Since the first man, humanity has expanded and developed in simple ways. It’s a simple process where a man and a woman have sex and the man’s sperm fertilizes the woman’s egg. Within four days after fertilization, a small mass of cells, or embryo, begins to develop. The embryo, which has expanded to about 100 fluid-filled cells, travels along the fallopian tubes and remains in the uterus within a week after conception, where it is attached to the mother’s body and receives nutrients from blood vessels and glands. and grow.
Within two months after conception, the embryo becomes a fetus, and after nine months it becomes a baby. This is a miracle of human nature that you probably learned about in science class, and is due solely to the wonders of the mother’s womb.
Male infertility rates are increasing by 1% every year. “If this trend continues, the vast majority of couples will need assisted reproduction by 2045,” Cohen says.
But a minority in the scientific community has a different view. These scientists plan to eliminate humans from the post-conception process, allowing the embryos to grow independently of the womb and instead to be raised artificially. The ability to develop humans independently outside of their mother’s womb will have a profound impact on society and humanity. “What does it mean for society to be able to have children without putting a burden on women?” asks digital health futurist Maneesh Juneja. “It will have a huge economic and social impact.”
That possibility has been backed up by Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, among others. both Said The development of an artificial womb could solve the world’s pressing population crisis.
The potential impact of this research is so significant that there are many competing projects trying to take artificial wombs out of the lab and into reality. exogenesisa community seeking to accelerate the development of an extrauterine device capable of growing human babies in vitroheld its first in-person meetup in San Francisco in late February. Among the attendees was Divya Cohen, a physician, MBA, and MPA with nearly 20 years of experience in health tech startups. “We feel very strongly that this needs to happen,” Cohen said.
Approximately 13% of women want to become mothers but do not want to become pregnant. Male infertility rates are increasing by 1% every year. “If this trend continues, the vast majority of couples will need assisted reproduction by 2045,” Cohen says. “It’s not the only technology that’s helpful, but it’s certainly a tool.”
womb of technology
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This is a technology that is reportedly being developed in university labs around the world. China’s Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering Technology developed This is an AI-based technology that can nurse a human fetus inside an artificial womb by monitoring the nutrition and carbon dioxide levels in the artificial environment that helps the fetus grow to term, which is similar to the natural womb. This was a key problem in previous experiments that attempted to develop embryos outside of the cell. The goal of AI is to mimic the mysterious changes and transformations that a mother’s body unconsciously undergoes throughout pregnancy to nurture her fetus, but that’s easier said than done.
Although AI has garnered a lot of attention and many news articles, the reality is more mundane. This technology has not been tested on humans. Despite the flashy headlines, it’s not necessarily all that effective.
Projects at the forefront of artificial womb development – 1 of 3 papers The research, discussed at the Exo-Genesis conference in San Francisco, was based at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Alejandro Aguilera Castrejon is the lead author of the project to impregnate mouse embryos.
“The goal is to create chimeric models by injecting human cells into embryos,” Aguilera-Castrejon says. So-called chimeric models are used, where human cells are injected into embryos of other species and tracked to model as accurately as possible what happens to the human cells during the embryonic stage. This is because it is impossible to perform clinical tests on human embryos. .
In previous experiments, similar chimeric model embryos had a two-day growth period, but the conditions carefully monitored by Aguilera-Castrejon allowed the embryos to grow for six days after being implanted in mice and five days after fertilization. did it. He and his colleagues are now working on starting the same process to grow embryos from day 0 of fertilization instead of day 5. It is hoped that similar methods can be applied to humans. But there are also some problems. The mouse embryos that Aguilera Castrejon studies die on day 11 of the fertilization process. This is because the mouse embryo becomes too large to get the oxygen and nutrients it needs to grow further. “They basically die,” he says.
This problem with mouse embryos may be even worse in humans. Another challenge Aguilera Castrejon and his colleagues faced was protecting the embryos from infection and contamination. Performing similar experiments would make the problem even worse, since human embryos take longer to develop. Mouse pregnancy lasts 20 days. Human, 9 months. “The longer an embryo is left in culture, the more problems are likely to occur,” he says.
The 29-year-old researcher, who has been working on the project for five years, believes an artificial womb for humans is still some time away. “For mice, that’s probably going to be a reality within 10 years,” he says. In humans? “I don’t think I’ll live to see another human being,” he says.
Aguilera Castrejon believes it will be “at least 50 years” before science can produce a full-term human fetus, and it is not just the technical and biological challenges that are holding back development. I don’t think so. In Israel, even if Aguilera Castrejon and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute had the technical knowledge to grow human embryos through their first month of formation, they could not. “Maybe one day society will advance enough that we can be born outside the womb,” he says. “I think it’s technically possible, but the biggest limitation is the ethical aspect.”
Regulations are being lifted
In May 2021, the International Stem Cell Research Association, the public voice of the stem cell research community, deleted the rule For this reason, culturing human embryos for more than 14 days was previously prohibited. Some concerns remain about mixing human stem cells and non-human embryos in chimeric models. US-China project in 2021 Although it combined humans and macaque monkeys, there is growing recognition that such experiments are a necessary step to increase future fertility.
Aguilera Castrejon is pessimistic that a baby growing outside a mother’s womb will be born in her lifetime, but even in her five years in the field, she has noticed a change in attitude. For Cohen, the conversation needs to extend beyond disciplines and into the wider world. When she brings up the topic with her science friends, too often they don’t know about the risks of a potential population crisis. “What we want is [the rate of population replacement] “It’s supposed to be 2.1, but in the US it’s 1.6 and in Japan it’s 1.3,” she says. “This means that we are rapidly turning into an upside-down pyramid society. If things continue as they are, we will be in serious trouble by then. A future like The Handmaid’s Tale… We might see it. I used to read that book and think that would never happen, but now the science suggests it could happen.”
As for skepticism about whether that will be possible in Aguilera Castrejon’s lifetime, Cohen says we need to say less and do more. “I’m worried that we’re going to see a trend towards something like that in 2045. There are two options,” she says. “One is either we fall into this horrible dystopian future, or we start doing science and building things that will help us beat it.”
