leave and periodically cull them was a solution to widespread rejection of the system that would have affected entire crops of humans. It's hard to do that if they don't have physical bodies to escape the system in the real world.
erickhill 9y ago
Oddly this exact same URL was posted 2 days ago. I wonder why it didn't get caught? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196680
- rubyn00bie 9y ago
  I've had this happen multiple times. Usually it's because it's missing the "/" at the end or some other small change in the URL. Their check is only looking for exact matches.
  - kristofferR 9y ago
    I'm glad the dupe check isn't better, as it is undeniable that reaching the front page here is about luck just as much as quality. This story is just as interesting as when it was first submitted, yet this submission is way more popular.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Well, that post got no comments. So this could just be a resubmission.
- stared 9y ago
  Hacker roulette.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
cletus 9y ago
Disclaimer: I really know nothing about biology or genetics. This is an area I find fascinating. One thing I've pondered is with merely a genome could you construct the organism it's from? The first problem is creating a fertilized egg. Having that, it's not clear to me (again, as a layman) whether or not you could gestate that to an independent organism. To put it in computing terms, imagine the genome as "source code" and the host (gestating) organism as, for lack of a better word, a "compiler". Now imagine that a lot of the complexity of life comes from these successive generations, which is to say that an organism isn't simply a function of its genome, it's essentially a function of every ancestor. If you think about it, some organisms are born with some ingrained characteristics and behaviour. Humans have the moro reflex. Bear cubs manage to find way to their mother's milk when the mother is barely conscious. Some ducks are capable of swimming, eating and surviving from the day they're born. How much of this is part of the genome and how much is "communicated" from mother to child in the womb? Obviously only applies to a subset of animals. Birds, for example, are born in eggs and--unless I'm missing something--the only interaction between parent and egg once the egg is laid is incubation so it's easy to imagine that there is no "communication" in this phase. But maybe this is what makes mammals (particularly primates) seemingly special? How much of what we do is hardwired or "software"? So there have been two important developments in the last year or so. The first is hatching chicks without a shell [1]. The second is this and this is far more impressive. If nothing else, this limits potential interactions between mother and unborn child. At least for sheep. I think this is a really important development. [1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/video-shows-how-to-incubate-an-egg-without-the-shell/ https://www.cnet.com/news/video-shows-how-to-incubate-an-egg...
- refurb 9y ago
  One thing I've pondered is with merely a genome could you construct the organism it's from? Craig Venter already did that with a bacterial. He synthesized the entire genome, then inserted it a cell. I assume that cell already had the other machinery (translation enzymes, etc).
  - cletus 9y ago
    Single cells organisms are one thing. I don't think you can automatically extrapolate from bacteria to primates however.
LouisSayers 9y ago
I guess next we'll put hospital patients in such bags to protect them from the external environment, provide healing fluids as well? The future is looking pretty cool.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
  I'm picturing something like the pods in "The Matrix". Actually I can see a huge benefit to e.g. burns victims and other types of massive trauma where some time in an "artificial womb" could be hugely beneficial for regeneration. Cool indeed.
gliese1337 9y ago
The original source, with the actual science: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112 It's not quite a total replacement for a natural womb (and the Nature article only uses the word "womb once, in the abstract), as it can't grow a fetus from an embryo; you have to start with a pre-incubated fetus that already has an umbilical ford to plug into and a strong enough heart. But even though we won't be growing test-tube babies 100% in-vitro with this thing, it is a major advance that could significantly push back the earliest time at which a premature baby could remain viable with artificial incubation.
- gadders 9y ago
  And also hopefully reduce the need for abortion. Women would be able to "donate" the foetus to be raised in one of these bags and then adopted. (Eventually, I realise this technology is not there yet).
  - fdsfsafasfdas 9y ago
    ...because adoption is such a riotous success these days?
    - dw0rm1 9y ago
      ...because there are thousands of women who for various reasons cannot have children of their own and would definitely prefer a child created like this rather than adopting a child that potentially comes with a lot of life baggage.
      - XorNot 9y ago
        ...because raising a child is such an easy process, it would be terrible if you had to start with one with "life baggage" instead of just being totally helpless, completely unable to be reasoned with or in control of it's basic bodily functions?
      - tome 9y ago
theprop 9y ago
Super!! Bringing the Wooly Mammoth and more extinct animals is next :-D!
- thedailymail 9y ago
  George Church's group at Harvard is proposing using similar technology in their attempt to clone a mammoth by replacing the DNA in an elephant egg with DNA from a mammoth. They want to grow it extracorporeally for its entire development, because doing it in utero in an elephant would present additional ethical issues (i.e., potentially harming elephants in an experiment of a technology that is far from mature).
- logicallee 9y ago
  What a time to be a lamb! :D
k__ 9y ago
Axolotl tanks? ;)
red023 9y ago
I think this is absolutely sick, I know there are way more horrible experiments scientists do with animals but this gives me the creeps. Its just sick, let nature but nature and stop messing around with it. Seriously if this continues we have AI that breeds Humans as their power or brain source and the matrix becomes reality.
- lesingerouge 9y ago
  I do not think this is a rational response. I get that the "knee-jerk" reaction might be one of total disgust (I know because I also had it reading this), but there should be a bit of rational thought put into what would be the consequences of this. Because AI growing humans and the Matrix becoming reality is a little bit on the "surreal paranoid" side of life, given the current state of scientific knowledge. On that same train of thought, but with a more realistic outlook, we could just think of the many difficult pregnancy cases that women might face that this development might help solve. And by difficult cases I mean situations where women who want a child face complications during pregnancy. And generally (even though I'm a natural pessimist), I think it's best to have a positive outlook towards the products of our own curiosity. They might bring trouble, but there are very few other natural catalysts to progress other than curiosity. War comes to mind as an alternative, but I believe that is less than desired.
- BoringAsian 9y ago
  disgust is a useful expression but I'm not sure I would rely on it to make choices and strange imagined futures. I'm glad that your disgust was vivid enough to conjure such a future in your head though!
- louhike 9y ago
  As said in another comment, it might be benificial for premature babies.
- red023 9y ago
  Oh yeah it may help humans, in the future mothers can simply skip the "annoying" part of being pregnant. Thats great the future is here women can stay sexy and thin, being naturally pregnant will be totally out. Welcome to the brave new world. Awesome who cares about animals if we can help humans. And yeah downvote me because I do not embrace this unhuman future.
sek 9y ago
This could become a model for space colonization, imagine you only send frozen embryos to another planet that then give birth to humans educated and raised by an AI. I mean there is a limit how long we can preserve living humans and multi generational ships are very fragile ecosystems.
- magic_beans 9y ago
  Who exactly will be birthing and nurturing these babies?
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    Waymo
- 05 9y ago
  If you have an AI that can create human-friendly environment from scratch on an alien planet, what exactly you need humans for?
  - ben_w 9y ago
    "Civilization: Beyond Earth" Live-Action Role Playing?
jlebrech 9y ago
imagine no more abortions, you're just giving your child away prior to birth.
cies 9y ago
Pictures or it didn't happen. C'mon this is 2017, everyone has a camera in their pocket! I expect the pictures look so gross that they don't want to publish it, afraid for public outcry. And thus settle with drawings instead :)
- belorn 9y ago
  Not sure why the article didn't include it, but here is a Swedish news article with a video: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/vetenskap/lammfoster-overlevde-fyra-veckor-i-konstgjord-livmoder https://www.svt.se/nyheter/vetenskap/lammfoster-overlevde-fy...
  - cies 9y ago
    Wow! Thanks, video!
  - booleandilemma 9y ago
    Thanks for the video! It reminded me of the scene in the Matrix with Neo coming out of his tank.
flexie 9y ago
In a scary future, this could be used to grow a population fast. Once they can copy the entire pregnancy from (artificial) inception to ready made baby, they can grow a population from just the sperm and eggs of a few men and women. Send 1M embryos up to Mars, take them out of the freezer as you need more workers. You no longer need thousands of ships for that or to wait for generations. They might even be able to "bake in" chips and sensors in the process for better control of the population.
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, there was a colonisation attempt before the main one in that series where fertilized embryoes were sent on ships with all they needed to rebuild civilisation. Turned out some fraction of the people born thusly became psychopaths and killed off all the rest, dooming the entire thing, so in the books all that is left is artifacts. I always found it a very nice touch and highly plausible that such an attempt failed spectacularly.
  - Arizhel 9y ago
    We already have that: at least 5-10% of the population is naturally born that way now. We try to socialize them out of it, which has some success, but for those who it doesn't, the dumb ones become hardened criminals, and the smart ones become politicians and CEOs. This colonization idea needs to wait until we can figure out the genetic basis of sociopathy, and then we can genetically engineer it out of the fertilized embryos, and instead GE them to be much more interdependent and social than we are.
- cstross 9y ago
  end 1M embryos up to Mars, take them out of the freezer as you need more workers. Because of course a one month old baby is ready to work, right? Sorry, but humans are social animals. We don't come ready-to-use; it takes a lot of training (about 9-18 months for basic language alone). Worse, we're born — by the standards of most mammals — prematurely: if we weren't, the maternal death rate would be unsustainable (big skulls don't pass easily through gaps in the mother's pelvis). Our immune systems are primed by the mother via colostrum ("first milk") after delivery: we can't walk for months, we don't even have full bowel control for a year or two. And then there's socialization and interaction and play and all the other panoply of human developmental requirements — which you might think are unimportant, but a quick look at the history of Romania's Ceaucescu-era orphanages and their survivors (the Ceaucescu dictatorship banned abortions) will give you a grisly tour of the failure modes. The least-bad outcome of your proposal is that it would enable parents to rapidly raise a family with 2-20 children without inflicting direct physical damage on the female population (but don't underestimate the exigencies of raising children as a full-time job, specially on that scale). But it's not a colony-in-a-can gadget that will making planetary (or interstellar) colonization easy; someone's got to be there first, to prepare a safe and healthy environment for the kids to grow up in. (If you say "yes but AI!" then I submit that you don't have any clear idea what you're asking for or you're a believer in the singularity, aka the rapture of the nerds.)
wjbdvkjwbbvwdjk 9y ago
One aspect of this that's interesting is the extent to which factors like the sound and pulse of the mother's heart, her movement, and sounds from the outside world affect fetal development. For example, this system is pumpless, while the rest of the system evolved in the presence of a pump. In mammals the vascular system is continuously monitoring and optimizing blood-vessel diameter as a function of the waves of blood flowing through them. You don't get that if you have an artificial heart. I bet movement also plays a role in fetal brain development too. Therefore ideally the bag should be hung from a robot arm programmed to move like a sheep moves (maybe from recordings of an actual sheep), including sleeping at night etc. And the bag should gently pulse as though there's a heart and lungs. Also the miserable factory where these clones develop should play sounds of open pasture and birds, sheep bleating etc. That way they will be properly developed lambs ready to go to the abattoir. (edit: sorry for the sad ending)
- aequitas 9y ago
  I believe this study is done as alternate treatment for premature born babies. In that respect these babies already miss this aspect in their development. I don't know how current incubators or treatments handle this or if the effect have been studied. But it makes me curious if it really makes a difference in longer term.
  - Saad_M 9y ago
    Yes and no. For the most premature babies in the low 20s week gestation they have minimal physical contact with their parents. However older preterm infants do receive Kangroo care with their mothers.
- ben_w 9y ago
  As we rapidly convert science fiction into reality, the question in my (vegetarian) mind is this: Why not genetically engineer them to not have a brain? No brain, no chance it might suffer. The bare minimum of neurons needed for staying alive — pump heart, breathe, digest food — is tiny compared to a mamillian brain.
danuta_ 9y ago
This is actually great. The possibilities are vast: saving prematurely born babies, speeding up the healing process of patients with severe burns...and then even (maybe) bringing back to life some of the extinct species (this one's tricky though).
- alvarosevilla95 9y ago
  I wonder what the implications of functioning artificial wombs would be to abortion. Would it make sense to allow people to abort if we could take the fetus from the mother and let it become a baby?
  - jerryszczerry 9y ago
    If/when that becomes feasible, I assume moving the fetus to the artificial womb would become a more humanitarian (if more expensive) equivalent to getting an abortion.
jaddood 9y ago
One should read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley after this.
summerdown2 9y ago
An artificial womb is also one of the steps required to bring back the mammoth. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170221-reviving-woolly-mammoths-will-take-more-than-two-years http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170221-reviving-woolly-mamm...
belorn 9y ago
I find it a fascinating implication that this could do to men what artificial insemination do for women. All that a man would need to start a family would be to visit a bio bank and wait, which with current rules has none of the requirement that exist for adoption.
csomar 9y ago
Technologist who are trying to create an A.I. empowered robot with silicon should take note. Why complicate stuff when you already have millions of years of evolution giving you a good framework to start. Genetically design babies, and then produce them. Bingo, there you have your A.I. new born. Creating real A.I. robots that are close to humans (intelligence-wise) is just complicating the process and pushing us a bit further from the ethical questions. I say let's face them now and push A.I. through biotechnology.
teddyh 9y ago
Much like the last episode of the 1988 TV show Max Headroom, “Baby Grobags”.
petarvasilev 9y ago
That's beyond cruelty and evil.

226 points by techpulse-co 9y ago

gokusaaaan 9y ago

I wonder how long before we have cities that regulate humans population via such machines as shown in Ergo Proxy?

Laforet 9y ago
It's going to take a while, for what they have described is a process to keep extremely preterm foetus alive, rather than an artificial environment to develop an entire organism from a fertilised egg - we actually know lot about IV fertilisation and keeping it alive through the first few development stages, but there are still significant gaps to cover until you have a somewhat developed foetus that has a chance of survival outside the womb. In parallel example, we have not managed to find an artificial replacement for egg shells which is required for avian embryos to develop. Some techniques do exist, but none of the them were able to ensure survival past the first 2 weeks. Considering that humans have been breeding chicken for centuries, there is still plenty we don't know about our favourite bird, let alone fellow humans.
- slv77 9y ago
  Hatching a chick shell free using plastic wrap was developed in 2014. It was recently replicated by Japanese students which made the news.
  - Laforet 9y ago
    Not really, similar techniques were developed as early as.the 70s and there are sufficient doubt that the student project in the news did not go as well as they claimed, nor was there any report of reproducibility in a controlled laboratory setting.
    - dotancohen 9y ago
      Jurassic Park, at least in book form, describes in the first few chapter or three a revolutionary plastic which can replace an egg shell and produce viable chicks. I believe that this was based on actual contemporary science, circa 1990.
Moshe_Silnorin 9y ago
What's really frightening is not controlling human population, but vastly expanding it. Countries could grow citizens in factories. I've always thought Malthus would come back roaring, but this could go uncomfortably far.
- devrandomguy 9y ago
  No need to let them run free. Those humans could work remotely, from a small pod of amniotic fluid, mounted to the side of a huge tower. They could live their lives in MMOs, which would seem absolutely realistic, if that was the only thing they ever experienced. I don't think it is realistic to use them as an energy source though, heat would be a waste product in an environment like that.
  - derefr 9y ago
    I've always been confused about the part of The Matrix where they still bother to grow the whole human, rather than just the brain.
    - struct 9y ago
      Rewatching the films recently, the only explanation I've thought of for the machine's barmy plan is that they must be bound by the three laws or feel some kind of deep obligation to us, even after we made the entire world uninhabitable. Why else would they spend so much time growing us, feeding us, simulating for us, allowing the One(s) to save humanity repeatedly, and why else would they initially try to simulate paradise for us?
    - snuxoll 9y ago
      The method of which they produce the fetuses is never explained in the franchise, and considering they'd want to maintain genetic diversity it's probable that they simply harvest gametes from mature humans in the power plant and incubate an embryo. There's also the whole "cycle" thing that's apparantley gone on for 6 iterations, allowing humans who reject the matrix to leave and periodically cull them was a solution to widespread rejection of the system that would have affected entire crops of humans. It's hard to do that if they don't have physical bodies to escape the system in the real world.

erickhill 9y ago

Oddly this exact same URL was posted 2 days ago. I wonder why it didn't get caught? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196680

rubyn00bie 9y ago
I've had this happen multiple times. Usually it's because it's missing the "/" at the end or some other small change in the URL. Their check is only looking for exact matches.
- kristofferR 9y ago
  I'm glad the dupe check isn't better, as it is undeniable that reaching the front page here is about luck just as much as quality. This story is just as interesting as when it was first submitted, yet this submission is way more popular.
mirimir 9y ago
Well, that post got no comments. So this could just be a resubmission.
stared 9y ago
Hacker roulette.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

cletus 9y ago

Disclaimer: I really know nothing about biology or genetics. This is an area I find fascinating. One thing I've pondered is with merely a genome could you construct the organism it's from? The first problem is creating a fertilized egg. Having that, it's not clear to me (again, as a layman) whether or not you could gestate that to an independent organism. To put it in computing terms, imagine the genome as "source code" and the host (gestating) organism as, for lack of a better word, a "compiler". Now imagine that a lot of the complexity of life comes from these successive generations, which is to say that an organism isn't simply a function of its genome, it's essentially a function of every ancestor. If you think about it, some organisms are born with some ingrained characteristics and behaviour. Humans have the moro reflex. Bear cubs manage to find way to their mother's milk when the mother is barely conscious. Some ducks are capable of swimming, eating and surviving from the day they're born. How much of this is part of the genome and how much is "communicated" from mother to child in the womb? Obviously only applies to a subset of animals. Birds, for example, are born in eggs and--unless I'm missing something--the only interaction between parent and egg once the egg is laid is incubation so it's easy to imagine that there is no "communication" in this phase. But maybe this is what makes mammals (particularly primates) seemingly special? How much of what we do is hardwired or "software"? So there have been two important developments in the last year or so. The first is hatching chicks without a shell [1]. The second is this and this is far more impressive. If nothing else, this limits potential interactions between mother and unborn child. At least for sheep. I think this is a really important development. [1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/video-shows-how-to-incubate-an-egg-without-the-shell/ https://www.cnet.com/news/video-shows-how-to-incubate-an-egg...

refurb 9y ago
One thing I've pondered is with merely a genome could you construct the organism it's from? Craig Venter already did that with a bacterial. He synthesized the entire genome, then inserted it a cell. I assume that cell already had the other machinery (translation enzymes, etc).
- cletus 9y ago
  Single cells organisms are one thing. I don't think you can automatically extrapolate from bacteria to primates however.

LouisSayers 9y ago

I guess next we'll put hospital patients in such bags to protect them from the external environment, provide healing fluids as well? The future is looking pretty cool.

SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
I'm picturing something like the pods in "The Matrix". Actually I can see a huge benefit to e.g. burns victims and other types of massive trauma where some time in an "artificial womb" could be hugely beneficial for regeneration. Cool indeed.

gliese1337 9y ago

The original source, with the actual science: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112 It's not quite a total replacement for a natural womb (and the Nature article only uses the word "womb once, in the abstract), as it can't grow a fetus from an embryo; you have to start with a pre-incubated fetus that already has an umbilical ford to plug into and a strong enough heart. But even though we won't be growing test-tube babies 100% in-vitro with this thing, it is a major advance that could significantly push back the earliest time at which a premature baby could remain viable with artificial incubation.

gadders 9y ago
And also hopefully reduce the need for abortion. Women would be able to "donate" the foetus to be raised in one of these bags and then adopted. (Eventually, I realise this technology is not there yet).
- fdsfsafasfdas 9y ago
  ...because adoption is such a riotous success these days?
  - dw0rm1 9y ago
    ...because there are thousands of women who for various reasons cannot have children of their own and would definitely prefer a child created like this rather than adopting a child that potentially comes with a lot of life baggage.
    - XorNot 9y ago
      ...because raising a child is such an easy process, it would be terrible if you had to start with one with "life baggage" instead of just being totally helpless, completely unable to be reasoned with or in control of it's basic bodily functions?
    - tome 9y ago

theprop 9y ago

Super!! Bringing the Wooly Mammoth and more extinct animals is next :-D!

thedailymail 9y ago
George Church's group at Harvard is proposing using similar technology in their attempt to clone a mammoth by replacing the DNA in an elephant egg with DNA from a mammoth. They want to grow it extracorporeally for its entire development, because doing it in utero in an elephant would present additional ethical issues (i.e., potentially harming elephants in an experiment of a technology that is far from mature).
logicallee 9y ago
What a time to be a lamb! :D

k__ 9y ago

Axolotl tanks? ;)

red023 9y ago

I think this is absolutely sick, I know there are way more horrible experiments scientists do with animals but this gives me the creeps. Its just sick, let nature but nature and stop messing around with it. Seriously if this continues we have AI that breeds Humans as their power or brain source and the matrix becomes reality.

lesingerouge 9y ago
I do not think this is a rational response. I get that the "knee-jerk" reaction might be one of total disgust (I know because I also had it reading this), but there should be a bit of rational thought put into what would be the consequences of this. Because AI growing humans and the Matrix becoming reality is a little bit on the "surreal paranoid" side of life, given the current state of scientific knowledge. On that same train of thought, but with a more realistic outlook, we could just think of the many difficult pregnancy cases that women might face that this development might help solve. And by difficult cases I mean situations where women who want a child face complications during pregnancy. And generally (even though I'm a natural pessimist), I think it's best to have a positive outlook towards the products of our own curiosity. They might bring trouble, but there are very few other natural catalysts to progress other than curiosity. War comes to mind as an alternative, but I believe that is less than desired.
BoringAsian 9y ago
disgust is a useful expression but I'm not sure I would rely on it to make choices and strange imagined futures. I'm glad that your disgust was vivid enough to conjure such a future in your head though!
louhike 9y ago
As said in another comment, it might be benificial for premature babies.
red023 9y ago
Oh yeah it may help humans, in the future mothers can simply skip the "annoying" part of being pregnant. Thats great the future is here women can stay sexy and thin, being naturally pregnant will be totally out. Welcome to the brave new world. Awesome who cares about animals if we can help humans. And yeah downvote me because I do not embrace this unhuman future.

sek 9y ago

This could become a model for space colonization, imagine you only send frozen embryos to another planet that then give birth to humans educated and raised by an AI. I mean there is a limit how long we can preserve living humans and multi generational ships are very fragile ecosystems.

magic_beans 9y ago
Who exactly will be birthing and nurturing these babies?
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  Waymo
05 9y ago
If you have an AI that can create human-friendly environment from scratch on an alien planet, what exactly you need humans for?
- ben_w 9y ago
  "Civilization: Beyond Earth" Live-Action Role Playing?

jlebrech 9y ago

imagine no more abortions, you're just giving your child away prior to birth.

cies 9y ago

Pictures or it didn't happen. C'mon this is 2017, everyone has a camera in their pocket! I expect the pictures look so gross that they don't want to publish it, afraid for public outcry. And thus settle with drawings instead :)

belorn 9y ago
Not sure why the article didn't include it, but here is a Swedish news article with a video: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/vetenskap/lammfoster-overlevde-fyra-veckor-i-konstgjord-livmoder https://www.svt.se/nyheter/vetenskap/lammfoster-overlevde-fy...
- cies 9y ago
  Wow! Thanks, video!
- booleandilemma 9y ago
  Thanks for the video! It reminded me of the scene in the Matrix with Neo coming out of his tank.

flexie 9y ago

In a scary future, this could be used to grow a population fast. Once they can copy the entire pregnancy from (artificial) inception to ready made baby, they can grow a population from just the sperm and eggs of a few men and women. Send 1M embryos up to Mars, take them out of the freezer as you need more workers. You no longer need thousands of ships for that or to wait for generations. They might even be able to "bake in" chips and sensors in the process for better control of the population.

semi-extrinsic 9y ago
In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, there was a colonisation attempt before the main one in that series where fertilized embryoes were sent on ships with all they needed to rebuild civilisation. Turned out some fraction of the people born thusly became psychopaths and killed off all the rest, dooming the entire thing, so in the books all that is left is artifacts. I always found it a very nice touch and highly plausible that such an attempt failed spectacularly.
- Arizhel 9y ago
  We already have that: at least 5-10% of the population is naturally born that way now. We try to socialize them out of it, which has some success, but for those who it doesn't, the dumb ones become hardened criminals, and the smart ones become politicians and CEOs. This colonization idea needs to wait until we can figure out the genetic basis of sociopathy, and then we can genetically engineer it out of the fertilized embryos, and instead GE them to be much more interdependent and social than we are.
cstross 9y ago
end 1M embryos up to Mars, take them out of the freezer as you need more workers. Because of course a one month old baby is ready to work, right? Sorry, but humans are social animals. We don't come ready-to-use; it takes a lot of training (about 9-18 months for basic language alone). Worse, we're born — by the standards of most mammals — prematurely: if we weren't, the maternal death rate would be unsustainable (big skulls don't pass easily through gaps in the mother's pelvis). Our immune systems are primed by the mother via colostrum ("first milk") after delivery: we can't walk for months, we don't even have full bowel control for a year or two. And then there's socialization and interaction and play and all the other panoply of human developmental requirements — which you might think are unimportant, but a quick look at the history of Romania's Ceaucescu-era orphanages and their survivors (the Ceaucescu dictatorship banned abortions) will give you a grisly tour of the failure modes. The least-bad outcome of your proposal is that it would enable parents to rapidly raise a family with 2-20 children without inflicting direct physical damage on the female population (but don't underestimate the exigencies of raising children as a full-time job, specially on that scale). But it's not a colony-in-a-can gadget that will making planetary (or interstellar) colonization easy; someone's got to be there first, to prepare a safe and healthy environment for the kids to grow up in. (If you say "yes but AI!" then I submit that you don't have any clear idea what you're asking for or you're a believer in the singularity, aka the rapture of the nerds.)

wjbdvkjwbbvwdjk 9y ago

One aspect of this that's interesting is the extent to which factors like the sound and pulse of the mother's heart, her movement, and sounds from the outside world affect fetal development. For example, this system is pumpless, while the rest of the system evolved in the presence of a pump. In mammals the vascular system is continuously monitoring and optimizing blood-vessel diameter as a function of the waves of blood flowing through them. You don't get that if you have an artificial heart. I bet movement also plays a role in fetal brain development too. Therefore ideally the bag should be hung from a robot arm programmed to move like a sheep moves (maybe from recordings of an actual sheep), including sleeping at night etc. And the bag should gently pulse as though there's a heart and lungs. Also the miserable factory where these clones develop should play sounds of open pasture and birds, sheep bleating etc. That way they will be properly developed lambs ready to go to the abattoir. (edit: sorry for the sad ending)

aequitas 9y ago
I believe this study is done as alternate treatment for premature born babies. In that respect these babies already miss this aspect in their development. I don't know how current incubators or treatments handle this or if the effect have been studied. But it makes me curious if it really makes a difference in longer term.
- Saad_M 9y ago
  Yes and no. For the most premature babies in the low 20s week gestation they have minimal physical contact with their parents. However older preterm infants do receive Kangroo care with their mothers.
ben_w 9y ago
As we rapidly convert science fiction into reality, the question in my (vegetarian) mind is this: Why not genetically engineer them to not have a brain? No brain, no chance it might suffer. The bare minimum of neurons needed for staying alive — pump heart, breathe, digest food — is tiny compared to a mamillian brain.

danuta_ 9y ago

This is actually great. The possibilities are vast: saving prematurely born babies, speeding up the healing process of patients with severe burns...and then even (maybe) bringing back to life some of the extinct species (this one's tricky though).

alvarosevilla95 9y ago
I wonder what the implications of functioning artificial wombs would be to abortion. Would it make sense to allow people to abort if we could take the fetus from the mother and let it become a baby?
- jerryszczerry 9y ago
  If/when that becomes feasible, I assume moving the fetus to the artificial womb would become a more humanitarian (if more expensive) equivalent to getting an abortion.

jaddood 9y ago

One should read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley after this.

summerdown2 9y ago

An artificial womb is also one of the steps required to bring back the mammoth. http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170221-reviving-woolly-mammoths-will-take-more-than-two-years http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170221-reviving-woolly-mamm...

belorn 9y ago

I find it a fascinating implication that this could do to men what artificial insemination do for women. All that a man would need to start a family would be to visit a bio bank and wait, which with current rules has none of the requirement that exist for adoption.

csomar 9y ago

Technologist who are trying to create an A.I. empowered robot with silicon should take note. Why complicate stuff when you already have millions of years of evolution giving you a good framework to start. Genetically design babies, and then produce them. Bingo, there you have your A.I. new born. Creating real A.I. robots that are close to humans (intelligence-wise) is just complicating the process and pushing us a bit further from the ethical questions. I say let's face them now and push A.I. through biotechnology.

teddyh 9y ago

Much like the last episode of the 1988 TV show Max Headroom, “Baby Grobags”.

petarvasilev 9y ago

That's beyond cruelty and evil.