There is massive upside here, people who suffer from fertility problems could actually have a shot at having a child. Same goes for gay people.
Every technology is dual-use, but this one strikes me as absolutely worth it.
For people worried about baby factories: this is already possible via surrogacy with humans, especially is 3rd world countries. Yet it’s not a problem, there’s no evidence that evil billionaires want or need to grow an army of slaves via surrogates. You still have to get sperm and eggs from a woman (the hardest part honestly, it can take many rounds under anesthesia to get enough for just a few viable eggs) and that is already a well regulated process. If you are an evil billionaire and want an army of slaves you are much better off just buying robots and paying some already alive adult humans to do your bidding.
But is it even ethical here to attempt to develop this? How many failed attempts does it take to refine it?
If the tech can magically spawn of nowhere and create totally healthy at birth and later in life children, I'm sure people will get used to the idea of it.
But the path to get there seems unethical.
It is much easier than one might think because feutuses don't work the way people consider them working. In a pregnancy, the feutus itself, the amniotic sac, the cord, the placenta and the veines are all part of the baby. Not the mother. Anything and everything even remotely touching the baby is part of the baby and the function of the mother is not much more than to provide nutrient/gas exchange, immune system and shock proofing for the amniotic sac. Well, and the actual birth of course, as well as afterwards. When a feutus begins development, first thing it forms is a "balloon", a hollow sac of cells, filled with fluid, then it splits, so there's 2 hollow balls and a separation layer of cells between them, and (with a lot of details ignored) the only thing that becomes a baby is the separation layer.
Ectogenesis is an outlawed-in-theory research field in the west. For both human and animal feutuses.
Why in theory? Well it is not possible to really outlaw it. On the one hand purposefully creating feutal development like this is highly illegal across the entire west, except ... perhaps obviously, we keep and keep and keep being brought into the situation by simply wanting to save a feutus. So we're "working our way down", saving younger and younger feutuses that would otherwise have to be aborted, or left to die. On the other hand, researching things like organ (re)generation, stem cell formation and cell specialization is done by "working our way up", subject to regulation. A complication is that the Vatican (which is the founder, and still in charge of a lot of research centers) is entirely, 100% opposed to "working our way up" in whatever way, shape or form, no exceptions, fuck off. On the other hand, they're quite supportive of "working our way down".
So here's "the score":
Getting a human feutus to grow to 4 weeks old is understood to the point that it could be a first-year biomed exercise. However, at that point it has to be aborted, legally. We can do all sorts of tricks and still get to that point. Like doing it without any form of conception, cloning from an adult, or, given that it has to be aborted, there is quite a bit of research into skipping parts of development and having a liver form in a 2 weeks old feutus, or activate the immune system for example. We can make very early human feutuses sing and dance, so to speak.
Getting a human feutus to grow to 12 weeks has been successfully done (then it was terminated, it did not die). Supposedly the record is 14 weeks, in Japan, and yes, that was considered a crime. Frankly, given that any student has access to everything they need to violate the rules, I have no doubt that in practice, uh, pretty good knowledge beyond the 4 weeks limit will turn out to be widely available to anyone who goes looking for it.
On the feutus-to-baby front, "working our way down", Saving an 18 week old feutus has been done, more than once, though there were serious complications. Supposedly a team in China has saved a 16 week old feutus but there was no confirmation. That said, it is true that there are Chinese hospitals that have a lot of experience successfully saving young feutuses, in the 20 week range.
Saving a 24 week old feutus is done semi-regularly. And while kids born like this have issues, it is expected for them to catch up to normal development levels by age 2.
So really, all that's needed is to bridge the gap between 8/14 and 18/24 weeks. A good well-funded research project can do this in a few years, I have no doubt it can. But you'll be killing probably several hundred viable babies, and producing at least dozens of severely handicapped children, mostly mentally handicapped, in the process ...
cosmicgadget•5mo ago
> They emphasize that current scientific understanding cannot duplicate complex biological processes such as maternal hormone secretion, immune system interactions, and the neurological development that occurs during natural pregnancy.
There is no way this works.
Charon77•5mo ago
But business people sees projections rather than facts, it's probably easy to show them robots with TV in the belly showing babies forming and reeling in investment that way.
joak•5mo ago