Artificial Wombs

Will we grow babies outside their mothers' bodies?

By Gretchen Reynolds Posted 08.01.2005 at 2:00 pm 8 Comments

Artificial wombs have figured for generations in fiction, feminist theory, abortion debates and even the wistful imaginings of women far advanced in pregnancy. In Brave New World, the 1932 book by Aldous Huxley, babies grew in tubes. In 1970 Shulamith Firestone wrote in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution that artificial wombs should be developed to free women from “the tyranny of their sexual-reproductive roles.” More recently, the exhausted working-mother heroine of the novel I Don’t Know How She Does It assures a younger female colleague that she, at least, will be relieved of the tedium and career-torching effects of pregnancy, thanks to emerging baby-in-a-box technology. Science has been playing catch-up to these fantasies: In 1963, researchers put miscarried fetuses in oxygen chambers and added a watery fluid. It didn’t work.

The closest approximation of an operational machine-womb was created about five years ago. In experiments at Juntendo University in Tokyo, an acrylic box was filled with a liquid similar to amniotic fluid. A goat embryo, removed by cesarean section after four months of normal gestation, was placed in the chamber and its umbilical cord hooked to tubes connected to an artificial placenta. Most of the kids died, but a few survived up to three weeks, reaching full term for a goat. None was without deformities or lung problems. The experiments are no longer under way.

Which has left the field to Liu. She and two of her colleagues, both men, have been refining their artificial womb bit by bit. They’re developing liquid formulas that are incrementally closer to the fluids within an actual mammalian uterus, although developing the perfect mix of blood, hormones and proteins—and precisely adjusting it during the course of a pregnancy—is so far impossible. Minuscule differences in amniotic fluid have been found, in other labs’ experiments, to produce notable differences in the resulting offspring.

In Liu’s most recent experiment, she surgically implanted one of her artificial mouse wombs in an adult mouse, and the fetus inside lived about 19 days. (In earlier experiments, fetuses survived in external wombs for up to 17 days. That’s roughly equivalent to 37 weeks of human fetal development, although fetuses appear to develop slower in artificial wombs than in real ones.) But invariably, each mouse embryo, more than 150 to date, died. One reason, Liu believes, is that the snaky vines of blood vessels that should link the tiny bodies to the womb’s surface wither or fail to develop at all. Starved of blood, the embryos shrivel.

To rectify this, Liu’s colleague Weidong Wang has been studying the expression of a gene, called murine AGPAT, that seems to stimulate blood-vessel formation within the womb. If you block that gene, the embryo can’t implant fully and grow, which may explain why some women—in whom this gene is missing or malfunctioning—miscarry. Force the gene’s expression, on the other hand, and you get a jungle of blood vessels, a fecund clot of veins. The work may have implications for cancer treatment. Block the gene’s expression, and you could disable a tumor’s ability to create new blood vessels for itself, causing a slow self-strangulation. “There’s overlap between research into fertility and oncology,” Wang says. “The beginning of life and the end of life. We deal with both in this lab.”

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8 Comments

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Betwinklet

03/31/08 at 12:03 pm

For years I had trouble conceiving a child. Finally put on fertility drugs, I was pregnant! Twice I lost my babies at 51/2 months. No reason was ever found. If I could have only transferred them to an artificial womb.....
I often thought about this at that time. You would think that with our technology today, it would already be in use. Instead, we use our technology for wars and eliminating the human race rather than creating life.
I finally conceived and had one son, with a miscarriage again after that. I always wanted at least a few children and thought that I would be a great mom and although it is not easy, Iam at least grateful to have had one.
My son is twenty now and has left home. I often long to have had more children as I now feel most useless as I wanted motherhood to be my chosen profession.
I do know that the development of an artificial womb would benefit many childless couples yearning to be parents....................I would like to see this developed in my lifetime.

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Dracula505

04/04/08 at 1:05 am

This Technology is not meant to be used for humans. Not to offend anyone but this is risky not to mention unnatural and can lead to some very bad things. Just think what will start to happen when a teenager gets pregnant and abandons the baby in a womb. Also you should consider how this will psychologically affect your "baby" adoted kids often have problems imagine a child learning there machine born.

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amandarey92

08/19/09 at 5:09 pm

This technology is quite incredible. Although I hope it's never used main stream, it would be sweet for preventing stretch marks from forming during pregnancy!

- Amanda
http://www.stretch-marks.me/

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Kakekikoku

02/24/10 at 9:38 pm

The best application for the artificial womb is to end the abortion issue. Any female who is impregnated can have her fertilized egg or embryo removed and placed in an artificial womb. In the future all fetuses will develop in an artificial womb, just like they do it in Heaven, no more birth defects, generational diseases, every sort of disease passed through heritary genetics, and this is how we become immortal, like God, just as the Bible says.

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Kakekikoku

02/24/10 at 9:40 pm

Hereditary genetics

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Weslia

02/27/10 at 7:36 pm

If artificial womb technology & embryonic transfer were available as easily as abortion, can you imagine what that would mean for the women who are stuck with an unwanted pregnancy & most of all for the innocent unborn child? A woman could go into a clinic, have the baby extracted live from her womb & either placed in the womb of the new adopted mother or put in an artificial womb to mature into a full-term baby & then be adopted by new parents who want the child. No more horrible choices for women or couples who want to remain childless or not have a child at that particular time & more importantly for the child who is at the mercy of the grown-ups around it. We need to let our medical researchers know that we desperately need this new technology. - PLEASE!

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sciencenerd

07/14/10 at 6:04 pm

it might be good or bad... parents think ( mainly moms) that it was worth the hard work for the baby. but parents may think the same way but not as much( with artifisial womb). i mean a mother thinks after 20 years than you can't believe that thing came out of your stomach. good because no pain. so lack of pain may be good or bad......

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Bigmouth

02/07/12 at 11:24 pm

Stop giving us this shit!
"Or not. Days after cheerfully percolating, Liu’s rodent fetus died, deformed and contorted, more seahorse than mouse, a developmental freak. The same thing happened to the next fetus she implanted, and the one after that"------
these embryos were actually bad (malformed, clinically)mouse embryos hung--ching liu and one of her co-workers collected from normal mouse breedings, not from what she called "artifial womb at all. Malformed embryos happen spontenously ever by nature breeding. She made up this story.

"In 2003, in an experiment that hasn’t received as much attention as one might expect—perhaps because Liu hasn’t published her results, due to her qualms about how those results will be received by politicians, activists and desperate would-be parents—a mouse embryo grew almost to full term in one of Liu’s artificial wombs."------she was shitting again! she dare not to publish it at all because anybody with a litte scientific background won't believe it. Technically, up to date, it is impossible to raise a whole organ outside human body , let alone an embryo(with eyes, head and arms) on dish or in test tubes. Hung-ching liu and her coworker fabricated all of this and also claimed her techinque was not perfect to produce "perfect" embryos,trying to make her story look more "real".
We really hope Popsc improve your quality by interviewing some reputable scientists for readers. Stop misleading this society! In fact, almost all of Hung-ching Liu's papers co-authored with the same coworker are under scrutiny for fabrication, data manipulation and exaggeration. It is a shame that institute still keep a liar like HCLiu.

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