An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep

http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15421734/artificial-womb-fetus-biobag-uterus-lamb-sheep-birth-premie-preterm-infant

by techpulse-co • 9 years ago

226 127 9 years ago

gokusaaaan2• 9 years ago

I wonder how long before we have cities that regulate humans population via such machines as shown in Ergo Proxy?

Laforet2• 9 years ago

It's going to take a while, for what they have described is a process to keep extremely preterm foetus alive, rather than an artificial environment to develop an entire organism from a fertilised egg - we actually know lot about IV fertilisation and keeping it alive through the first few development stages, but there are still significant gaps to cover until you have a somewhat developed foetus that has a chance of survival outside the womb.

In parallel example, we have not managed to find an artificial replacement for egg shells which is required for avian embryos to develop. Some techniques do exist, but none of the them were able to ensure survival past the first 2 weeks. Considering that humans have been breeding chicken for centuries, there is still plenty we don't know about our favourite bird, let alone fellow humans.

slv77• 9 years ago

Hatching a chick shell free using plastic wrap was developed in 2014. It was recently replicated by Japanese students which made the news.

Moshe_Silnorin• 9 years ago

What's really frightening is not controlling human population, but vastly expanding it. Countries could grow citizens in factories. I've always thought Malthus would come back roaring, but this could go uncomfortably far.

devrandomguy2• 9 years ago

No need to let them run free. Those humans could work remotely, from a small pod of amniotic fluid, mounted to the side of a huge tower. They could live their lives in MMOs, which would seem absolutely realistic, if that was the only thing they ever experienced. I don't think it is realistic to use them as an energy source though, heat would be a waste product in an environment like that.

erickhill• 9 years ago

Oddly this exact same URL was posted 2 days ago. I wonder why it didn't get caught? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196680

rubyn00bie• 9 years ago

I've had this happen multiple times. Usually it's because it's missing the "/" at the end or some other small change in the URL. Their check is only looking for exact matches.

kristofferR• 9 years ago

I'm glad the dupe check isn't better, as it is undeniable that reaching the front page here is about luck just as much as quality.

This story is just as interesting as when it was first submitted, yet this submission is way more popular.

mirimir• 9 years ago

Well, that post got no comments. So this could just be a resubmission.

stared• 9 years ago

Hacker roulette.

cletus2• 9 years ago

Disclaimer: I really know nothing about biology or genetics.

This is an area I find fascinating. One thing I've pondered is with merely a genome could you construct the organism it's from?

The first problem is creating a fertilized egg. Having that, it's not clear to me (again, as a layman) whether or not you could gestate that to an independent organism.

To put it in computing terms, imagine the genome as "source code" and the host (gestating) organism as, for lack of a better word, a "compiler". Now imagine that a lot of the complexity of life comes from these successive generations, which is to say that an organism isn't simply a function of its genome, it's essentially a function of every ancestor.

If you think about it, some organisms are born with some ingrained characteristics and behaviour. Humans have the moro reflex. Bear cubs manage to find way to their mother's milk when the mother is barely conscious. Some ducks are capable of swimming, eating and surviving from the day they're born.

How much of this is part of the genome and how much is "communicated" from mother to child in the womb?

Obviously only applies to a subset of animals. Birds, for example, are born in eggs and--unless I'm missing something--the only interaction between parent and egg once the egg is laid is incubation so it's easy to imagine that there is no "communication" in this phase.

But maybe this is what makes mammals (particularly primates) seemingly special? How much of what we do is hardwired or "software"?

So there have been two important developments in the last year or so. The first is hatching chicks without a shell [1]. The second is this and this is far more impressive.

If nothing else, this limits potential interactions between mother and unborn child. At least for sheep. I think this is a really important development.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/video-shows-how-to-incubate-an-egg...

refurb• 9 years ago

One thing I've pondered is with merely a genome could you construct the organism it's from?

Craig Venter already did that with a bacterial. He synthesized the entire genome, then inserted it a cell. I assume that cell already had the other machinery (translation enzymes, etc).

cletus2• 9 years ago

Single cells organisms are one thing. I don't think you can automatically extrapolate from bacteria to primates however.

_Adam• 9 years ago

I'm doubtful about this. There's no neural connection between mother and child, and I find it hard to believe there's some alternative communication mode with enough bandwidth to teach behaviours.

The fetus may be listening to the outside environment or hearing his or her mother talk, but if this was a prerequisite to the "specialness" of humans/primates you are referring to, then we would see significant differences in the immediate post-natal behaviour of congenitally deaf children. I haven't searched the literature for this topic, but I personally have never seen that mentioned.

An easier explanation is that these are genetically encoded. The ducks are a good example. Ducks hatched from eggs that are artificially incubated seem to have the same core instincts as those hatched from natural incubation.

That said, there are still important forms of communication between mother and child: chemicals. An extreme example is the disastrous and tragic affect of alcohol on fetal development.

LouisSayers• 9 years ago

I guess next we'll put hospital patients in such bags to protect them from the external environment, provide healing fluids as well? The future is looking pretty cool.

SmellyGeekBoy• 9 years ago

I'm picturing something like the pods in "The Matrix". Actually I can see a huge benefit to e.g. burns victims and other types of massive trauma where some time in an "artificial womb" could be hugely beneficial for regeneration. Cool indeed.

gliese1337• 9 years ago

The original source, with the actual science: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112

It's not quite a total replacement for a natural womb (and the Nature article only uses the word "womb once, in the abstract), as it can't grow a fetus from an embryo; you have to start with a pre-incubated fetus that already has an umbilical ford to plug into and a strong enough heart. But even though we won't be growing test-tube babies 100% in-vitro with this thing, it is a major advance that could significantly push back the earliest time at which a premature baby could remain viable with artificial incubation.

gadders5• 9 years ago

And also hopefully reduce the need for abortion. Women would be able to "donate" the foetus to be raised in one of these bags and then adopted.

(Eventually, I realise this technology is not there yet).

fdsfsafasfdas• 9 years ago

...because adoption is such a riotous success these days?

magic_beans3• 9 years ago

And what exactly is wrong with women choosing to have an abortion? Not every child is adopted. Our planet is grossly overpopulated. Abortions are more humane.

lawless1234• 9 years ago

I;m pro choice and think this tech is great.

All the pro-life people i know that have seen it though think it's a disturbing, godless or unnatural...

dbg31415• 9 years ago

Cringe. Here's how this plays out:

I get a knock on the door... "Hello, it's me your long lost child..."

"Wait, what? I thought we aborted you?"

"Nope! Mom secretly put me in a bag and I was raised by Mormons. Would you like me to tell you about Joseph Smith?"

"Oh cool, yeah... this is exactly the outcome I hoped for when I paid for her to get an abortion 20 years ago... come on in!"

upvotinglurker2• 9 years ago

The science fiction author Lois McMaster Bujold has this technology in her "Vorkosigan universe" books, depicted as sufficiently advanced that it is safer for the fetus than natural pregnancy. She presents such technology, should it exist, as a moral imperative for the health and safety of both the mother and the child in wanted pregnancies, as well as an alternative to abortion.

PMan74• 9 years ago

You know it's the actual science because they use the word "lamb" instead of "baby sheep"

afandian• 9 years ago

I think this graph tells you everything you need to know. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=baby+sheep%2Cl...

mhb• 9 years ago

And its comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14194422

crusso• 9 years ago

The great thing about it is that it's a start. If it even begins to be used regularly to gestate fetuses for 25% of the gestation period, eventually techniques and technology will improve to use it for 30% then 40% and on and on.

Foothold technologies like this generally improve over time.

theprop• 9 years ago

Super!! Bringing the Wooly Mammoth and more extinct animals is next :-D!

thedailymail• 9 years ago

George Church's group at Harvard is proposing using similar technology in their attempt to clone a mammoth by replacing the DNA in an elephant egg with DNA from a mammoth. They want to grow it extracorporeally for its entire development, because doing it in utero in an elephant would present additional ethical issues (i.e., potentially harming elephants in an experiment of a technology that is far from mature).

logicallee• 9 years ago

What a time to be a lamb! :D

k__• 9 years ago

Axolotl tanks? ;)

red0232• 9 years ago

I think this is absolutely sick, I know there are way more horrible experiments scientists do with animals but this gives me the creeps. Its just sick, let nature but nature and stop messing around with it. Seriously if this continues we have AI that breeds Humans as their power or brain source and the matrix becomes reality.

lesingerouge• 9 years ago

I do not think this is a rational response. I get that the "knee-jerk" reaction might be one of total disgust (I know because I also had it reading this), but there should be a bit of rational thought put into what would be the consequences of this. Because AI growing humans and the Matrix becoming reality is a little bit on the "surreal paranoid" side of life, given the current state of scientific knowledge. On that same train of thought, but with a more realistic outlook, we could just think of the many difficult pregnancy cases that women might face that this development might help solve. And by difficult cases I mean situations where women who want a child face complications during pregnancy. And generally (even though I'm a natural pessimist), I think it's best to have a positive outlook towards the products of our own curiosity. They might bring trouble, but there are very few other natural catalysts to progress other than curiosity. War comes to mind as an alternative, but I believe that is less than desired.

BoringAsian• 9 years ago

disgust is a useful expression but I'm not sure I would rely on it to make choices and strange imagined futures. I'm glad that your disgust was vivid enough to conjure such a future in your head though!

louhike• 9 years ago

As said in another comment, it might be benificial for premature babies.

red0232• 9 years ago

Oh yeah it may help humans, in the future mothers can simply skip the "annoying" part of being pregnant. Thats great the future is here women can stay sexy and thin, being naturally pregnant will be totally out. Welcome to the brave new world.

Awesome who cares about animals if we can help humans.

And yeah downvote me because I do not embrace this unhuman future.

sek• 9 years ago

This could become a model for space colonization, imagine you only send frozen embryos to another planet that then give birth to humans educated and raised by an AI.

I mean there is a limit how long we can preserve living humans and multi generational ships are very fragile ecosystems.

05• 9 years ago

If you have an AI that can create human-friendly environment from scratch on an alien planet, what exactly you need humans for?

ben_w4• 9 years ago

"Civilization: Beyond Earth" Live-Action Role Playing?

magic_beans3• 9 years ago

Who exactly will be birthing and nurturing these babies?

tonyedgecombe• 9 years ago

Waymo

jlebrech• 9 years ago

imagine no more abortions, you're just giving your child away prior to birth.

cies2• 9 years ago

Pictures or it didn't happen. C'mon this is 2017, everyone has a camera in their pocket!

I expect the pictures look so gross that they don't want to publish it, afraid for public outcry. And thus settle with drawings instead :)

belorn3• 9 years ago

Not sure why the article didn't include it, but here is a Swedish news article with a video: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/vetenskap/lammfoster-overlevde-fy...

cies2• 9 years ago

Wow! Thanks, video!

booleandilemma• 9 years ago

Thanks for the video!

It reminded me of the scene in the Matrix with Neo coming out of his tank.

flexie• 9 years ago

In a scary future, this could be used to grow a population fast. Once they can copy the entire pregnancy from (artificial) inception to ready made baby, they can grow a population from just the sperm and eggs of a few men and women. Send 1M embryos up to Mars, take them out of the freezer as you need more workers. You no longer need thousands of ships for that or to wait for generations. They might even be able to "bake in" chips and sensors in the process for better control of the population.

semi-extrinsic• 9 years ago

In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, there was a colonisation attempt before the main one in that series where fertilized embryoes were sent on ships with all they needed to rebuild civilisation. Turned out some fraction of the people born thusly became psychopaths and killed off all the rest, dooming the entire thing, so in the books all that is left is artifacts. I always found it a very nice touch and highly plausible that such an attempt failed spectacularly.

Arizhel3• 9 years ago

We already have that: at least 5-10% of the population is naturally born that way now. We try to socialize them out of it, which has some success, but for those who it doesn't, the dumb ones become hardened criminals, and the smart ones become politicians and CEOs.

This colonization idea needs to wait until we can figure out the genetic basis of sociopathy, and then we can genetically engineer it out of the fertilized embryos, and instead GE them to be much more interdependent and social than we are.

cstross• 9 years ago

end 1M embryos up to Mars, take them out of the freezer as you need more workers.

Because of course a one month old baby is ready to work, right?

Sorry, but humans are social animals. We don't come ready-to-use; it takes a lot of training (about 9-18 months for basic language alone). Worse, we're born — by the standards of most mammals — prematurely: if we weren't, the maternal death rate would be unsustainable (big skulls don't pass easily through gaps in the mother's pelvis). Our immune systems are primed by the mother via colostrum ("first milk") after delivery: we can't walk for months, we don't even have full bowel control for a year or two. And then there's socialization and interaction and play and all the other panoply of human developmental requirements — which you might think are unimportant, but a quick look at the history of Romania's Ceaucescu-era orphanages and their survivors (the Ceaucescu dictatorship banned abortions) will give you a grisly tour of the failure modes.

The least-bad outcome of your proposal is that it would enable parents to rapidly raise a family with 2-20 children without inflicting direct physical damage on the female population (but don't underestimate the exigencies of raising children as a full-time job, specially on that scale). But it's not a colony-in-a-can gadget that will making planetary (or interstellar) colonization easy; someone's got to be there first, to prepare a safe and healthy environment for the kids to grow up in.

(If you say "yes but AI!" then I submit that you don't have any clear idea what you're asking for or you're a believer in the singularity, aka the rapture of the nerds.)

maxerickson2• 9 years ago

I wonder what a few hundred years of using external gestation would do to early development.

Arizhel3• 9 years ago

The premature-birth thing can be fixed now with artificial wombs: we'll just keep kids in there longer, perhaps 2-4 years. Throw in some genetic engineering and some techniques to rapidly indoctrinate and train these people and we can grow a clone army! Bwahahaha!

upvotinglurker2• 9 years ago

The novel Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh depicts more or less this scenario: "normally" raised human colonists (who happen to include a lot of genetics, biology, and psychology experts) need to expand their population quickly, so they create babies in artificial wombs. Womb conditions simulate a particular human pregnancy with sound, movement, temperature, hormones, etc. After birth, children are socialized with a combination of brainwashing delivered via sensory "tapes" under hypnotic drugs, and orphanage/boarding school style care, with the front line caregivers themselves being artificial womb products. They are conditioned to be unable to disobey, so are essentially slaves, but are also conditioned to derive deep satisfaction from their work, with each worker genetically and psychologically optimized for a specific field/job. The resulting people are depicted as not "normal" in their psychology and social behavior, but in some ways superior (able to approach problems more rationally and systematically with less emotional involvement, for example). It's an interesting study by an author who clearly recognizes this scenario as slavery and ultimately wrong, but is also willing to explore a variety of both positive and negative implications.

wjbdvkjwbbvwdjk5• 9 years ago

One aspect of this that's interesting is the extent to which factors like the sound and pulse of the mother's heart, her movement, and sounds from the outside world affect fetal development.

For example, this system is pumpless, while the rest of the system evolved in the presence of a pump. In mammals the vascular system is continuously monitoring and optimizing blood-vessel diameter as a function of the waves of blood flowing through them. You don't get that if you have an artificial heart.

I bet movement also plays a role in fetal brain development too.

Therefore ideally the bag should be hung from a robot arm programmed to move like a sheep moves (maybe from recordings of an actual sheep), including sleeping at night etc. And the bag should gently pulse as though there's a heart and lungs. Also the miserable factory where these clones develop should play sounds of open pasture and birds, sheep bleating etc. That way they will be properly developed lambs ready to go to the abattoir. (edit: sorry for the sad ending)

aequitas• 9 years ago

I believe this study is done as alternate treatment for premature born babies. In that respect these babies already miss this aspect in their development. I don't know how current incubators or treatments handle this or if the effect have been studied. But it makes me curious if it really makes a difference in longer term.

Saad_M• 9 years ago

Yes and no. For the most premature babies in the low 20s week gestation they have minimal physical contact with their parents. However older preterm infants do receive Kangroo care with their mothers.

ben_w4• 9 years ago

As we rapidly convert science fiction into reality, the question in my (vegetarian) mind is this:

Why not genetically engineer them to not have a brain? No brain, no chance it might suffer. The bare minimum of neurons needed for staying alive — pump heart, breathe, digest food — is tiny compared to a mamillian brain.

TeMPOraL2• 9 years ago

As a meat-eater, I'd welcome that. It would be a great way to step around the whole issue of animal suffering.

wjbdvkjwbbvwdjk5• 9 years ago

was thinking that too. Isn't there already a genetic condition where mammals can be born with no brain ? If so, CRISPR that up and there you go -- suffering-free meat in a convenient boil-in-the-bag format

wjbdvkjwbbvwdjk5• 9 years ago

or, going the other way, it reminds me of a Stephen Baxter novel where humans were exclusively fed by "mummy cows", which were genetically-engineered cows who could provide meat while staying alive and actually enjoyed having meat taken from their bodies

nzp2• 9 years ago

Because it's even more ridiculous than raising normal animals for food. Producing a whole animal minus a functional brain is no less wasteful than raising a normal animal and you have the added expense of developing this tech (which, granted, goes to zero with time). We can already grow meat without actual animals, just using animal cells, and even engineering meat from completely plant tissue is viable. And that's for the case someone is psychologically “desperate” for meat as such, because we don't really need any animal products in our diet.

bkkssnn• 9 years ago

Why not just isolate the meat and just grow meat? instead of growing lambs without brains that still have to grow into adults just to waste bones/tenonds/all other non edibles etc. etc. etc.

LordKano2• 9 years ago

I wonder how much my/our reaction to heartbeat sounds in movies and music is a psychological remnant of the time we spent listening to our mothers' heartbeats.

imron• 9 years ago

Once again, Kano revealing his obsession with beating hearts.

alkonaut• 9 years ago

One aspect of this that's interesting is the extent to which factors like the sound and pulse of the mother's heart, her movement, and sounds from the outside world affect fetal development.

Not to mention the influence of everything else that the mother provides (hormone levels, immune system, ...).

I mean there are people that research whether c-sections vs. natural birth has a measurable impact on human children (and believe it has), for example. In that context, this would seem like a big diffrence.

And unlike things like sounds and mechanics these are things that are quite poorly understood. How humans develop their immune systems, get autoimmune diseases and allergies etc is tricky stuff. What this will do is at least help figure out what comes from where, because you can use identical twin animals where one is born naturally and one artificially.

danuta_• 9 years ago

This is actually great. The possibilities are vast: saving prematurely born babies, speeding up the healing process of patients with severe burns...and then even (maybe) bringing back to life some of the extinct species (this one's tricky though).

alvarosevilla95• 9 years ago

I wonder what the implications of functioning artificial wombs would be to abortion. Would it make sense to allow people to abort if we could take the fetus from the mother and let it become a baby?

jerryszczerry• 9 years ago

If/when that becomes feasible, I assume moving the fetus to the artificial womb would become a more humanitarian (if more expensive) equivalent to getting an abortion.

jaddood• 9 years ago

One should read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley after this.

summerdown2• 9 years ago

An artificial womb is also one of the steps required to bring back the mammoth.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170221-reviving-woolly-mamm...

belorn3• 9 years ago

I find it a fascinating implication that this could do to men what artificial insemination do for women. All that a man would need to start a family would be to visit a bio bank and wait, which with current rules has none of the requirement that exist for adoption.

csomar• 9 years ago

Technologist who are trying to create an A.I. empowered robot with silicon should take note. Why complicate stuff when you already have millions of years of evolution giving you a good framework to start. Genetically design babies, and then produce them. Bingo, there you have your A.I. new born.

Creating real A.I. robots that are close to humans (intelligence-wise) is just complicating the process and pushing us a bit further from the ethical questions. I say let's face them now and push A.I. through biotechnology.

teddyh• 9 years ago

Much like the last episode of the 1988 TV show Max Headroom, “Baby Grobags”.

An artificial womb successfully grew baby sheep

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