Artificial Womb

[Phi for All]

But a baby born inside a woman is natural because it was conceived via the natural process of sexual reproduction. Culturing egg and sperm and then injecting sperm into the egg culture to fertilize it is artificial because this wouldn't happen naturally. Nor would 1 organism carefully building a baby cell by cell.

 

So I think of artificial as being something that has went through a manmade process in the case of making an organism, made from mixing ingredients that don't naturally occur in a product(such as sodium benzoate for preservation) with the natural part of the product(such as fruit juices) in the case of food, or something completely synthetic(in other words it does not have any natural component).

 

I still think it's weird that humans often make this distinction between artificial and natural using every animal except ourselves as the baseline. Isn't that just doomed to fail every time?

 

Won't that always make everything we can do that other animals can't do unnatural? Why do we place such a curse on our intelligence? Why are humans the only creatures who can do something unnatural?

 

Isn't our medical specialization ability just one of the traits we've developed to help us adapt to the environments we face? We get more of these types of traits because we're smarter, instead of faster, bigger, stronger, meaner, toothier, or better swimmers/flyers. Failing to take this into consideration is unbalancing the equation.

 

On a side note, I did have a discussion recently where a member thought that beavers building dams was unnatural. I'm sure he'd include chimps using sticks to catch termites, but most people wouldn't. By that reasoning, humans should be able to use a fishing pole, or build a thatched hut and still be considered natural.

 

So where is the line between natural and unnatural? When we stop using straw and start building with wood? Or is it when we move to bricks? Why?

[mistermack]

It's interesting what's been happening since the last post on this thread.

Quite a lot of progress has been made in the field. 

A lab in Israel has substantially extended the life in and artificial womb of mice embryos to 11 days. ( That's out of about 20 days full term )

https://www.science.org/content/article/mouse-embryos-grown-bottles-form-organs-and-limbs 

https://www.weizmann.ac.il/WeizmannCompass/sections/briefs/artificial-‘wombs’-incubate-stem-cell-breakthrough 

While impressive and very useful, the technique is facing a road block, because it doesn't involve growing an artificial placenta, so the way to take it further is probably barred, but it does demonstrate that the fetus is naturally trying to survive and grow, given the right conditions. The next step would be to find a way to establish a placenta, and once that's done, there would be probably no reason why the fetus should not go all the way to delivery. 

At the other end of the cycle, a lot of progress has also been made on transferring an extremely premature lamb fetus to an artificial womb, and continuing the development to a more mature stage, and I believe, all the way to the lamb being born. From what I gather, the lungs of a premature baby stop developing when they start to breathe air, leading to health problems in life. If a premature fetus can be kept gestating for a few weeks, it might make all the difference to the prospects of a healthy life. Real progress has been made with premature lambs, that were given extra weeks effective gestation in a plastic bag simulating a womb, complete with artificial placenta.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15421734/artificial-womb-fetus-biobag-uterus-lamb-sheep-birth-premie-preterm-infant 

https://www.iflscience.com/artificial-womb-used-to-successfully-grow-premature-lamb-for-the-second-time-43344  

I think the ball is well and truly rolling in this field, and the progress made in the last seven years seems to indicate that it's not a lifetime away from going the whole way to producing a live lamb from invitro fertilisation to birth, and after that the first human baby by the same route. 

 

 

[mistermack]

A thought occurred to me that when it becomes the norm, that babies are developed all the way in an artificial womb, it might affect the jobs market. At the moment, employers look at women candidates, and in the back of their mind, they are weighing up what it will cost them if she gets pregnant. With this process, the only medical procedure needed by the woman is egg removal, so apart from that, men and women will be an equal bet for employers. 

( I know discrimination is illegal in a lot of countries, but it's still happening all the time )

I guess that some women will go on a hormone regime, to mimic being pregnant, so as to induce bonding and breast milk flow.