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qwertyuiiop145 · 2025-04-15T01:19:42+00:00

Likely a long ways off. The most exciting stage of artificial womb tech so far is a “bio bag” that can take prematurely born lambs and bring them to term https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-have-successfully-grown-premature-lambs-in-an-artificial-womb

The hurdles still to overcome are numerous:

-lambs are way less resource intensive than humans, so humans may require a much more complicated system than a lamb would need. Getting an artificial womb approved for premature babies is still years away at best.

-a viable-but-premature fetus is much less fragile than an embryo—embryos will definitely require a much more complicated system than the bio bag. The technology to support an animal embryo is still far away, let alone a human embryo.

-it is very likely that regulatory agencies will not allow human testing on a reproductive technology which is so likely to kill or permanently disable babies if it goes wrong and which only helps rich infertile couples get biological children if it goes right. Even if a system could reliably bring animals from zygote to healthy baby, it could still go terribly wrong in humans if any minor quirk of the human reproductive system was overlooked.

PennStateFan221 · 2025-04-15T00:37:30+00:00

They can't even grow and 3d print meat without Fetal Bovine Serum. I'd give this decades.

noodlesarmpit · 2025-04-15T02:09:39+00:00

Okay, but we all know artificial wombs will be used to make cheap labor and soldiers before helping people, right? Yaaaay capitalism and the industrial war complex!

evapotranspire · 2025-04-15T03:19:33+00:00

The headlines are super misleading. Colossal Biosciences claims to have grown a thylacine embryo "halfway to term," but they fail to clarify that (a) it's not really a thylacine and (b) because thylacines are marsupials, they have extremely short gestations and scarcely any placenta - so this amounts to only a week or so of growing to the size of a pea.

The complexity involved with replicating the placenta of a placental mammal is orders of magnitude more difficult. We don't even understand very well how the placenta works in humans, despite more than a century of intense study.

(Source: I am a biologist and a survivor of a life-threatening placental abnormality.)

Plane_Chance863 · 2025-04-15T01:08:53+00:00

I don't know whether it would ever be considered ethical to test such things on humans. I don't know that we understand enough about what happens in the womb, in the mother's blood stream, and in terms of the microbiome, to be sure that whatever fetus developed in there would come out okay. I'm not sure the testing that might be required to figure that out would necessarily be ethical either.

This is just my gut feeling as a lay person though, I'll be reading upcoming comments with interest.

NEBanshee · 2025-04-15T12:30:13+00:00

I think people underestimate how much fetal neural development depends on the experience of being inside a person who is doing person things. Not the early stages necessarily, but the stuff from the last trimester mostly.
Getting proper nutrition & not being exposed to teratogens is critical of course, and those facets of an artificial uterus could be developed, could even conceivably (har!) be better than what nature provides is certain circumstances.

But what the developing fetus is hearing & feeling, as well as experiencing biochemically from cytokines, hormones, and the immune system are critical to development. We are coming to appreciate how much these factor in to everything from epigenetic phenotypic development to biobehavioral development.

These aspects might not matter as much to a lamb, granted. But then again, animals we've domesticated for food have been genetically modified & lack a lot of developmental experiences that don't have negative impacts on what we want them to do (live docilely until bred or eaten) but severely impact their ability to survive like wild-types of their species. So our baseline for even evaluating whether the lamb has everything a naturally developing lamb has is really skewed.

We know that ICU premies with the tech we do have, not only have elevated mortality risks, but also exhibit high rates of somato-sensory disorders and delayed developmental milestones. We know that fetuses developing in utero without proper stimulation also have these symptoms (eg one of the factors contributing to fetal alcohol syndrome expression is how little the fetus moves, leading to poorer neuro-motor development compared to other infants). Basically, we're kidding ourselves if we think we understand human development or human teratology well enough to develop ex-vivo uterus tech to any kind of scale.

vulcanfeminist · 2025-04-15T00:32:17+00:00

My body just does not handle pregnancy well at all, I had hyperemisis gravidarum twice and it nearly killed me both times. If I could have a kid without using my own body to grow it I would jump at the chance immediately. This kind of stuff wouldn't just help infertile people, pregnancy is physically grueling and damaging, not for everyone but for enough people that something like this would make a huge difference. Even a healthy pregnancy with zero complications can cause lifelong changes that some people would prefer to avoid if possible.

AnyAd6651 · 2025-04-15T05:13:50+00:00

Not a fan, from a psychological perspective the mothers environment has a direct impact on feral development. The food she eats, even her stress and emotions impact fetal development. This is an absolute ethical nightmare. We are not masters of our own species, that is a fallacy created by our own greed. We already have the systems in place to bear offspring, why substitute one of most fundamental aspects of life on this earth?

Adventurous_Job_4339 · 2025-04-15T00:17:44+00:00

I hope they never get it- because they’ll be selling babies at that point .

Perfect-Sign-8444 · 2025-04-15T07:54:53+00:00

If we are only talking about artificial wombs, then we already have them and they are already being used for cattle. However, they don't look anywhere near as cool as these and the embryos don't float in the water either. It should also be noted that these embryos come from cows that have died during pregnancy. If you are thinking of artificial insemination with subsequent maturation in an artificial womb, all ex vivo, then we are still a long way from that, especially because there is no development pressure for something like that. Billions would be invested in a project without knowing who needs it.

Anthrogal11 · 2025-04-15T00:41:39+00:00

No. NO! As a woman who experienced infertility and adopted this is monstrous. You cannot replicate the connection of mother to child during gestation. It’s fundamental to human development. Some humans want to overcome the limitations of nature. It’s hubris and nothing more. The idea of commercializing this is even more monstrous. Stop.

No_Chair_9421 · 2025-04-15T01:56:32+00:00

Did you know that many people who are the result of a sperm donor feel uncomfortable because they came this way?

People think about how many parents feel, but no one thinks about how their children feel.

Plane_Chance863 · 2025-04-15T12:47:45+00:00

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BIG YES BOMB!!!!!

Monday, April 14, 2025

What would it take to make these fetal growth pods (AKA artificial wombs) work flawlessly? How many years away are they from a practical-working commercial model getting developed?

What would it take to make these fetal growth pods (AKA artificial wombs) work flawlessly? How many years away are they from a practical-working commercial model getting developed?

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