> 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 wil

> 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...