The original source, with the actual science: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112</a><p>It's not quite a total replacement for a natural womb (and the Nature article only uses the word "womb <i>once</i>, 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.
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.<p>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.<p>I bet movement also plays a role in fetal brain development too.<p>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)
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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>I mean there is a limit how long we can preserve living humans and multi generational ships are very fragile ecosystems.
Oddly this exact same URL was posted 2 days ago. I wonder why it didn't get caught?
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196680" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196680</a>
Disclaimer: I really know nothing about biology or genetics.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>How much of this is part of the genome and how much is "communicated" from mother to child in the womb?<p>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.<p>But maybe this is what makes mammals (particularly primates) seemingly special? How much of what we do is hardwired or "software"?<p>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.<p>If nothing else, this limits potential interactions between mother and unborn child. At least for sheep. I think this is a really important development.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/video-shows-how-to-incubate-an-egg-without-the-shell/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnet.com/news/video-shows-how-to-incubate-an-egg...</a>
Pictures or it didn't happen. C'mon this is 2017, everyone has a camera in their pocket!<p>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 :)
An artificial womb is also one of the steps required to bring back the mammoth.<p><a href="http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170221-reviving-woolly-mammoths-will-take-more-than-two-years" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170221-reviving-woolly-mamm...</a>
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).
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.