20 ms·

First live birth using Fertilo procedure that matures eggs outside the body

146 points by apsec112 2y ago

spiritplumber 2y ago
[flagged]
gnfargbl 2y ago
There aren't many future societal changes that I'd bet on, but the acceptance of Brave-New-World-style artificial uterine environments is one of them. Even for a healthy woman at an optimal age, the process of pregnancy is incredibly physically strenuous, yet our culture continues to encourage motherhood at a later age and fails to effectively support those who do make the choice to have children. A technological solution would be an easy out here, and if it were available then people would very likely take it, for better or worse.
- MrDresden 2y ago
  > ..yet our culture continues to encourage motherhood at a later age and fails to effectively support those who do make the choice to have children. Just so it is said, not all cultures on the planet are as equally bad at supporting parents.
- hooli_gan 2y ago
  I don't believe healthy, social children can be born in this way within our lifetime. Babies start learning their mother tongue in the stomach while being out and about with their mother. There may also be hundreds of other things happening in the stomach that we don't know about, which are needed for healthy children
  - seydor 2y ago
    hopefully, the babies are not in the stomach :) There are already prototypes of artificial wombs imitating natural womb environment (which might potentially be in the mother's home) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai8X3Tc-jN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai8X3Tc-jN8
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    Putting a speaker in the incubation room is probably the easiest tweak in all this.
    - jollyllama 2y ago
      The voice actors from that loop will be quite effective in subsequent advertisements!
      - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
        Baby's first words will be "This is Audible".
        ceejayoz 2y ago
        I'm fairly certain some baby's first words have already been "don't forget to like and subscribe!"
  - alistairSH 2y ago
    Source? I’ve never heard of babies learning English or French or whatever in utero. Or do you mean they get used to their mother’s voice?
    - nkrisc 2y ago
      As I recall there’s some evidence they begin learning to recognize the phonemes commonly used in the mother’s language.
    - krisoft 2y ago
      > Source? https://pressbooks.pub/psycholinguisticsfall2017section2/chapter/language-acquisition-in-utero-and-beyond/ https://pressbooks.pub/psycholinguisticsfall2017section2/cha... > I’ve never heard of babies learning English or French or whatever in utero. Don’t expect a baby jumping out and saying “a lovely day to all. What are your further plans for the rest of the evening Mother?” It is more like that structures in the baby’s brain get subtly influenced to better pay attention to certain sounds while paying less attention to others. This is the theory at least. There is some experimental evidence mentioned in the link, but i haven’t reviewed all of it.
      - throwuxiytayq 2y ago
        Yes, but is it necessary? Does it make any difference? This isn’t an interactive learning process anyway, just put an audiobook player next to your BabyVat9000 for an equivalent result.
        krisoft 2y ago
        I think we just don't know.
        pelagicAustral 2y ago
        well, I guess time will tell.
      - alistairSH 2y ago
        Thanks! That's more "learning" that I had realized. Neat stuff.
- JofArnold 2y ago
  I suspect you're right. But I've just last night finished Brave New World and what strikes me is production of children in that book almost entirely for the purpose of labour. So, I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans live for a very long time. I don't have children nor intend to - so likely this is a very cold take that doesn't apply to most - but the cynic in me says we've so far focussed on reproduction as individuals and at a country level to maintain productivity and extend the health and wealth of their elders. Without that pressure, would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?
  - qgin 2y ago
    It's already happened to a degree. People used to need to birth their own personal/family workforce (to work their land, for example). That was the main purpose of children. The idea that children are for some kind of top-of-the-pyramid self-actualization experience is really, really recent.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the future Leaving behind and continuing your legacy and heritage. Personally I have no interest in pushing my blood, interests, and achievements and their endurement upon my hypothetical children, among many other reasons I have no interest in having children, but if someone wants to be that person then more power to them since it's none of my business.
  - ZiiS 2y ago
    Once society has accepted robot labour without rights and children without parents, the question quickly becomes is flesh or steel cheaper.
  - trhway 2y ago
    >what the driver for reproduction will be the people without such driver are naturally weeded out, so due to such weeding out the majority of the population always naturally consist of the people who have such a driver, it may be some crazy one in any given particular case, yet it is there. >in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans live for a very long time. and with artificial uterine it would mean that some people, the wealthy ones, would be able to have a hundred, or a thousand of children. Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here. >would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before? the people who wouldn't be able to afford it as having children would be less beneficial for society as you correctly noted and it will be more like a personal luxury/indulgence and thus would be treated accordingly - taxed, no child support help from government, etc
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 2y ago
  Such practices is why the Brave New World is a dystopia
  - emidln 2y ago
    Not the universal usage of a euphoria-inducing, pacifying drug covering large-scale psychological manipulation and inudstrialist domination of society? Brave New World is a dystopia because it shows a fully satiated and socially occupied doesn't care that it is being manipulated and repressed. You don't care about your caste,or the atrocities committed to others, or learning to better yourself because you take another hit of Soma and join an orgy. Did we read the same book?
    - aaomidi 2y ago
      > You don't care about your caste,or the atrocities committed to others Totally not our society! But yeah this invention is a good thing
    - kanzure 2y ago
      Generally speaking, when it comes to _Brave New World_, the answer is no - people did not read the same book: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/crispr.2019.0046 https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/crispr.2019.0046
      - trey-jones 2y ago
        Well it's definitely possible to have different takeaways from the same book. I can't remember what I took away as a high school student, but when I read it again in my late 30s (I think) it blew my mind a little bit because I had adopted a sort of libertarian view that anything that doesn't directly impede the happiness of someone else should be legal. Coming down to the idea that personal happiness is ultimately what I want (not just for myself; for everybody). Brave New World (which is almost 100 years old at this point) says, "OK, here is a world where everyone can be happy all the time. What do you think?" And as a reader, of course I'm on the side of John Savage. The Soma holiday and ignorance (bliss) is not what I'm after. And of course, without contrast against strife and unhappiness, how can there be happiness at all?
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  I will be amazed if a technology solution in biology can compete with 100 million years of evolution. Even children born via C-section are put at a measurable disadvantage due to micro biome stuff.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    You may be amazed, but that doesn't make it implausible. We already did beat evolution first with wheels, later with steam, then with jet engines, nuclear reactors, heart transplants, vaccines, exogenous steroids, etc. Evolution hit a constraint with us, our increased brain size making childbirth unusually difficult for humans compared to other species; all of us are born premature by the standard of our nearest wild relatives, and have to be premature just so the mother doesn't die all the time, merely unusually often.
  - MandieD 2y ago
    But that's possibly outweighed by the advantages implied by their mothers having the resources (personal or societal) to get their babies out safely for both themselves and said babies at later ages (mother and/or father have more advanced careers and financial stability) and despite their physical condition. My kid (born when I, his mother, was 40) is a second generation C-section baby who, had my own mother (who had me at 35) been born in the 60s instead of the 40s, likely would have been a 3rd generation C-section baby. My mother was 10.5 lbs at birth and left my grandmother unable to have another child in her early 20s. Perhaps I can't eat crustaceans and have a stuffed nose for several weeks in the spring because I didn't get my mother's microbiome. I'll take that trade; my mother was then able and willing to go on to have my little brother. I'll also wager that as a Western middle-class middle-aged professional who had my kid about a decade after I "should have" (can't plan everything!), my child's material circumstances and opportunities would be the envy 90-95% of his agemates worldwide. I'm definitely providing a better education than a semi-literate 17-year-old Afghani woman who could only have hers "the old fashioned way".
    - triyambakam 2y ago
      Sure, just trivialize the constraints of systemic barriers, political instability, and gender-based oppression that limit educational and reproductive choices for many Afghan women.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > There aren't many future societal changes that I'd bet on, but the acceptance of Brave-New-World-style artificial uterine environments is one of them. It will be a huuuge time until extrauterine reproduction is viable even for mammals as small as mice. We barely understand pregnancy and its effects in humans as it is - IMHO it's barely ethical to research around pregnancy on mice, even less on "higher" levels of intelligence such as great apes. It's only a relatively recent discovery for example that fetal cells transfer via the placenta into the mother's organism [1], but it's only extremely recent that further discoveries into the mother-fetus interactions were studied [2]. Hell we're not yet sure if cloning humans actually works - it took a great deal of effort for sheep, and to this date we haven't even managed to work out the ethics for humans in gene-editing, just look at the controversy around He Jiankui [3]. Not saying it isn't worth the effort to hold a debate around human germ line research... but I think the time is premature, we should have it once we have proven it possible and safe in primates. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2633676/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2633676/ [2] https://scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/moms-ability-to-remember-prior-pregnancies-suggests-new-strategies-for-preventing-complications/ https://scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/moms-ability-to-... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_genome_editing_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_genome_editing_inci...
- xattt 2y ago
  After ex-utero pregnancy is achieved, the next step would be some form of recombinant human analogue breast milk synthesis. Beyond that, breast milk tailored to mom-babe pairs. Yes, formula exists and has created billions of healthy children. However, breastfeeding is a signifiant commitment of blood, sweat and tears for many moms that want to do best by their babes.
  - Teever 2y ago
    At that point we can produce dairy milk for human consumption too. I've been thinkingg about this for a while, that the way we're approaching growing artificial meat from stem cells is the wrong way to use this kind of technology. Is anyone using this technology to grow chicken eggs and dairy milk in the lab for human consumption? It will remain tricky to get subtle things like colour, taste, and the texture profile right for lab grown meat but will that hold the same for the output of a rtificially grown tissue like milk or eggs?
    - derektank 2y ago
      The company Perfect Day has a bio-reactor service that produces whey protein without the need for dairy cows. They've partnered with a couple of different companies to bring different vegan milk/ice cream products to market. It doesn't use stem cells though, I believe they bio-engineered fungal microbiota to create the process. https://perfectday.com/made-with-perfect-day/ https://perfectday.com/made-with-perfect-day/
- pnutjam 2y ago
  Imagine a world where anybody can gestate a baby in a tank. It would be a boon to older couples, same sex couples, and many others. What happens to the inevitable baby who's parent's die before they can be decanted? They will stack up over time since who wants someone else's baby when you can get your own so easily. This will also be abused by some jacka## like Musk who wants to build a labor force for something distasteful. Imagine a Mars colonization effort with exclusively young people who were raised in a sealed environment and don't know anything that was not fed to them.
  - teeray 2y ago
    > What happens to the inevitable baby who's parent's die before they can be decanted? This is already a problem for children of single mothers who die during childbirth. I’m not saying we have a solution to that problem (we are far from one), but it’s at least not a new problem.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
    >Imagine a world where anybody can gestate a baby in a tank. It would be a boon to older couples, same sex couples, and many others. It would be a world where the Ghadafis and the Putins could breed armies of 100,000, a million, all raised in barracks and surveilled from birth. The critics would have no say, none of these children are theirs. The political enemies would become allies, just so they might have influence in where those armies are pointed. Entire crops of insect-people, superficially human, but psychologically tortured into compliance, outnumbering anyone who might want to put a stop to it. And don't get me wrong, I think the United States would do it too, even if it might need to hide it for awhile. >Imagine a Mars colonization effort with Imagine a Californian colonization effort with hundreds of thousands of psychopath soldiers exactly 15 yrs old, hopped up on roids, raised by a few hundred drill sargeants since they could hold their heads up, slowly marching through and getting rid of anyone who wasn't flagged as an elite. The reason you don't have stormtroopers doing this now is because there are only a few hundred of them who would be willing to do that at any given point at time. But when you can literally multiple humans with machines, then their numbers could grow quickly and to absurd degree.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > the process of pregnancy is incredibly physically strenuous Friend just gave birth. I honestly don’t understand how anyone who has been proximate to childbirth can believe in intelligent design. Everything about human birthing is a hack. The placenta. The rotation and cord and length of the process. The ridiculous frequency of stupid fuck-ups which often result in the death of a baby or the mother or both. Pregnancy strikes me as one of those processes proximate technology could absolutely do better than nature in 9/10 cases.
  - nashashmi 2y ago
    On the other side, I honestly dont understand how anyone who believes in the accidental theory of evolution would persist in their opinion after witnessing a live birth. The emotions that flood the mind are not “evolutionary”. seeing the struggle a mother puts in to give birth is incredible. And part of the reason why civilizations have had goddesses in their mythology. The number of things that can go wrong are significant. And yet despite all that, a birth happens. That is a miracle in itself. It goes against probability.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Woshiwuja 2y ago
      [dead]
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - Terr_ 2y ago
    In the Vorkosigan Saga, the "uterine replicator" appears as a minor but persistent future-technology, where the main selling point is Not Dying To Your Stupid Biology, followed by convenience. > "[The] debate that will fundamentally alter Barrayar's future is being carried on right now among their wives and daughters. To use it, or not to use it? Too late to keep it out, it's already here. The middle classes are picking it up in droves. Every mother who loves her daughter is pressing for it, to spare her the physical dangers of biological childbearing. They're fighting not the old men, who haven't got a clue, but an old guard of their sisters who say to their daughters, in effect, We had to suffer, so must you! Look around tonight, Mark. You're witnessing the last generation of men and women on Barrayar who will dance this dance in the old way." -- Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga
- remarkEon 2y ago
  That way madness lies. Growing children in a vat, to be bought and sold. That's what you're talking about. As a kid or young adult I never fully understood the Butlerian Jihad plot point of the DUNE universe, but as an adult and a father I certainly do now.
  - morkalork 2y ago
    The surrogacy industry exists with the added bonus of exploiting women to be those vats.
    - polski-g 2y ago
      After spending >$200k on surrogacy, I say: please bring on the baby vats.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Growing children in a vat, and the personhood of those children, are two separate things. It's been entirely possible in recent history for naturally born children to be born to be bought and sold; whereas things like IVF have no effect on the personhood of the children so concieved.
    - remarkEon 2y ago
      Loosening the biological connection to parents and replacing it with a mechanical process means there isn't a first line defense against the buying and selling. In fact, the buying and selling is the first step since the activity is reduced to a monetary transaction. It's just slavery, with a veneer of charity around it for people who struggle to conceive naturally. OP argued that supporting this concept would become mainstream, and my point is that it won't, because you'd have to put people like me in prison for that to happen.
- patrickwalton 2y ago
  I would guess that the negative consequences of widespread adoption of full gestation out of the womb would be much worse than the consequences of epidurals and C-sections. There's evidence that epidurals are actually worse for maternal mortality, since the epidural disrupts the natural birthing process, leading moms to need C-sections, which increase mortality. The moms I know have had better, less traumatic and painful, birthing experiences by working with coaches that help them understand and listen to their body through the process. Being around those moms, especially my wife, it's fascinating to learn about how pregnancy is the foundation of mother-child bonding. So it's easy to see how artificial wombs would be much worse. I guess that's the point of Brave New World, how destructive the loss of that and other bonds is.
  - MrDresden 2y ago
    > There's evidence that epidurals are actually worse for maternal mortality, since the epidural disrupts the natural birthing process.. That is a bold claim, so please back it up with references to published peer reviewed research.
  - polski-g 2y ago
    There is no longitudinal effect on "bonding". You are speaking like a religious zealot.
- thatfrenchguy 2y ago
  I mean, raising the child after is actually the hard part, and women get shafted there around 99% for societal reasons.
dinkblam 2y ago
> Gameto is rapidly expanding the availability of Fertilo […] in key markets such as Australia, Japan, Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, and Peru. so, are those the key markets for expensive fertility treatments?
- bdcravens 2y ago
  Or markets with lower burdens of entry (ie, regulations or religion-political opposition)
pgryko 2y ago
'With nearly half of the women in the US never reaching their maternity goals, there is an urgent need for innovation' - did they just describe having children like a KPI?
- sebmellen 2y ago
  It is! If ~50% of the population feels unfulfilled because they haven’t been able to have the children they wanted, we should fix that. But clearly it would be better to look at the root cause than to rely on this specious invention.
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Subjective well-being is a fascinating metric to chase because it always changes.
    - Pigalowda 2y ago
      I agree. I think happiness and “well-being” are not actual realities. There is only the pursuit of happiness. And that pursuit can be manipulated for financial gain. I think the very best you can achieve is being a child or failing that contentedness and absence of suffering. Otherwise loss and grief will strip away any possibility of happiness. The only fleeting happiness/joy I often see in myself or other adults is in nostalgia - and that’s pure manipulation.
      - squigz 2y ago
        Might this just be you and the people you know, rather than some law of reality?
        Pigalowda 2y ago
        It certainly could be. There’s the old Greek myth of Pandora’s box - the last entity to emerge is ‘hope’. Is that the worst monster or greatest gift to humanity? I feel like I fall in the former camp. But that’s OK - I still move forward in life and engage in the pursuit of happiness.
waltercool 2y ago
[dead]
nashashmi 2y ago
The headline inspires SCiFi stories of creating humans outside of the woman. But that is not at all what this story is about: eggs were brought to maturity level outside of the woman. Currently eggs would be matured inside the mother with artificial hormones. Now they can be removed before maturing and inflated after in a dish. Then fertilized. Then be injected back into the mother. Hormones are still used in the next step.
- chiyc 2y ago
  The article claims an 80% reduction in injections, but they must only be counting the injections prior to egg retrieval. After the 2 weeks of injections before the egg retrieval, there's another 8-10 weeks of intramuscular injections after the embryo transfer. Still, this is a great development to lessen the entire ordeal for women undergoing IVF.
s1mon 2y ago
I first read that very very differently with a word which is almost an anagram of Fertilo, which begins with 'fe' and ends with 'o'. I was very confused how what has been euphemistically described as "swallowing kids" would produce viable eggs.
- Smithalicious 2y ago
  It's okay, you can say "fellatio", we're adults here
kazinator 2y ago
> In the U.S., the company is preparing for Phase 3 trials. That's that country where, if you do anything such that these eggs don't make it, you're an abortionist.
- enceladus06 2y ago
  Hah just locate in Alabama, where your frozen embryos are "pre-born children" and then use them as tax deductions.
nimish 2y ago
Oh boy we invented Axlotl tanks!
- stevenwoo 2y ago
  Not if you have read the fifth book. Spoilers for approximate 50 year old book but IIRC Axlotl tanks just women forced into coma to gestate/bear children remarkably like the Handmaids Tale, published at about the same time.

146 points by apsec112 2y ago

[flagged]

There aren't many future societal changes that I'd bet on, but the acceptance of Brave-New-World-style artificial uterine environments is one of them. Even for a healthy woman at an optimal age, the process of pregnancy is incredibly physically strenuous, yet our culture continues to encourage motherhood at a later age and fails to effectively support those who do make the choice to have children. A technological solution would be an easy out here, and if it were available then people would very likely take it, for better or worse.

MrDresden 2y ago
> ..yet our culture continues to encourage motherhood at a later age and fails to effectively support those who do make the choice to have children. Just so it is said, not all cultures on the planet are as equally bad at supporting parents.
hooli_gan 2y ago
I don't believe healthy, social children can be born in this way within our lifetime. Babies start learning their mother tongue in the stomach while being out and about with their mother. There may also be hundreds of other things happening in the stomach that we don't know about, which are needed for healthy children
- seydor 2y ago
  hopefully, the babies are not in the stomach :) There are already prototypes of artificial wombs imitating natural womb environment (which might potentially be in the mother's home) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai8X3Tc-jN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai8X3Tc-jN8
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  Putting a speaker in the incubation room is probably the easiest tweak in all this.
  - jollyllama 2y ago
    The voice actors from that loop will be quite effective in subsequent advertisements!
    - SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
      Baby's first words will be "This is Audible".
      - ceejayoz 2y ago
        I'm fairly certain some baby's first words have already been "don't forget to like and subscribe!"
- alistairSH 2y ago
  Source? I’ve never heard of babies learning English or French or whatever in utero. Or do you mean they get used to their mother’s voice?
  - nkrisc 2y ago
    As I recall there’s some evidence they begin learning to recognize the phonemes commonly used in the mother’s language.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    > Source? https://pressbooks.pub/psycholinguisticsfall2017section2/chapter/language-acquisition-in-utero-and-beyond/ https://pressbooks.pub/psycholinguisticsfall2017section2/cha... > I’ve never heard of babies learning English or French or whatever in utero. Don’t expect a baby jumping out and saying “a lovely day to all. What are your further plans for the rest of the evening Mother?” It is more like that structures in the baby’s brain get subtly influenced to better pay attention to certain sounds while paying less attention to others. This is the theory at least. There is some experimental evidence mentioned in the link, but i haven’t reviewed all of it.
    - throwuxiytayq 2y ago
      Yes, but is it necessary? Does it make any difference? This isn’t an interactive learning process anyway, just put an audiobook player next to your BabyVat9000 for an equivalent result.
      - krisoft 2y ago
        I think we just don't know.
      - pelagicAustral 2y ago
        well, I guess time will tell.
    - alistairSH 2y ago
      Thanks! That's more "learning" that I had realized. Neat stuff.
JofArnold 2y ago
I suspect you're right. But I've just last night finished Brave New World and what strikes me is production of children in that book almost entirely for the purpose of labour. So, I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans live for a very long time. I don't have children nor intend to - so likely this is a very cold take that doesn't apply to most - but the cynic in me says we've so far focussed on reproduction as individuals and at a country level to maintain productivity and extend the health and wealth of their elders. Without that pressure, would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before?
- qgin 2y ago
  It's already happened to a degree. People used to need to birth their own personal/family workforce (to work their land, for example). That was the main purpose of children. The idea that children are for some kind of top-of-the-pyramid self-actualization experience is really, really recent.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the future Leaving behind and continuing your legacy and heritage. Personally I have no interest in pushing my blood, interests, and achievements and their endurement upon my hypothetical children, among many other reasons I have no interest in having children, but if someone wants to be that person then more power to them since it's none of my business.
- ZiiS 2y ago
  Once society has accepted robot labour without rights and children without parents, the question quickly becomes is flesh or steel cheaper.
- trhway 2y ago
  >what the driver for reproduction will be the people without such driver are naturally weeded out, so due to such weeding out the majority of the population always naturally consist of the people who have such a driver, it may be some crazy one in any given particular case, yet it is there. >in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans live for a very long time. and with artificial uterine it would mean that some people, the wealthy ones, would be able to have a hundred, or a thousand of children. Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the major limiting factor here. >would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've never seen before? the people who wouldn't be able to afford it as having children would be less beneficial for society as you correctly noted and it will be more like a personal luxury/indulgence and thus would be treated accordingly - taxed, no child support help from government, etc
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 2y ago
Such practices is why the Brave New World is a dystopia
- emidln 2y ago
  Not the universal usage of a euphoria-inducing, pacifying drug covering large-scale psychological manipulation and inudstrialist domination of society? Brave New World is a dystopia because it shows a fully satiated and socially occupied doesn't care that it is being manipulated and repressed. You don't care about your caste,or the atrocities committed to others, or learning to better yourself because you take another hit of Soma and join an orgy. Did we read the same book?
  - aaomidi 2y ago
    > You don't care about your caste,or the atrocities committed to others Totally not our society! But yeah this invention is a good thing
  - kanzure 2y ago
    Generally speaking, when it comes to _Brave New World_, the answer is no - people did not read the same book: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/crispr.2019.0046 https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/crispr.2019.0046
    - trey-jones 2y ago
      Well it's definitely possible to have different takeaways from the same book. I can't remember what I took away as a high school student, but when I read it again in my late 30s (I think) it blew my mind a little bit because I had adopted a sort of libertarian view that anything that doesn't directly impede the happiness of someone else should be legal. Coming down to the idea that personal happiness is ultimately what I want (not just for myself; for everybody). Brave New World (which is almost 100 years old at this point) says, "OK, here is a world where everyone can be happy all the time. What do you think?" And as a reader, of course I'm on the side of John Savage. The Soma holiday and ignorance (bliss) is not what I'm after. And of course, without contrast against strife and unhappiness, how can there be happiness at all?
mensetmanusman 2y ago
I will be amazed if a technology solution in biology can compete with 100 million years of evolution. Even children born via C-section are put at a measurable disadvantage due to micro biome stuff.
- ben_w 2y ago
  You may be amazed, but that doesn't make it implausible. We already did beat evolution first with wheels, later with steam, then with jet engines, nuclear reactors, heart transplants, vaccines, exogenous steroids, etc. Evolution hit a constraint with us, our increased brain size making childbirth unusually difficult for humans compared to other species; all of us are born premature by the standard of our nearest wild relatives, and have to be premature just so the mother doesn't die all the time, merely unusually often.
- MandieD 2y ago
  But that's possibly outweighed by the advantages implied by their mothers having the resources (personal or societal) to get their babies out safely for both themselves and said babies at later ages (mother and/or father have more advanced careers and financial stability) and despite their physical condition. My kid (born when I, his mother, was 40) is a second generation C-section baby who, had my own mother (who had me at 35) been born in the 60s instead of the 40s, likely would have been a 3rd generation C-section baby. My mother was 10.5 lbs at birth and left my grandmother unable to have another child in her early 20s. Perhaps I can't eat crustaceans and have a stuffed nose for several weeks in the spring because I didn't get my mother's microbiome. I'll take that trade; my mother was then able and willing to go on to have my little brother. I'll also wager that as a Western middle-class middle-aged professional who had my kid about a decade after I "should have" (can't plan everything!), my child's material circumstances and opportunities would be the envy 90-95% of his agemates worldwide. I'm definitely providing a better education than a semi-literate 17-year-old Afghani woman who could only have hers "the old fashioned way".
  - triyambakam 2y ago
    Sure, just trivialize the constraints of systemic barriers, political instability, and gender-based oppression that limit educational and reproductive choices for many Afghan women.
mschuster91 2y ago
> There aren't many future societal changes that I'd bet on, but the acceptance of Brave-New-World-style artificial uterine environments is one of them. It will be a huuuge time until extrauterine reproduction is viable even for mammals as small as mice. We barely understand pregnancy and its effects in humans as it is - IMHO it's barely ethical to research around pregnancy on mice, even less on "higher" levels of intelligence such as great apes. It's only a relatively recent discovery for example that fetal cells transfer via the placenta into the mother's organism [1], but it's only extremely recent that further discoveries into the mother-fetus interactions were studied [2]. Hell we're not yet sure if cloning humans actually works - it took a great deal of effort for sheep, and to this date we haven't even managed to work out the ethics for humans in gene-editing, just look at the controversy around He Jiankui [3]. Not saying it isn't worth the effort to hold a debate around human germ line research... but I think the time is premature, we should have it once we have proven it possible and safe in primates. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2633676/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2633676/ [2] https://scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/moms-ability-to-remember-prior-pregnancies-suggests-new-strategies-for-preventing-complications/ https://scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/moms-ability-to-... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_genome_editing_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_genome_editing_inci...
xattt 2y ago
After ex-utero pregnancy is achieved, the next step would be some form of recombinant human analogue breast milk synthesis. Beyond that, breast milk tailored to mom-babe pairs. Yes, formula exists and has created billions of healthy children. However, breastfeeding is a signifiant commitment of blood, sweat and tears for many moms that want to do best by their babes.
- Teever 2y ago
  At that point we can produce dairy milk for human consumption too. I've been thinkingg about this for a while, that the way we're approaching growing artificial meat from stem cells is the wrong way to use this kind of technology. Is anyone using this technology to grow chicken eggs and dairy milk in the lab for human consumption? It will remain tricky to get subtle things like colour, taste, and the texture profile right for lab grown meat but will that hold the same for the output of a rtificially grown tissue like milk or eggs?
  - derektank 2y ago
    The company Perfect Day has a bio-reactor service that produces whey protein without the need for dairy cows. They've partnered with a couple of different companies to bring different vegan milk/ice cream products to market. It doesn't use stem cells though, I believe they bio-engineered fungal microbiota to create the process. https://perfectday.com/made-with-perfect-day/ https://perfectday.com/made-with-perfect-day/
pnutjam 2y ago
Imagine a world where anybody can gestate a baby in a tank. It would be a boon to older couples, same sex couples, and many others. What happens to the inevitable baby who's parent's die before they can be decanted? They will stack up over time since who wants someone else's baby when you can get your own so easily. This will also be abused by some jacka## like Musk who wants to build a labor force for something distasteful. Imagine a Mars colonization effort with exclusively young people who were raised in a sealed environment and don't know anything that was not fed to them.
- teeray 2y ago
  > What happens to the inevitable baby who's parent's die before they can be decanted? This is already a problem for children of single mothers who die during childbirth. I’m not saying we have a solution to that problem (we are far from one), but it’s at least not a new problem.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
  >Imagine a world where anybody can gestate a baby in a tank. It would be a boon to older couples, same sex couples, and many others. It would be a world where the Ghadafis and the Putins could breed armies of 100,000, a million, all raised in barracks and surveilled from birth. The critics would have no say, none of these children are theirs. The political enemies would become allies, just so they might have influence in where those armies are pointed. Entire crops of insect-people, superficially human, but psychologically tortured into compliance, outnumbering anyone who might want to put a stop to it. And don't get me wrong, I think the United States would do it too, even if it might need to hide it for awhile. >Imagine a Mars colonization effort with Imagine a Californian colonization effort with hundreds of thousands of psychopath soldiers exactly 15 yrs old, hopped up on roids, raised by a few hundred drill sargeants since they could hold their heads up, slowly marching through and getting rid of anyone who wasn't flagged as an elite. The reason you don't have stormtroopers doing this now is because there are only a few hundred of them who would be willing to do that at any given point at time. But when you can literally multiple humans with machines, then their numbers could grow quickly and to absurd degree.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> the process of pregnancy is incredibly physically strenuous Friend just gave birth. I honestly don’t understand how anyone who has been proximate to childbirth can believe in intelligent design. Everything about human birthing is a hack. The placenta. The rotation and cord and length of the process. The ridiculous frequency of stupid fuck-ups which often result in the death of a baby or the mother or both. Pregnancy strikes me as one of those processes proximate technology could absolutely do better than nature in 9/10 cases.
- nashashmi 2y ago
  On the other side, I honestly dont understand how anyone who believes in the accidental theory of evolution would persist in their opinion after witnessing a live birth. The emotions that flood the mind are not “evolutionary”. seeing the struggle a mother puts in to give birth is incredible. And part of the reason why civilizations have had goddesses in their mythology. The number of things that can go wrong are significant. And yet despite all that, a birth happens. That is a miracle in itself. It goes against probability.
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- Terr_ 2y ago
  In the Vorkosigan Saga, the "uterine replicator" appears as a minor but persistent future-technology, where the main selling point is Not Dying To Your Stupid Biology, followed by convenience. > "[The] debate that will fundamentally alter Barrayar's future is being carried on right now among their wives and daughters. To use it, or not to use it? Too late to keep it out, it's already here. The middle classes are picking it up in droves. Every mother who loves her daughter is pressing for it, to spare her the physical dangers of biological childbearing. They're fighting not the old men, who haven't got a clue, but an old guard of their sisters who say to their daughters, in effect, We had to suffer, so must you! Look around tonight, Mark. You're witnessing the last generation of men and women on Barrayar who will dance this dance in the old way." -- Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga
remarkEon 2y ago
That way madness lies. Growing children in a vat, to be bought and sold. That's what you're talking about. As a kid or young adult I never fully understood the Butlerian Jihad plot point of the DUNE universe, but as an adult and a father I certainly do now.
- morkalork 2y ago
  The surrogacy industry exists with the added bonus of exploiting women to be those vats.
  - polski-g 2y ago
    After spending >$200k on surrogacy, I say: please bring on the baby vats.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Growing children in a vat, and the personhood of those children, are two separate things. It's been entirely possible in recent history for naturally born children to be born to be bought and sold; whereas things like IVF have no effect on the personhood of the children so concieved.
  - remarkEon 2y ago
    Loosening the biological connection to parents and replacing it with a mechanical process means there isn't a first line defense against the buying and selling. In fact, the buying and selling is the first step since the activity is reduced to a monetary transaction. It's just slavery, with a veneer of charity around it for people who struggle to conceive naturally. OP argued that supporting this concept would become mainstream, and my point is that it won't, because you'd have to put people like me in prison for that to happen.
patrickwalton 2y ago
I would guess that the negative consequences of widespread adoption of full gestation out of the womb would be much worse than the consequences of epidurals and C-sections. There's evidence that epidurals are actually worse for maternal mortality, since the epidural disrupts the natural birthing process, leading moms to need C-sections, which increase mortality. The moms I know have had better, less traumatic and painful, birthing experiences by working with coaches that help them understand and listen to their body through the process. Being around those moms, especially my wife, it's fascinating to learn about how pregnancy is the foundation of mother-child bonding. So it's easy to see how artificial wombs would be much worse. I guess that's the point of Brave New World, how destructive the loss of that and other bonds is.
- MrDresden 2y ago
  > There's evidence that epidurals are actually worse for maternal mortality, since the epidural disrupts the natural birthing process.. That is a bold claim, so please back it up with references to published peer reviewed research.
- polski-g 2y ago
  There is no longitudinal effect on "bonding". You are speaking like a religious zealot.
thatfrenchguy 2y ago
I mean, raising the child after is actually the hard part, and women get shafted there around 99% for societal reasons.

dinkblam 2y ago

> Gameto is rapidly expanding the availability of Fertilo […] in key markets such as Australia, Japan, Argentina, Paraguay, Mexico, and Peru. so, are those the key markets for expensive fertility treatments?

bdcravens 2y ago
Or markets with lower burdens of entry (ie, regulations or religion-political opposition)

pgryko 2y ago

'With nearly half of the women in the US never reaching their maternity goals, there is an urgent need for innovation' - did they just describe having children like a KPI?

sebmellen 2y ago
It is! If ~50% of the population feels unfulfilled because they haven’t been able to have the children they wanted, we should fix that. But clearly it would be better to look at the root cause than to rely on this specious invention.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Subjective well-being is a fascinating metric to chase because it always changes.
  - Pigalowda 2y ago
    I agree. I think happiness and “well-being” are not actual realities. There is only the pursuit of happiness. And that pursuit can be manipulated for financial gain. I think the very best you can achieve is being a child or failing that contentedness and absence of suffering. Otherwise loss and grief will strip away any possibility of happiness. The only fleeting happiness/joy I often see in myself or other adults is in nostalgia - and that’s pure manipulation.
    - squigz 2y ago
      Might this just be you and the people you know, rather than some law of reality?
      - Pigalowda 2y ago
        It certainly could be. There’s the old Greek myth of Pandora’s box - the last entity to emerge is ‘hope’. Is that the worst monster or greatest gift to humanity? I feel like I fall in the former camp. But that’s OK - I still move forward in life and engage in the pursuit of happiness.

waltercool 2y ago

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nashashmi 2y ago

The headline inspires SCiFi stories of creating humans outside of the woman. But that is not at all what this story is about: eggs were brought to maturity level outside of the woman. Currently eggs would be matured inside the mother with artificial hormones. Now they can be removed before maturing and inflated after in a dish. Then fertilized. Then be injected back into the mother. Hormones are still used in the next step.

chiyc 2y ago
The article claims an 80% reduction in injections, but they must only be counting the injections prior to egg retrieval. After the 2 weeks of injections before the egg retrieval, there's another 8-10 weeks of intramuscular injections after the embryo transfer. Still, this is a great development to lessen the entire ordeal for women undergoing IVF.

s1mon 2y ago

I first read that very very differently with a word which is almost an anagram of Fertilo, which begins with 'fe' and ends with 'o'. I was very confused how what has been euphemistically described as "swallowing kids" would produce viable eggs.

Smithalicious 2y ago
It's okay, you can say "fellatio", we're adults here

kazinator 2y ago

> In the U.S., the company is preparing for Phase 3 trials. That's that country where, if you do anything such that these eggs don't make it, you're an abortionist.

enceladus06 2y ago
Hah just locate in Alabama, where your frozen embryos are "pre-born children" and then use them as tax deductions.

nimish 2y ago

Oh boy we invented Axlotl tanks!

stevenwoo 2y ago
Not if you have read the fifth book. Spoilers for approximate 50 year old book but IIRC Axlotl tanks just women forced into coma to gestate/bear children remarkably like the Handmaids Tale, published at about the same time.