
An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep - techpulse-co
http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15421734/artificial-womb-fetus-biobag-uterus-lamb-sheep-birth-premie-preterm-infant
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gliese1337
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
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).

~~~
lawless123
I;m pro choice and think this tech is great.

All the pro-life people i know that have seen it though think it's a
disturbing, godless or unnatural...

~~~
xienze
Yeah, take a fetus out of a living being and stick it in a plastic bag to
incubate. How could anyone possibly think that's weird or unnatural?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
And? "Unnatural" describes our entire existence - living in houses, eating
food we raised, wearing clothes, taking medicines.

To be honest, 'nature' is that thing that constantly tries to kill us. I think
its hilarious that folks pursue 'natural' foods and lifestyles, thinking its
somehow better.

~~~
apocalypstyx
Birds nests and termite mounds. Ants invented farming and animal domestication
(and slavery) before humans evolved as a species (certain strains of fungus
have gone extinct in nature and only still remain because of their
cultivation. Hermit crabs. And a few years ago (can't remember where at the
moment) it was shown animals self-medicate when sick by instinctually eating
certain plants they would otherwise not consume.

You're not in traffic. You are traffic.

~~~
lawless123
Either nothing is Natural or everything is.

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wjbdvkjwbbvwdjk
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)

~~~
ben_w
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.

~~~
bkkssnn
Why not just isolate the meat and just grow meat? instead of growing lambs
without brains that still have to grow into adults just to waste
bones/tenonds/all other non edibles etc. etc. etc.

~~~
Arizhel
This is coming soon; there's already companies working on this. It makes the
most sense, because once you can grow stuff biologically, for meat you only
want the muscle and fat, you don't want the rest, so why bother growing it?

I predict that within 50 years (which may be overly conservative), killing
animals for meat will be all but extinct, and we'll be eating artificially-
grown meat.

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flexie
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.

~~~
cstross
_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.)

~~~
Arizhel
The premature-birth thing can be fixed now with artificial wombs: we'll just
keep kids in there longer, perhaps 2-4 years. Throw in some genetic
engineering and some techniques to rapidly indoctrinate and train these people
and we can grow a clone army! Bwahahaha!

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LouisSayers
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
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.

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csomar
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.

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belorn
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.

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sek
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.

~~~
05
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
"Civilization: Beyond Earth" Live-Action Role Playing?

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erickhill
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
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
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.

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cletus
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...](https://www.cnet.com/news/video-shows-how-to-incubate-an-egg-without-
the-shell/)

~~~
refurb
_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
Single cells organisms are one thing. I don't think you can automatically
extrapolate from bacteria to primates however.

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cies
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
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-
fy...](https://www.svt.se/nyheter/vetenskap/lammfoster-overlevde-fyra-veckor-
i-konstgjord-livmoder)

~~~
booleandilemma
Thanks for the video!

It reminded me of the scene in the Matrix with Neo coming out of his tank.

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summerdown2
An artificial womb is also one of the steps required to bring back the
mammoth.

[http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170221-reviving-woolly-
mamm...](http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170221-reviving-woolly-mammoths-
will-take-more-than-two-years)

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danuta_
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
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
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.

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

~~~
Laforet
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
Hatching a chick shell free using plastic wrap was developed in 2014. It was
recently replicated by Japanese students which made the news.

~~~
Laforet
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
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.

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teddyh
Much like the last episode of the 1988 TV show Max Headroom, “ _Baby Grobags_
”.

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

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

~~~
thedailymail
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).

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

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k__
Axolotl tanks? ;)

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red023
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
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.

