Will we grow babies outside their mothers' bodies?
Posted 08.01.2005 at 2:00 pm
8 Comments
Janet DiPietro is the world’s leading expert on what it’s like to be an embryo. A developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, she is one of the few scientists to have closely studied the womb as an ecosystem. In recent experiments, DiPietro and her colleagues attached monitors to the skin and belly of pregnant women. They had expected to find that the child within responded to its mother’s moods. Earlier research had shown that fetuses react almost instantly to changes in maternal position or emotions—with stillness. DiPietro speculates that this is the way the fetus learns to understand its mother and her body and how she reacts to noise and other stimuli.
But in work published last year, she found that the instruction is hardly unilateral. Fetuses teach their mothers, too. “We found that the fetuses were moving when the mothers weren’t even aware of it, and were giving the mother a little emotional jolt. They were, in effect, training her to pay attention to them.” Since much of this movement comes at night, they were also giving her a foretaste of sleep deprivation, apparently knowing deep within their DNA that she might as well start getting used to it.
“The fetal environment is more than just hormones,” DiPietro says. “You can’t simply add titrates of this or that hormone or protein and re-create the womb.” An embryo gestating outside its mother “will wind up being different than that same embryo [would be] had it developed the natural way.”
Women who have borne children understand this instinctively. Any woman who has lain in the dark watching a heel-shaped bump move across her belly knows that a sensibility is growing within, that the child is becoming itself even while still a part of her. The success of adoption shows that this interaction isn’t necessary for parental bonding. But is it essential in certain immeasurable ways to the infantile brain and body, to a baby’s later ability to touch, attach, and love?
As Liu pursues the science of hormone levels and gene expression, she too worries about the ineffable. In 2001, after her earliest experiments with human zygotes were publicized, she was inundated with calls from infertile women begging to become test subjects. Overwhelmed by the response and by her own unwonted realization that,
as she says, “this work could have great social impact,” she halted the artificial-womb experiments for a full year, resuming only after reaching certain decisions.
“I don’t want to make a womb for the convenience of women who don’t want to be pregnant,” she says. And she declines to discuss the uses that anti-abortion groups might make of her results. “I want to make a womb that would be a replacement organ,” she says, that would be implanted in a woman whose endometrial tissue was donated, that would fully re-create the rich, dark wilderness of a healthy female reproductive system.
But as we all know, intentions don’t mean much once an innovation is released. Liu thinks she and her team should have a viable mouse womb in 5 to 10 years. A human model will take longer—“10 years, maybe, or a little more,” she says, assuming that restrictions on fetal testing are lifted or eased. “It could take as much as 50 years, but I’m very hopeful that this is possible.” Her voice is soft. “It will be helping a life, a baby, helping parents. Those are good things, and that’s all I can be thinking about right now.”
Gretchen Reynolds lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is mother to a son, Max. This is her first feature for Popular Science.
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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.
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.
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/
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.
Hereditary genetics
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!
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......
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.