What is ectogenesis and can it make natural pregnancy and childbirth unnecessary

What is ectogenesis and when did it appear

There are many spiritualized metaphors about the “miracle of birth” and “the main purpose of a woman” around pregnancy. For sure, for some part of the girls, this experience can really turn out to be completely positive - when the pregnancy is planned and desired. But there is another side: bearing a child requires a huge amount of resources - health, time, moral strength. A sudden pregnancy can cross out the career prospects of an expectant mother or put her in a difficult financial situation.

But neither with a conscious, nor with an accidental pregnancy, the fetus and mother are not immune from the risks. Miscarriage, premature birth, Rh conflict, hidden pathologies - this is just a short list of what doctors face. More than two and a half million babies every year

perishAudit and Analysis of Stillbirths and Neonatal Deaths / World Health Organization in the womb. Despite the high level of medicine, every day in the world there are about a thousand women in labor are dyingMaternal mortality / World Health Organization from complications associated with pregnancy and childbirth.

But there are still people who want, but can not to have children. In general, pregnancy and childbirth are complex and little controlled processes from different angles. It is not surprising that at some stage in the development of biotechnology, scientists began to think about how to solve all the acute issues associated with them.

The hypothetical possibility of growing a child in an artificial womb was called ectogenesis.

It is believed that for the first time this concept was uttered by the English scientist John Holdrein. This is happenedJ. b. S. Haldane. Daedalus of science and the future / Vanderbilt University in 1923 at a lecture in biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. Haldrain read to the audience a fictional account from a Cambridge student from the future, which included the following lines: “In 1951, DuPont and Schwartz produced the first ectogenetic child <...> France became the first country to legalize ectogenesis, and by 1968, using this method, 60,000 children."

However, ectogenesis is interpreted not only in the context of the liberation of women from the litigation of childbirth and the opportunity to have children for everyone. Potentially, the method can be used to control the reproduction of the population. Therefore, the theory of the artificial uterus did not escape the fate of many progressive, but "terrible" ideas: it migrated to dystopia. For example, in Brave New World, ectogenesis is the only way to have children and an element of social control.

From dystopia to scientific discoveries

Despite debates about ethics and "sharp corners", the first experiments with gestation were not long in coming. In 1955 there was patentedUS2723660A. Artificial uterus / Google Patents the world's first artificial womb. It was like the incubators that already existed at that time. The only difference is the ability to attach the umbilical cord of a premature baby to the "womb". At the same time, there is no evidence that the drawings of the invention became a real device, and not a concept.

Probably the loudest real experimentE. A. Partridge, M. G. Davey, et al. An extra-uterine system to physiologically support the extreme premature lamb / Nature Communications managed to be carried out by a group of American scientists in 2017. They transferred preterm lambs at 15–17 weeks of development to an ectopic life support system. It was a sealed bag filled with a semblance of amniotic fluid. To the umbilical cords embryos the researchers attached apparatus for filtering air and saturating the blood with oxygen. During the four weeks of observation, the lambs gained weight, grew hair, and opened their eyes. Autopsy and analyzes showed that the internal organs of animals developed quite naturally. The so-called bio-bag was actually the first working prototype of an artificial uterus.

The next major step was taken by Israeli researchers. In 2021, a group of scientists from the Weizmann Institute succeededA. Aguilera-Castrejon, B. Oldak, T. Shani, et al. Ex utero mouse embryogenesis from pre-gastrulation to late organogenesis / Nature to grow in an artificial uterus embryos of mice from five-day-old embryos. Mice "survived" to about the middle of a natural pregnancy, but this does not mean that the experiment failed. Philadelphia lambs were placed in a biobag at a late stage of development, when their internal organs were already formed. Here, for the first time, scientists managed to fill the “gap” of the first trimester, that is, to turn the accumulation of cells into a developed fetus outside the mother's body.

And in 2022, interesting news cameChinese scientists create AI nanny to look after embryos in artificial womb / South China Morning Post from China. The Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology has created an "embryo culture device" based on artificial intelligence. If earlier researchers controlled the development of the fetus in the laboratory uterus manually, then Chinese scientists managed to program the world's first smart monitoring system. The “AI nanny” is able to check the indicators of the environment in which the embryo develops: temperature, the ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen, and the concentration of nutrients. The system is currently being tested on mice.

What are the prospects for artificial incubation technologies

So far, any assumptions about the future of ectogenesis are more like futuristic theories than scientific predictions. For a long time, any study of human embryos was limited to the first two weeks. International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) releasedGuidelines for the Field of Stem Cell Research and Regenerative Medicine / International Society for Stem Cell Research an updated version of the ethical guidelines for experiments with human cells and embryos, which effectively abolished the 14-day rule, only in 2021. That is, now research can theoretically be carried out at any time, but there is no open information that someone has already taken advantage of this opportunity.

Surely in the future, thanks to ectogenesis, scientists will find a way to study the formation and birth of a new person from beginning to end. Then the ethical problem will disappear surrogacy, and doctors will be even more effective in helping people without a uterus or with infertility. Mortality among newborns and mothers will also be reduced.

At the same time, any technology based on a new look at pregnancy brings with it a number of problems. First, no one guarantees that the part of Huxley's famous dystopia, which deals with strict social control, will not become prophetic.

Secondly, the position of a woman can change, both for the better and for the worse. In progressive countries, the rejection of natural childbirth is likely to deepen the concept of equal sharing of parental responsibilities from the moment of conception. In conservative societies, the loss of women's inherently unique reproductive function can lead to a catastrophic situation with gender rights. For example, they can be completely removed from the issues of educating future generations, leaving only the unenviable fate of egg suppliers.

In any case, work on reproductive biotech has already been launched, and it is possible that ectogenesis will go beyond experimental laboratories will become the Rubicon, after which humanity will once again turn its views on the device peace.