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Scientists Grow Mouse Embryos In a Mechanical Womb (nytimes.com) 103

Posted by BeauHD from the major-breakthroughs dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The mouse embryos looked perfectly normal. All their organs were developing as expected, along with their limbs and circulatory and nervous systems. Their tiny hearts were beating at a normal 170 beats per minute. But these embryos were not growing in a mother mouse. They were developed inside an artificial uterus, the first time such a feat has been accomplished, scientists reported on Wednesday.

The experiments, at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, were meant to help scientists understand how mammals develop and how gene mutations, nutrients and environmental conditions may affect the fetus. But the work may one day raise profound questions about whether other animals, even humans, should or could be cultured outside a living womb. In a study published in the journal Nature, Dr. Jacob Hanna described removing embryos from the uteruses of mice at five days of gestation and growing them for six more days in artificial wombs. At that point, the embryos were about halfway through their development; full gestation is about 20 days. A human at this stage of development would be called a fetus. To date, Dr. Hanna and his colleagues have grown more than 1,000 embryos in this way.

But the research has already progressed beyond what the investigators described in the paper. In an interview, Dr. Hanna said he and his colleagues had taken fertilized eggs from the oviducts of female mice just after fertilization -- at Day 0 of development -- and had grown them in the artificial uterus for 11 days. [...] The artificial womb may allow researchers to learn more about why pregnancies end in miscarriages or why fertilized eggs fail to implant. It opens a new window onto how gene mutations or deletions affect fetal development. Researchers may be able to watch individual cells migrate to their ultimate destinations.
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Scientists Grow Mouse Embryos In a Mechanical Womb More

Scientists Grow Mouse Embryos In a Mechanical Womb

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  • Egg banks in sight? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by malkavian ( 9512 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @05:06PM (#61169684)

    Of interest, this could be useful for men who want a child on thier own (no surrogates), and the ability to pick and choose in the same way that women can currently use a sperm bank, and for couples where the woman has a physiological abnormality that prevents either conception or bringing to term (allowing a baby to grow without requiring the aforementioned surrogate).
    It could be the solution to much heartache.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It could be the solution to much heartache.

      It could be the beginning of a Matrix prequel.

    • this could be useful for men who want a child on thier own

      Yeah, if they're hoping for a mouse.

    • It could be the solution to much heartache ... for all the 40 year old virgins on /. I know this is the first post and I already know that when I scroll down some fat, pale turd is going to tell me what women need. Particularly women from some minority group. That's why I'm here.

    • Who needs an egg-bank, science is very close (20 years) to generating egg cells using skin cells.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Vastad ( 1299101 )

      You want a Miranda Lawson? Cos that's how you get a Miranda Lawson. The daddy issues are included.

  • Lois McMaster Bujold should be pleased.

  • It's amazing how so much "far-out" sci-fi appears to be not too far around the corner: lab-grown babies, "true" AI, self-driving cars, lab grown meat, etc.

    However, still missing is flying cars and space travel for the middle class. Other long shots are replicators, transporters, age reversal, and faster-than-light travel. But some surprise discovery could change all that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vadim_t ( 324782 )

      AI is nowhere near true yet, and I expect won't be for a long time, though AI that can convincingly imitate a human is pretty much here.

      Structuring text in a way that looks readable and coherent is quite far from true AI because it lacks the ability to deal with real-life context, and I don't think that's achievable by just throwing lots of text at a neural network. You need a simulation that can interface with the real world.

      Eg, I'm sure the right algorithm can produce a reasonable sounding response to "I'

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        When they figure out how to hook neural nets up to the likes of Cyc, we'll see stuff with a bit more common sense.

    • Look up what is "Maternal mortality": https://www.who.int/news-room/... [who.int]

      "About 295 000 women died during and following pregnancy and childbirth in 2017."

      Imagine if we could avoid a large portion of these deaths by using artificial womb.
      Imagine women no longer need to risk their lives so our species can continue.

      Imagine how much it would do to equality if we can free women from having to take half a year or more out of her career to give birth to her baby.

      Imagine there is no more need of surrogate mothers and

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dcw3 ( 649211 )

        Imagine women no longer need to risk their lives so our species can continue.

        The species is doing just fine, closing in on 8B, and doesn't need any more help.

    • It's amazing how so much "far-out" sci-fi appears to be not too far around the corner

      It has always been that way.

  • In realated news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @05:36PM (#61169856)

    Veal is about to get a whole lot fresher!

  • Researchers may be able to watch individual cells migrate to their ultimate destinations

    We'll find out if Uber "employees" are involved.

  • Substitute for abortion? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @05:48PM (#61169920)
    Now all they need is a way to remove a fertilized egg from the real womb and continue to grow it in the artificial one. This would allow all those who oppose abortion to take over those unwanted pregnancies themselves. Instead of an abortion, you have your egg removed, and the pro-life people raise it from there. Win-win all around.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by malkavian ( 9512 )

      Absolutely.. Plus the cases where the mother is suffers a fatal condition that doesn't allow pregnancy to continue, it would raise the possibility of saving the baby as well.. Lots of incredibly useful clinical situations for this..

      • Why stop there? Pregnancy is a mildly dangerous and generally unpleasant condition, to say nothing of giving birth. If there are no side effects I would fully expect many perfectly healthy women to choose to forgo the dubious pleasure.

        • If there are no side effects I would fully expect many perfectly healthy women to choose to forgo the dubious pleasure.

          If there are no side effects I would fully expect many perfectly wealthy women to choose to forgo the dubious pleasure.

          FTFY

          • ah, wealthy women. Helps to draw attention to such small "corrections" - they're very easy to overlook when you've already got the original sentence in your brain. I reread three times and then had to carefully compare word for word to spot it.

            A fair point though, unless it gets cheap.

        • They already do, to a lesser extent. Elective Caesarian delivery does happen, quite frequently.

    • Re:Substitute for abortion? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @06:27PM (#61170178) Homepage Journal

      That's assuming (a) you want *your* fertilized egg removed and cultured and (b) people who oppose abortions are willing to take responsibility for it. Those are both dubious propositions.

      • (a) Should be easier than putting the child up for adoption, because you don't even have to endure the pregnancy, and
        (b) I expect approximately zero pro lifers to have any interest in these children if anything other than protesting is required, pretty much like now.

        If they have the option and don't use it though, are they really any different from the women they protest against? If you can save children and don't, then your supposed moral high ground to preach to others disappears.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by auxsvr ( 811165 )
        The fact remains that there are people who think that killing a fetus is not a big deal, while it is equivalent to homicide according to the Christian tradition and science. Are you really supporting the right to kill babies before they're born?
        • Yes!

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by hey! ( 33014 )

          I don't think a zygote is a baby. Nor is a blastocyst, it's just a clump of undifferentiated cells. Nor is an embryo any time in the first trimester. Some time, probably in the late second trimester, the fetus's brain develops to the point where it supports rudimentary consciousness, and at that point it's reasonable to talk about the fetus having rights.

          I understand that you believe that a fertilized egg has a mystical, impossible-to-observe property called "the soul", and that given you believe (a) tha

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by auxsvr ( 811165 )
            From Keith Moore T. V. N. Persaud Mark Torchi: The Developing Human, 11th Edition, Clinically Oriented Embryology, p.11:

            Human development begins at fertilization when a male gamete or sperm unites with a female gamete or oocyte to form a single cell, a zygote. This highly specialized, totipotent cell marks the beginning of each of us as a unique individual.

            So you're saying that in the beginning a human being is not a human? I didn't ask you whether a zygote has legal rights or not, I asked if you really support killing babies before they're born. From the scientific point of view:

            1. 1. zygotes are humans,
            2. 2. they're alive,

            therefore it is obvious that killing them is homicide. The Christian tradition is in agreement with science, and I have no

    • Except we already see a distinct lack of pro-lifers volunteering to adopt children who were put up for adoption instead of being aborted. Or even volunteering to help pay to raise a child whose mother simply couldn't afford it. What makes you think there would be any more volunteers to do so when it also involves paying for a presumably expensive artificial incubation first?

      Pro-lifers by and large appear to have far more interest in punishing women and keeping them in their place, than any actual concern

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 )

        Pro-lifers by and large appear to have far more interest in punishing women and keeping them in their place, than any actual concern for the would-be child.

        Oh, I don't disagree. As a male of course my perspective is limited, but it seems to me that most pro-lifers concern for children's welfare pretty much ends the moment they are born. Still, the more opportunities they have to put their time and money where their mouth is the more obvious that becomes.

      • Re:Substitute for abortion? (Score:4, Informative)

        by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Thursday March 18, 2021 @02:01AM (#61171402)

        If their concern were motivated by concern for the lives of the unborn as they claim, they would be pushing contraception and sex education harder than anyone. Nothing else can lower the unintended pregnancy rate so well. And yet most pro-life organisations are also opposed to comprehensive sex education, and either uninterested in contraception or outright hostile to it. Instead of trying to avoid unwanted pregnancy, their concern is focused on trying to avoid unwanted sex - which they consider to be any sex outside of a life-long heterosexual marriage. And within those marriages, every child is wanted. Even if the parents don't know it.

        • Yep. If a "happily" married couple don't have twelve kids, what's to keep them dirt poor and desperate for whatever work they can find?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      Now all they need is a way to remove a fertilized egg from the real womb and continue to grow it in the artificial one. This would allow all those who oppose abortion to take over those unwanted pregnancies themselves. Instead of an abortion, you have your egg removed, and the pro-life people raise it from there.

      I would say it's more likely that the government would raise it and adopt it out to someone at "birth", but yes, I've been saying that pro-life versus pro-choice is a false dichotomy for about two decades.

      This will, of course, raise all sorts of ethical, moral, legal, and regulatory questions, like who pays for it if the mother changes her mind, whether insurance should pay for it without a medical reason for women who want kids but don't want to fool with being pregnant, whether children raised in an artif

      • This will, of course, raise all sorts of ethical, moral, legal, and regulatory questions, like who pays for it if the mother changes her mind, whether insurance should pay for it without a medical reason for women who want kids but don't want to fool with being pregnant, whether children raised in an artificial womb will have any interesting mental or psychological issues or differences, and so on, but at least those discussions should be more straightforward than trying to balance two currently fundamentally conflicting sets of rights.

        Agreed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by steveha ( 103154 )

      Instead of an abortion, you have your egg removed, and the pro-life people raise it from there.

      This scenario played out in the fiction of Lois McMaster Bujold. I believe it was in the novel Shards of Honor [wikipedia.org], the very first in the "Vorkosigan Saga". At the end of a military campaign, after a cease-fire, a representative of the invaded planet presented the invading army with a collection of "uterine replicators", each one of which contained an embryo caused by an invading soldier raping a local woman.

      As it

  • When it comes to "living" in space and on other planets, initially there will be no way for half the population to gestate children. Once a child is born, the entire community can help. The weak link in the population chain is the "one-womb = one-child" limitation. And not just for gestation alone, but assuming significant risk in the daily lives of colonizers, harm to a gestating mother can also harm the child she carries.

    External wombs are mandatory for **all** self-sustaining populations away from Ear

    • How do you figure? It's not like a woman is incapacitated while pregnant, she's just awkward for a couple months towards the end, and should probably avoid going outside into high-radiation areas - which most people will likely avoid as much as possible anyway - that's what tele-operated robots are for. The overwhelming majority of the cost in time, labor, and resources of a child is in raising it, not incubating it. Artificial wombs might be more convenient (on Earth as well), but hardly essential.

      Where

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by BobC ( 101861 )

        For many decades to come, ALL the environments we are likely to be in for births away from Earth will have elevated radiation levels. Adult humans can generally handle that, but it most certainly is a HUGE problem for fetuses. So the gestation *MUST* happen in a shielded area. Why have two folks in there when the adult can keep working safely in the elevated radiation environment and the fetus can be gestated in the shielded area? What if the shielded area is limited? Would you have not just the mother

        • Any habitat worth its salt will have good radiation shielding. Dirt is cheap, it only takes a few meters to reduce radiation levels to Earth-normal, and the alternative is greatly reduced life expectancy. And it's not like a few 9-month stints of "house arrest" in a lifetime are going to be a huge ordeal - not when pretty much everybody is staying indoors almost as much as you are anyway.

          And there's absolutely no reason to expect any nutrition shortage. NASA worked out extremely effective microbial farm

  • If it works to term, it might be the most reliable way to bring back extinct species. Growing a woolly mammoth in an elephant mother may not result in a very woolly mammoth for lack of the proper hormonal environment that could be dangerous or infeasible to artificially induce in the mother but readily available to an entirely artificial environment.

    On another topic, expect PETA to protest it. If it works to term, it's the very best way to get a cow to Mars. Why would we want a cow on Mars? Because cows

    • Maybe true about the mammoth, but gestating a new mammoth inside of that mammoth should do it. Just takes an extra generation.

      Not that bringing back mammoths is that good of an idea. There's hardly room in the wild for the elephants we have right now. You could find a place for them somewhere in Russia, but would the locals be happy about giving over a large tract of land to potentially-dangerous giants?

      • Not that bringing back mammoths is that good of an idea. There's hardly room in the wild for the elephants we have right now.

        Canada is really big. There's a song and everything. And mammoths are uniquely suited to living there year round, unlike elephants. (At least as we understand mammoths.)

        ...would the locals be happy about giving over a large tract of land to potentially-dangerous giants?

        Would the locals be happy with a tourist attraction with an equal or greater draw to a real-life Jurassic Park? Is that a rhetorical question? A nature preserve-type park with a network of elevated concrete and steel walkways would have a license to print money, at least until the novelty wore off.

  • Fuck ethics (Score:3)

    by Berkyjay ( 1225604 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2021 @06:46PM (#61170282)

    This is the key for humanities continued existence. It's not populating Mars or some other inhospitable planet. It's providing a system backup for humanity. 1 human left? No problem, spin up the old backup server and spit out a few hundred genetically diverse human to reboot humanity? Hell you don't even need a human. A well programed AI and a robust machine can be our fail-safe.

  • ...as a solution to abortion.

    Originaly, as a tought experiment, as I did not anticipate the science to catch up so fast.

    Think about it, the mother has rights to her body and the child is a person with rights too. Well, since the mother-person does not want to be near the fetus-person, a cesarean is done, the fetus person is put in a mechanical woomb and given for adoption when s/he is born, and voila, everyone is happy.

    No abortion, no human life lost, no right of the fetus to life disrespected, and no right

  • Brave New World and 1984 both involved fanciful technology when written: 1984 had the telescreen (which is surpassed easily by a tablet attached to the wall) and Brave New World had all babies grown in bottles (sounds like it could be coming soon.)

    In both cases the technologies were used to control populations. And where would we find a government that would go to such lengths to manage its subjects...?

  • Women are obsolete. Except your mom.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Steps:
    1. Build a super space ship
    2. Put some cool AI/robots on it
    3. Make sure things are durable/autorepairable
    4. Add a refrigerator full of embryos
    5. When you get close to destination, thaw out humans and grow / raise them to adulthood
    6. Colonize new planet

    • and do what? feel happy i guess.

      • Backup.

        • You can always wait another 4 or 5 billion years for a human like intelligence to evolve; universe is not going anywhere.

          • Technically, based on all we know, the universe is not eternal. From our perspective? Sure, it seems that way. But it will eventually die in one fashion or another.

            • Really? any proof for that (that it will die and never resurface again?); the point is even the very laws of physics can and could evolve based on the observer (ie the human/human brain). What may be certain is that the universe is more mysterious than any rule/mathematics that tries to contain it into some law/equation.

              • As with anything beyond our current comprehension, there's no proof. But there are several prevailing theoretic conclusions to the universe as we know it. Among those theories are the eventual heat death of the universe. The possibility, as you point out, that something happens to alter the rules of physics in such a way the universe to our understanding would simply collapse/disperse. If you're actually curious about the possibilities, there's a good read on the current models that predict various ends

                • The reason I invoked the "proof" word is because we make statements which are borderline superstitious; not grounded on solid math (1+1=2 starting); Mine A: 'universe is eternal'; yours B: 'universe will disappear'. You countered A with B when both A and B are castles in thin air -- standing on nothing. When using science/math, we should be concrete -- does it clearly prove or its' like may-be/i think so/past has shown/ etc.
                  I'm more interested in the observer -- like human brain which (likely) finds/dis

    • Consider this: We already know there are ways to preserve eggs and sperm. And it appears they have the ability to take a fertilized mouse egg at day zero and plant it in the artificial womb. We know labs can do human fertilization now (for surrogate mothers). Why not simply preserve sperm and eggs, wait for the destination to be near, then fertilize and implant in the artificial wombs? The tools are apparently all there for this progression save the super space ship.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cowdung ( 702933 )

        We also freeze embryos. There was a baby born last year that was over 20 years old.
        Really mind boggling.

        If we can preserve for a few hundred years we could get pretty far.

  • I can here to find this comment but sadly, I have to make it myself.
  • The excellent book by CJ Cherryh comes to life. Still some aspects to solve, but we are getting way closer to being able to start a viable colony in distant space.
  • You know this will be used for labgrown babies for militairy purposes, as you just harvest some eggs and sperm and manipulate the genes to create supersoldiers.. Many sci-fi movies have used this premise, and now this premise is just around the corner. Well, this is also an easy way to populate an alien planet.

  • A giant step for all mousekind.

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