Philip Ball: observation

Transcript context

…How far away are we from having artificial wombs that work? Well, this has certainly been a question for almost 100 years now. This was something that some scientists were debating in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, it was that debate that led to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which essentially talks about this in vitro gestation of whole populations. So that question has been around, and that research has been around for at least a hundred years now. We’re getting closer. It’s an incredibly slow process, and we’re coming at it from both directions now. There are technologies now that are being used to keep alive babies who are born very, very prematurely that would previously have died. Then, from the other direction, it’s becoming possible to grow embryos for longer and longer periods outside the womb. This isn’t done with human embryos because in just about all countries, that’s forbidden for longer than 14 days. But with animal embryos, it’s clear that they can be grown for much longer than that, almost to the point of full gestation, actually — certainly up until about halfway through, where you’ve really got something like a fetus. We have the technologies that are getting there from these two directions. I think the broader question is, why would we need a technology like that to do the whole job? Certainly, for humans, it’s not clear that there’s a call for it. It’s not clear that there’s any real social driver for that sort of technology. There is a big fertility crisis, right?…

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